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The next rover to roam the moon's surface may come not from NASA and its rocket scientists but from college students and private companies working on a shoestring
?| April 3, 2012
At a testing site in Pittsburgh, Red Whittaker and his teammates practice remotely controlling Red Rover, a pyramidal robot they hope to get on the moon by 2015.
Image: Photograph by Andrew Hetherington
In Brief
- Now that NASA?s space shuttle is retired, scientists may turn to privately funded rockets to get themselves and their equipment into space.
- The Google Lunar X PRIZE competition offers $20 mil?lion to the first nongovernment team to get a rover on the moon.
- Of the 26 competitors, Astrobotic may stand the best chance of winning. Team leader William ?Red? Whittaker has spent his career building innovative robots.
On a muddy, rubble-strewn field on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, a five-foot-tall pyra?midal robot with twin camera eyes slowly rotates on four metal wheels, its electric motors emitting a low whine. In a nearby trailer, students from Carnegie Mellon University huddle around a laptop to watch the world through the robot?s eyes. In the low-resolution grayscale images on the laptop?s screen, the rutted landscape looks a lot like the moon, which is the robot?s ultimate destination.
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