If box shape Opportunity rover can conjure years of anthropomorphism Love And goodwill, then surely Earth people will be very interested in the idea of sending a snake-shaped robot to the moon. This robot—the brainchild of students at Northeastern University—is meant to sway through difficult terrain, measure the amount of water in craters, and bite its own tail to become a spinning ouroboros. round falling to the cliff of the moon.
NASA’s annual Big idea challenge presents a new query each year addressing a technical problem the agency needs to address. In the fall of 2021, students from universities across the United States began designing a robot that could survive the harsh terrain on the Moon and send data back to Earth. The winning team, which includes students from the Northeast’s Space Exploration and Development Student club, took home the top prize in November and now hope to turn their winning design into a Advanced prototypes could actually be sent to the moon.
Using $180,000 in NASA funds, the students focused on designing a robot that could navigate Shackleton Crater—a 13-mile-wide basin near the lunar south pole where NASA confirmed the presence of ice in 2018. Water is abundant on Earth but a high value item outside our atmosphere. Humans need water to survive, but it is extremely heavy, and transporting it 240,000 miles from home is very expensive. So, local water in the form of ice will be a huge boon for NASA’s Artemis Mission as it seeks to establish a base on the moon.
However, before the agency can rely on this tape for crewed missions, it needs to confirm how many are located in different areas of the lunar surface and what is its chemical composition. But there are a few challenges to getting data from the 2-mile-deep crater. One: The floor is inside eternal shadow, which means temperatures hovering hundreds of degrees below freezing. Two: The angle of inclination from the rim to the floor is 30.5 degrees, steeper than Mount Everest. Three: The moon is sand. Any robot attempting to traverse this terrain will have to survive bone-chilling temperatures, descents, and harsh environments.
The students consider the robot to jump, legs and roll, like a robot self-propelled vehicle with wheels already on Mars. But the rolling robot would be submerged in rocks and unable to navigate safely on steep terrain like the Shackleton belt. Robots with legs also sink and are less stable in sandy environments. Jumping robots will have trouble launching and landing without damage or getting stuck. “We looked at this whole set of different robot designs and thought, is there a way we can combine different movements?” recalls Yash Bhora, a physics major who helped build software for the team.
Bhora and his teammates looked at an acrobatic robot, one that could harness part of the moon’s gravity to propel itself down the crater more efficiently. But once it reaches the floor, it will need a different kind of function. “An acrobatic robot by itself cannot really control a large scientific device or control it,” said Matthew Schroeter, team leader, who graduated from Northeastern in 2022 and now works at Honeybee Robotics. exactly like a walking robot.
