Viorel Badescu is Professor of Engineering Thermodynamics and affiliated with Candida Oancea Institute at Polytechnic University of Bucharest. His mainstream scientific contributions consist of more than 300 papers and forty books related to various fields in science and engineering. Most of his research areas refer to terrestrial and space solar energy applications, including research on photo-thermal energy conversion and solar power plants, the physics of radiation, photovoltaic conversion of solar energy, solar radiation properties and solar radiation distribution and forecasting. Other fields of interest are statistical physics and thermodynamics, the physics of semiconductors, optimal control of thermal engineering processes, terraforming and macro-engineering. He is Associate Editor and Member of the editorial board of several international journals including Space Power, Energy, Renewable Energy and Journal of Energy Engineering and Reviewer for more than fifty international journals. He is also Member of several scientific societies including the International Solar Energy Society and the European Astronomical Society and Member of the Romanian Academy. Dr. Kris Zacny is Vice President and Senior Research Scientist at Honeybee Robotics. His focus is on developing space mining robots for In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) and space exploration. Prior to joining Honeybee Robotics, Dr. Zacny worked in South African underground gold, diamond and coal mines. Dr. Zacny received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Extraterrestrial Drilling and Mining. He participated in several Antarctic, Arctic, Atacama and Greenland expeditions. Dr. Zacny has over 200 publications, including several co-edited books, and multiple NASA Group Achievement Awards. Dr. Zacny is Principal Investigator of TRIDENT ice mining drill scheduled to launch to the Moon in 2023 and 2024, as part of PRIME1 lander and VIPER rover, respectively. Heis also Principal Investigator of PlanetVac pneumatic mining systems scheduled to launch to the Moon in 2024. Dr. Yoseph Bar-Cohen is Senior Research Scientist and Group Supervisor at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, in 1979. His research is focused on electroactive mechanisms, biomimetics and NDE. He has edited and co-authored 12 books (including this one), co-authored over 460 publications and co-chaired 54 international conferences. He documented his co-conceived inventions in 132 New Technology Reports (NTR) and 41 registered patents. His notable initiatives include the SPIE conference on electroactive polymers (EAP) and the EAP-in-Action Session that he chaired for 21 years as well as his challenging engineers and scientists worldwide to develop a robotic arm driven by artificial muscles to wrestle with human and win. For his contributions to the field of artificial muscles, Business Week named him in April 2003 one of five technology gurus who are ‘Pushing Tech's Boundaries’. His scientific and engineering accomplishments earned him two NASA Honor Award Medals, two SPIE’s Lifetime Achievement Awards, Fellow of two technical societies: ASNT and SPIE, as well as many other honors and awards.
