Kickstarter

Your support is crucial to helping the team at Arizona State University win the NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition.

Arizona State University is participating in the NASA’s Lunabotics Mining Competition that is designed to promote the development of interest in space activities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. The competition uses excavation, a necessary first step towards extracting resources from the regolith and building bases on the moon.

The competition will be conducted by NASA at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, May 21-26, 2012.

The unique physical properties of lunar regolith and the reduced 1/6th gravity, vacuum environment make excavation a difficult technical challenge. Advances in lunar regolith mining have the potential to significantly contribute to our nation’s space vision and NASA space exploration operations.

Your support will allow us to complete this robot, and answer some important research questions to help further our academic work. We are interested in how the robot behaves when autonomously traversing an obstacle-rich environment (such as the surface of the moon) while it collects the "moon rocks" and returns them to the "moon base". 

We are also interested in the harsh environment that the moon presents for robotic applications, trying to determine the best way to protect the mechanical parts from the ultra-fine moon dust.

Your support will also enable us to participate in more outreach, getting into k-12 classrooms and giving the kids hands-on opportunities to interact with projects from the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. 

We are a group of students dedicated to the exploration and development of space. With projects like this, we hope to learn important lessons that will help make space exploration more affordable and productive. We also hope to inspire the younger generations to look up, and dare to explore beyond our planet.