Tiny robots made in Mexico to explore moon in scientific first
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Loading... - Reece Gibson
- 02 Mar 2022
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Five tiny robots designed and made in Mexico will blast off for the moon later this year, part of a first-of-its-kind scientific mission that envisions the two-wheeled bots scrambling across the lunar surface while taking sophisticated measurements.
The so-called nanorobots developed by researchers at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) will work together like a swarm of bees, the senior scientist told Reuters, once they make the nearly 240,000 mile (386,000 km) trip from earth aboard a rocket from closely held U.S. firm Astrobotic Technology.
The mission is poised to launch on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket and would be the first American spacecraft to land on the moon in nearly 50 years.
“This is a small mission where we’ll test the concept, and afterwards we’ll undertake other missions, first to the moon and then on to asteroids,” said Gustavo Medina Tanco, a UNAM scientist who heads the Colmena project, which means “beehive” in Spanish.
Medina Tanco explained that the bots, made of stainless steel, titanium alloys and space-grade aluminum, are equipped to gather lunar minerals that could be useful in future space mining.
On a recent tour of UNAM’s space instruments lab, Colmena team members tested a launch device for the wafer-thin almost 5-inch-diameter (12 cm) disk-shaped robots, which are designed to communicate with one another as well as with an earth-based command center.
The bots are scheduled to launch in June on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, originally developed for Google’s Lunar-X-Prize. Read More…
