Only a dozen men have ever set foot on the moon – the last ones, Jack Schmitt and Eugene Cernan, in 1972. But a group of international space agencies, including NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, have brought up the possibility of laying the groundwork for an eventual human base on the lunar surface.



Hauling enough water and other resources to sustain life on the moon, though, is prohibitively expensive. According to NASA, it costs $10,000 to put one pound of payload into Earth’s orbit–and exponentially more to shuttle it 384,400 kilometres to the moon. So, in 2018, NASA and its partners hope to launch the Lunar Resource Prospector mission, to map water and other resources on the moon.

The Artemis Jr. rover, a 270-kilogram unmanned robot designed and built by Neptec Technologies, is a key part of the project. Its job will be to drill for and collect samples to bring back to Earth (Neptec partnered with Sudbury-based Deltion Innovations, which builds drilling systems for primarily Earth-bound mining companies). To ensure that Neptec’s remote-controlled rover can get the job done, the Artemis Jr. has endured rigorous testing on the slopes of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano whose surface closely resembles that of the moon.

Neptec, which has 65 employees at its facility just outside Ottawa, is not a newcomer to space. In the mid-1990s, its breakthrough technology, the Space Vision System, helped astronauts assemble the International Space Station (ISS) and is still in use on Canadarm2. Neptec’s laser sensor technology, employed on the Artemis and in the TriDAR system it designed for docking the Cygnus resupply vehicle with the ISS, is now being used by mining companies to lend precision to the routes of massive open-mine dump trucks. That’s the key to surviving as a small space contractor, says Neptec’s president of space exploration, Mike Kearns: putting the technology you design for space missions to work here on Earth. Ontario Drive and Gear (ODG), which designed and built the Artemis chassis and drivetrain, has started incorporating some Artemis components into its commercial electric-powered vehicles. Kearns, too, has plans for the Artemis Jr. technology. “The U.S. military is having to cut back on the number of soldiers, and one of the ways to do that is to have a fleet of autonomous vehicles,” he says. “There’s an opportunity there. It’s something we’re going to pursue.”

In the meantime, Kearns’s team at Neptec is preparing for its first mission to Mars, also slated for 2018, when the red planet will be just 57.6 million kilometres away from Earth. The company has signed a deal with U.K.-based Astrium to put navigation cameras on the ExoMars rover, part of a mission funded by Russia and the European Space Agency. /Shane Dingman