NASA’s Artemis program will eventually need robots to help live off the lunar soil, and it’s enlisting help from the public to make those robots viable. The space agency has picked winners from a design challenge that tasked people with improving the bucket drums RASSOR (Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot) will use to dig on the Moon. The victors all had clever designs that should capture lunar regolith with little effort — important when any long-term presence might depend on bots like this.

The winner was a trap from Caleb Clausing that uses a passive door to grab large amounts of soil while remaining dust-tolerant. Others included a simple-yet-effective drum from Michael R, another from Kyle St. Thomas that uses narrow drums, an efficient double-helix design from Stephan Weiβenböck and a model from Clix that uses both gravity and weight to help movement.

As that suggests, this process could have an upshot for Moon explorers by producing useful alloys to construct habitats or repair vehicles.

There’s a lot of work needed before plants like this can go to the Moon. It needs to store oxygen instead of simply venting the gas. Likewise, scientists would need to determine what alloys would be the most useful byproducts. A Moon-worthy test plant should be ready by the mid-2020s, though, so it may just be a matter of time before explorers are producing air far from Earth.