Published on June 30, 2024 at 2:42 p.m.
While NASA is working to bring humans back to the Moon via the Artemis program, other projects are moving forward in a completely different environment. It was in Huntsville, Alabama, that the American space agency organized a robot competition in June, the Break the Ice Challenge! The goal: to find the one that will be able to break the ice to recover water on our satellite.
Let’s cut the suspense short: the winner is called Fracture. This four-wheeled rover, developed by a Californian couple behind the company Terra Engineering, has a drill and a bearing that allows a whole series of scrapers to fetch rocks from the surface and to reduce them to dust in the hope of extracting ice from them. “The rover is both robust and durable enough to traverse rocky landscapes and survive the harsh conditions at the Moon’s South Pole,” said challenge leader Kim Krone. Adding that it filled “technology gaps that we had identified.”
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