The great — private — space race is on!
Carnegie Mellon University and Astrobotic Technology on Monday unveiled its newest version of the rover — nicknamed Andy — that they hope to send to the moon by the end of 2015 and win the team the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize.
With more than 50 CMU students and staff and Astrobotics employees on hand to witness its public debut, CMU robotics professor William “Red” Whittaker brought it out by telling the crowd: “Let’s see Andy.”
With that, the knee-high, 72-pound (that’s less than 10 pounds on the moon), solar-powered, four-wheeled rover crept out from behind a curtain with a dramatic puff of dry-ice smoke in its wake, drawing cheers from the dozens of undergraduate and graduate students who did most of the legwork on the project.
This is the third evolution of the rover the team has built since it entered the competition seven years ago, and, by Mr. Whittaker’s account, the best one yet.
“It drives better. It handles well,” he told the crowd. “It certainly will handle anything the moon will throw at it.”
The team also debuted a new website — http://lunar.cs.cmu.edu/#robot — Tuesday for the rover.
The team believes this rover will be able to endure the wide temperature fluctuations on the moon, be light enough to stay on the surface of the sandy soil, mobile enough to overcome any rocks in its way — and be the first to do so and claim the $20 million first prize.
The prize will go to the first privately funded team that accomplishes three main goals: rocket a computer-driven rover to the moon’s surface, traverse 500 meters on the moon’s surface (a little less than one-third of a mile) and send back high-definition video to earth.
Additional bonuses go to the rover that survives and can restart after a 14-day lunar night (that is colder than dry ice), that can traverse 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) and that can explore Apollo-era “heritage” sites.
The competition was announced in 2007, and at one point there were 34 teams competing from around the globe.
It’s now down to 18 teams. But XPrize recognized only five of them earlier this year — including the CMU/Astrobotic team — for “demonstrating (via actual testing and analysis) robust hardware and software to overcome key technical risks in the areas of imaging, mobility and lander systems — all three being necessary to achieve a successful Google Lunar XPRIZE mission.”
CMU/Astrobotic was recognized in each of the three technical risk categories, which puts it in competition for “milestone” prizes of up to $1 million per category that could be awarded in the next few months.
The project is for many of the students “the reason I came here” to CMU, said Jon Anderson, 24, another master’s degree student who has worked on the project for two years, long enough to have been through one other version of the rover.
The first version, known as Red Rover, which debuted in 2011, was scrapped in favor of the Polaris Rover, which debuted in 2012, when the mission was switched to try to explore for lunar ice.
More recently, after the discovery of “pits,” or depressions, on the moon’s surface that could lead to sub-lunar caves, the decision was made to push off Polaris’ mission until later, said Astrobotic CEO John Thornton, himself a CMU graduate.
The Andy Rover was designed specifically with a mission to explore one of these pits about the size of Heinz Field in the Lacus Mortis (or “Lake of Death” in Latin) region of the moon.
Mr. Thornton and others from CMU spun Astrobotic off out of CMU’s work on space robotics. Astrobotic is something of the middle man in the project, putting together the rover, the lander and the rocket, plus the payload that will pay for the potential $100 million project.
It already has a rocket in line — a Space Exploration Technologies Falcon 9 rocket — and five payload customers so far, but not enough yet to pay for the project.
Mr. Thornton said he is “thrilled with CMU’s rover.”
One of the ways to fill the payload that Astrobotic is exploring is to get its other competitors to come on as customers, so they’ll all be on the same rocket, get there the same time and can have a real, 500-meter race – albeit at a slow, 7-inches-per-second speed of the Andy Rover.
“We could watch it,” Mr. Thornton said. “It would be like NASCAR or Formula One, only in slow-mo, but exciting nonetheless.”
First Published: November 25, 2014, 5:00 a.m.
