NASA Robots & Robotic Vehicles at Moses Lake, WA
“The scale of this site, the terrain of this site is something you just can’t find in most places in the world,” said Terry Phong with NASA. Phong works on the K-10 robot team. The black and red pair will scout out terrain, scan the ground and draw up maps. The robots are being controlled from 3,000 miles away in Houston, but they can also think for themselves. “They are smart enough to avoid running into obstacles, they’re smart enough not to go into places where they might get stuck,” said Phong.
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Moses Lake is considered Washington’s “Great Escape” with plenty of natural fresh water lakes, numerous parks and campgrounds, so it makes one wonder why NASA engineers in space suites have chosen this spot to try out their new robotic vehicles for a period of two weeks—other than its rolling slopes, and wide-open spaces filled with soft soil of the sand dunes which beat out 15 other states competing for NASA testing ground to prepare for moon exploration. Five of the vehicles were tested for future NASA missions on both Mars and the Moon, according the Washington’s “Tri-City Herald”: a six-wheeled lunar truck, a six-legged all-terrain vehicle that can carry payloads or astronaut habitats, an autonomous drilling rover, a mapping robot and a crane that can stand on its head to load itself onto a transport.
According to NASA, the reason Moses Lake was chosen was because of its similarity with lunar soil. “NASA chose the dunes for the demonstrations because the sand, mixed with ash from Mount St. Helens, is a suitable replica of lunar soil, called regolith.” Fred Horz, a planetary scientist for NASA since the Apollo missions and a geologist for NASA in Houston, said it has been too long since the United States last was committed to lunar trips. Fred Horz has studied samples of space samples for approximately ten years—comets, meteorites, Mars, and cosmic dust in the Earth’s stratosphere. But he has a special love for lunar exploration since the Apollo missions.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Space Agency News, The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
