Monthly Archives: April 2010

A great new animation by Aaron Davidson and his team shows how our solar-powered rover will explore the Moon, from lunar “skylights” into lava tubes to the Apollo 11 site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVQSiUMTl5g

A walk-in oven for curing large composite pieces arrived this week at Carnegie Mellon’s Planetary Robotics Lab. The oven is especially useful for the pieces that will make up the spacecraft-lander that delivers our robot to the lunar surface. The oven’s floor includes two grooves for the wheels of the support cart that will hold… {read more}

A challenge in commanding a robot arm to carve up a target object with its router is precise understanding of where that object is located in “three space.” The team recently developed a process to locate the plane of its angle table (the baseline surface upon which an object rests) using a piezoelectric “button” that… {read more}

Astrobotic Technology and its collaborators at Carnegie Mellon University are creating a series of Moon missions that open participation to the world in many innovative ways. President David Gump was invited to present a summary of these initiatives to a NASA-Battelle workshop April 13-15 in Columbus, OH. “Participatory Exploration” is a newly emphasized focus for… {read more}