Are you enjoying your 'summer' vacation so far? Of course, summer does not really begin until Wednesday, June 20, at 6:09pm CT to be exact. That is when the sun reaches its maximum declination north of the celestial equator, and the Summer Solstice occurs. Even though summer is not quite here, our Summer of Exploration is and will feature LiveChats every Thursday night (except July 5)! The first of these chats occured last night, when Jack Fox of Kennedy Space Center talked about the recent Lunabotics Mining Competition at KSC. 33 were in attendance to take part in the presentation.
Lunabotics asks college teams to design and build a vehicle that could operate on the lunar surface to mine the regolith (surface material) found there. Regolith may hold important minerals and compounds important for lunar bases and export back to earth. 57 teams came from around the globe to show off their robots and try their hand at mining. Robots were examined, weighed and after a communications test, placed in the Lunarena, a 25' x 25' pit filled with BP-1 a basalt based lunar simulant discovered during a recent Desert RATS (FYI - INSPIRE interns at KSC helped design and construct the Lunarena back in 2010).
The over winner of the Joe Kosmo Award of Excellence went to the University of Alabama & Shelton Community College (pictured above). To see other teams and their robots, and to find out more about the competition, go to http://www.nasa.gov/lunabotics.
Next week we will feature another competition held last year, the X-Hab Academic Innovation Challenge, the challenges university teams to design lunar habitats. Sign up now on the Discussion Board for this exciting chat! And don't forget to check the other chats for the Summer of Exploration listed on the OLC Home page. See you there!
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