Quote Originally Posted by Elizabeth Greene View Post
I wish we'd put a blade like this on a Mars rover. It'd be really cool to see below the weathered surface of that planet.
That would be really neat. Also suitable landing areas are a really big deal. The rockets fling every possible rock and stone under the landing area and cause a lot of damage. You can see it in some of the Apollo footage. The bottom of the craft becomes completely scoured from flying regolith after just a few seconds. I was working on a project that uses sunlight to melt Moon and Mars regolith into glass. It actually works pretty good. Were were able to make a bunch of different thing using a very simple process just by melting regolith down to glass. Beyond structural shapes and objects, you can "pave" a safe landing area. It would be highly beneficial to scrape down the area and get rid of the bigger rocks first (our process couldn't melt anything bigger than class A gravel).