Astrobotic Technology Digs For Dirt In Space
July 8th, 2009
Astrobotic Technology aims for winning a large prize, but more importantly recognition. With some help from the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon, they had created a robot to come in first in the NASA Regolith (the technical term for the soil covering a planet, moon or asteroid) Excavation Challenge. The challenge is to dump the most moon dirt in 30 minutes, which, if they win, they will get a bonus of $500,000, that should be enough for a nice add on or jump start to their main goal, The Google Lunar X Prize.
In the video above, the space dirt shoveler seems to take quite awhile to pick up the dirt, but if you look closely, the robot is actually close to filling up the entire bin of the sand. We hope that they will reach that 20 million dollar goal in the Google Lunar X Challenge. The Regolith Excavation Challenge will take place on October 17th and 18th of 2009 and the Google Lunar Challenge will take place sometime next year.
