• AutoTL;DRB
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    23 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    They will fly to the moon’s Reiner Gamma region on the second mission by Houston company Intuitive Machines, where they will act as a proof of concept to showcase how robots can work together on another world without the explicit interference of humans.

    “We have been in overdrive getting this tech demo ready for its lunar adventure,” Subha Comandur, the CADRE project manager at JPL, said in a press statement.

    When the rovers, which can drive in formation, encounter an obstacle such as a boulder or a steep slope, their software allows them to communicate with each other, sharing maps and formulating the best route forward.

    The other part of the testing has been preparing the rovers for the violence of launch and the brutal environment of the moon, where temperature swings and contrasting light and shadow can affect their performance.

    The “shake” part sees the rovers clamped to a shaker table that simulates the ferocious vibrations that they’ll experience during their launch on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

    The CADRE rovers will spend 14 days in broad daylight on the moon, mapping beneath the surface with ground-penetrating radar to see if there is anything there that can explain the lunar swirl.


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