Sunday, August 03, 2008

Astrobotic and a Different Type of Regolith Excavation Challenge

Astrobotic awarded Regolith-Moving Contract - Astrobotic - From the linked page:

Each organization will conduct a 180-day study focused on a topic relevant to lunar surface systems. Selected organizations and topics are:

... Regolith Moving Methods: Astrobotic Technology Inc. of Pittsburgh and Honeybee Robotics of New York, ...

Astrobotic has a couple more interesting video posts on the teams page: Beating the Heat and Resolution and Color.

There's also news from the Falcon 1 launch, which I tried to watch but didn't catch:

Falcon 1 from Space X lifted off; reported "anomaly" at T+2 minutes - LunaTrex. This is of special interest to some GLXP teams because of the "preferred launch provider" GLXP deal. The Launch Pad links to video from the attempt at On Orbit. RLV News has a number of August 2 posts on it.