Giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon...

(photocredit: The Sudbury Star)

This article underlines some of the creativity that mining people can demonstrate.


NORCAT (Northern Centre for Advanced Technology) is involved in testing rovers for lunar (or Martian?) missions in the crater of a volcano in Hawaii - yes, I imagine that was a tough project to attract people to work away on!

Commendably the team even used a student chef to help prepare meals, which seems quite a fair way to assign plum roles, rather than the usual cronies.

One of the things I found most impressive was the modular multi-tasking of the rovers. I wasn't surprised they can be equipped with a scoop or drill or ground penetrating radar. What surpised me the most as a cute adaptation to the expected environment was the scoop can be used to transport material for transport to a solar concentrator (think magnifiying glasses and ants - yes, I know, it's terrible, but own up, you've done it) where water and oxygen is cooked out of the rock.

In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) is where its at apparently. Think of it as extreme sustainability. The article estimates that to "land one litre of water on the moon would cost a space agency $100,000 a bottle".

Now mentioning ants was intentional above as the rovers are programmed to work in groups in a collaborative manner like ants do. They adapt to problems or mission issues as a team and if one rover is immobilized, the others will push it out of the way.

Oh yes and if anyone is in the market for it, NORCAT even makes and sells its own lunar regolith (moon dust) substitute, although like the real thing with dangers if inhaled and retailing for $40,000 per ton it may only be found in the most discerning sand lots...

Get your cameras at the ready!

The Snowden Mining photo competition is on again.

The standard of the photos has always been very good and often by the engineers etc. themselves. Actually, photography seems to be quite a popular hobby amongst engineers, maybe it appeals to their creative flair for problem solving, or maybe they're just geeks?

I saw a presentation yesterday in fact on the Canadian mining industry for CEMI (Centre of Excellence for Mining Innovation) that described the importance of mining to civilisation. It showed an interesting graph produced by an agency in the south of Ontario which demonstrated that "creatives" were found in high numbers around the major southern urban centres, but Sudbury ranked amongst the lowest for creative talent.

Now those of you who have been to Sudbury may be nodding your heads in agreement at this point, but the presenter made a good point that it all depends how you define creativity. If you choose cultural creativity, i.e. arts, then you are aligning yourself with the study, but if instead you take it to include innovative problem solving and the adoption and refinement of new techniques and processes, then the case for Sudbury's ranking to be improved becomes a little more reasonable.

I remember an applied geology professor opening a series of lectures on structural geology with the phrase, roughly recalled as best I can: "We are all artists and rock is the medium through which you have chosen to express your creativity."