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Could the U.S. put the first robot on the moon?
That is the goal of a small team of NASA scientists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. As the world gears up for the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery tomorrow with a humanoid robot ("robonaut") on board, another group of NASA scientists has proposed sending the same type of robot alone to the moon, in just 1,000 days. They call the idea Project M (M being the Roman numeral for 1,000).
As demonstrated in the concept video below, the robonot would travel to the moon on a small lander fueled by liquid methane and liquid oxygen, a cheap and lightweight fuel source. After landing, it could walk on the surface, perform some basic maintenance and construction duties, and test out student experiments.
Project M appears to have sprung out of some frustration over a lack of funding and bureacracy related to space research. Last fall, the Obama administration stopped funding the Houston center's ambitious Constellation project which would send more astronauts to the moon by 2020.
"We were frustrated. We saw what we had built and accomplished in the Engineering Directorate at JSC and knew we could do better. The talent was there; we just needed to unleash it," wrote project manager Matt Ondler on the Project M homepage.
The 1,000 day deadline is somewhat arbitrary, but as Ondler explained, the purpose is to complete the project before too many presidential administrations go by, thereby increasing the chance of its irrelevance.
The New York Times reports that Project M would cost no more than $450 million, a fraction of the $150 billion requested to send human astronauts to the moon.
A NASA spokeswoman said Project M was "just one of many ideas" floating around the center and has not been given authority to proceed, nor is there any active fundraising for the idea.
I found this interesting, however it does not have anything to do with what we are currently learning in Science.
ReplyDeleteI understand what you mean, for we will be learning about solar systems several months from now. But it falls under technology (What our classroom is integrated with), and this is a great example of how its evolved. From someone looking at the moon with a telescope to sending robots to that same planet.
ReplyDeleteI would like to thank the person who uploaded this video trying to help us children to learn something from this video.
ReplyDelete