"We looked at autonomous operations of equipment as being the same type of technology that could be used on the moon as well as in a mining application, " said Michele Blubaugh, manager of Intelligence Technology Services at Caterpillar.

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The most mentioned celebrity passing, of first man on the moon Neil Armstrong, was the fifteenth biggest event of any type for 2012.

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And long-term human settlement will follow at some point, mainly to develop mineral and energy resources available on the Moon, but also to emplace protective systems aimed at avoiding large asteroid impacts of the type we were all recently made aware with that grazing meteor strike in Chelyabinsk and the simultaneous near-miss by big-rock DA14.

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