Welcome to a large and hard-charging group of roboticists and lunar enthusiasts. At last count, there were at least 40 of us in various cities, centered in Pittsburgh and Tucson but with outposts on both coasts as well. We range from undergrads all the way up the experience chain to our program manager Tony Spear, who broke all the rules to pull off the successful 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission.
We’ve been digging into the challenge laid down by the X PRIZE Foundation since the Google funding was announced last fall. Our group was pretty excited to begin stepping through each of the many requirements to see if could agree on what we thought the words actually meant, in engineering terms, and what we’d have to design to fulfill them. The X PRIZE Foundation’s draft of the potential rules left some issues open, in order to draw feedback about what exact standard would make engineering sense. That was really sensible, and we appreciate their intent to listen to the teams about the final rule set.
In blog posts to come, I’ll tell you about the prototypes we’ve built of the lander and the rover. In Pittsburgh, despite wind chills below zero, our young engineers have been out testing the rover to measure its ability to handle rough lunar-like terrain. In Tucson, the team at Raytheon built two lunar lander prototypes in an amazingly short few weeks… and we’ve connected the rover to the lander there to check out the interfaces and try a few “dismounts” to see how the rover rolls off on to a simulated lunar surface.
-- Red Whittaker
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