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Tag: space travel

  • Video: Astrobotic Technology to Land a Robot on the Moon and Send Live Video Back to Earth

    Video: Astrobotic Technology to Land a Robot on the Moon and Send Live Video Back to Earth

    Astrobotic Technology, a private technology company, is planning to land a robot on the moon.

    “Whether men have reached the moon” has long been kept to bed as researchers compete to earn a $30 million fortune from Google to beam video back from the moon.

    A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, Daniel Shafrir, and his team want to do something incredible: they want to send a rover to the moon and then let us, the Earthlings, control it and look out of its stereoscopic cameras as it tumbles around that barren alien rock. The researchers are working to win a $30 million prize from Google to beam video back from the moon.

    The team, called Astrobotic Technology, has to complete the Google Lunar XPrize, a mission to land a robot on the moon and send live video back to Earth while moving it at least 1,600 feet. As you can imagine, this is harder than it sounds, given that they have to help the robot escape Earth’s orbit.

    Shafrir, game designer Ben Boesel, and astronomer Dan Arnett are working together to connect the robot to an Oculus Rift which, in turn, would control the robot. The team said they hope to let children worldwide see what “only 12 other people” have seen on Earth. They will build their lunar lander and fire their little robot, Andy, after Andrew Carnegie, into the stratosphere to pull this off.

  • China’s Chang’e-3 Makes it’s First Trip to Moon

    China’s Chang’e-3 Makes it’s First Trip to Moon

    China has joined the U.S. and Russia as one of only three nations to make a controlled soft landing of an unmanned spacecraft on the moon’s surface. https://www.youtube.com/embed/WGNdJ76aG54?feature=player_detailpage China Central Television, the state television broadcaster in mainland China, broadcast the final stage of the mission on Saturday (see above video); it showed the Chang’e-3 successfully touching down on the moon.   Carrying a solar-powered moon rover called “Yutu” (Jade Rabbit), CCTV also televised the launch of the Chang’e-3 probe on Dec. 1, as seen in the video, below.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/ctTBRWMh3yw?feature=player_embedded
    After achieving orbit on Dec. 6, the probe prepared to make its auto-controlled descent, which was closely monitored by staff at the China National Space Administration.

    Sending back black-and-white video of the moon’s surface as it made its final descent, the Chang’e-3’s handlers expect to deploy the Yutu moon rover on Sunday.

    In an interview with China’s state news agency Xinhua, Sun Huixian, an engineer in charge of the space-probe mission, said, “Compared to the last century’s space race between the United States and the former Soviet Union, mankind’s current return to the moon is more based on curiosity and exploration of the unknown universe … China’s lunar program is an important component of mankind’s activities to explore peaceful use of space.”

    The Yutu rover’s mission is to collect high-resolution imagery of the moon’s surface, as well as lunar soil samples, according to Xinhua.

    The samples will be returned to Earth by the Chang’e 5 probe, which is scheduled to launch some time before 2015, and to return to China before 2020.News According to Mashable | Image by: China National Space Administration