Thursday, May 05, 2011

WVU Students Builds Robot for the Moon

Moon Robot
A group of WVU students is building a robot that can work on the moon.

A lunabotics team of 15 engineering students is competing in NASA's second annual Lunabotics Mining Competition. They're designing a remote controlled excavation robot capable of collecting and depositing simulated moon soil.

The students say technology like this will make sustainable human settlement on the moon and Mars a possibility.

"The idea being that we are going to put robot's in place of astronauts, and so we wanna create the first wave of that lunar colonization for their exploration. It's just a really neat thing," said lunabotics team member Ben Knabenshue.

The WVU/NASA space grant consortium is sponsoring the project.

Former astronaut and WVU alum Jon McBride is advising the team.

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