A Team of Engineers, a Hardy Robot, the Moon

MOON SHOT: Engineers from Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, are developing a remote-controlled rover that they plan to send to the moon in late 2010. They are members of the Astrobotic team, one of the competitors vying for the US $20 million first prize in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. <

TEST DRIVE: The Carnegie Mellon group is conducting field tests on the grounds of a former steel mill a few kilometers from campus—a “little moon on Earth,” as team members call it. The site has large fields with craters where the team drives the rover around to test its mobility. <

UNDER THE HOOD: Field-test engineers Charlie Munoz [left] and Ethan Minogue remove the rover’s main cover to inspect its electronics. The current prototype uses mostly off-the-shelf hardware, including a PC-based system to control its two mast-mounted cameras. <

HARDY HARDWARE: A future version of the rover will be upgraded to space-rated systems. These will include high-efficiency solar cells, lithium-ion-phosphate batteries, and radiation-hardened computers. <

ELECTRIC EYES: Cameras mounted on a pan-tilt head capture high-resolution stereo images. Michael Furlong, a robotics grad student, is developing software to convert the images into three-dimensional maps. <

ROCK ’N’ ROLL: The rover has four metal-mesh wheels and a suspension system in a configuration known as rocker-bogie, which has no axles or springs. The mechanism—used on NASA’s Mars rovers—is ideal to climb over large obstacles. <

IN CONTROL: Ross Finman, an undergraduate who leads the field tests, uses a control interface on a laptop to operate the robot from a building nearby. In upcoming experiments, the engineers plan to drive the robot around the test site while sitting at their lab on the Carnegie Mellon campus. <

MEN AND MACHINE: Astrobotic team members [from left] Nisarg Kothari, James Lee, Ross Finman [foreground], Ethan Minogue, and Charlie Munoz gather for a test run of the rover. The plan is to go through several design iterations, evaluating prototypes until the final rover emerges. <

CHILLING: Responsible for the rover’s thermal design, Erika Bannon holds a cold plate used in heat-dissipation tests. To cool its computers and solar cells, the rover will use radiators and carbon plates optimized to emanate infrared energy into space. <

ENGINEER IN CHIEF: The Astrobotic team is led by William “Red” Whittaker, a renowned Carnegie Mellon engineer whose robots have explored ice fields, deserts, and volcanoes. Getting one to the moon is a feat he intends to pull off “without raising a heartbeat.”