Another face on the front pages is the team from Astrobotic, which is essentially the space business arm of the Carnegie Mellon University robotics department. You may know them as the winners of the DARPA 2007 Urban Challenge under the Team Tartan banner. They were the ones whose robotic SUV passed a driver's test.... without a driver.
The Astrobotic branch takes the concepts of autonomous rovers on the road, or the rocket as the case may be, in an effort to take home yet another big cash prize to the tune of $20 million for the Google Lunar X Prize. The goal: return to tranquility base to retrace Armstrong's giant leap. It's not just a sightseeing vacation, though. Scientists back on terra firma want to know how the relics of our first excursion on another planetary body have endured the difficulties of life on the lunar surface. Aside from answering some serious questions about micrometeorites, radiation, and that pesky ionized lunar dust, it helps set the stage for better designs for our next manned trip to Luna, set to occur in 2020.
Those are the basic parameters of the Lunar XPrize. What sets Astrobotic apart from it's competitors, aside from it's demonstrated robotic credentials, is in the landing. Unlike past missions to the moon's surface, Astrobotic's Red Rover will arrive on site with a pinpoint landing thanks to a partnership with Raytheon. This ups the team's chances of completing not just the main mission of soft landing a rover (which has only been done so far by governments) and roving for 500 meters, but of landing close enough to Tranquility Base to do the scientific sightseeing necessary to net it the bonus prizes and return the heavy scientific data we're looking for. They're hoping, though with a little less certainty, to grab all of the basic and bonus prizes including an overnight stay on the surface. That's a bigger challenge than it sounds as it takes 14.5 Earth days for the sun to make its way back onto the horizon and there's no atmosphere to trap heat during that period.
As is the hope of the prize sponsors and most folks in the space community, Astrobotic aims to put out further missions. Specifically they are aiming for the polar regions that have been pegged for possible sites for a human base. In recent news, they've prodded NASA to select private companies (presumably themselves) to do the robotic grunt work for preperatory missions to the moon. This was in response to a recent study done by NASA to demonstrate the best methods for robotic site prep for the future human missions. Of the options avalable, it appears the little bots would be going WALL-E and piling up the vast amounts of rock and soil into burms to shield the future home base from the dust kicked up by landers. It's nice to see NASA is following through with the nuts and bolts engineering tasks at this point. Let's hope that continues.
Look for Astrobotic's first mission to kick off in May 2010.
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