ESA Portal - Eight teams taking up ESA’s Lunar Robotics Challenge

Media Centre

Press Releases ESA Television Launch Media Corner Exhibitions

Services

Calendar Publications Frequently asked questions ESA-sponsored Conferences Help Site Credits Portal terms of use Comments Subscribe

Eight teams taking up ESA’s Lunar Robotics Challenge

2 July 2008

Back to article

A wheeled rover chassis demonstrates its difficulty in overcoming a sandy slope of just 20 degrees inclination.
Robotics vehicles (rovers) using wheeled locomotion principles cannot negotiate slopes found in lunar craters, unless some special provisions are used. A rover chassis of the automation and robotics laboratories at ESTEC is here shown as it tries to climb up a sand dune of about 20 degrees inclination. It can clearly be seen that the progress of the rover is extremely slow as the rovers slips on the sand. The ESA Lunar Robotics Challenge has been launched in order to investigate alternative locomotion principles or special provisions for wheeled rovers, to enable a rover to descend into a lunar crater and safely return back to surface.

Credits: ESA

Challenge objectives

Back to article

Download:

HI-RES JPEG (Size: 1991 kb)

This mosaic of the lunar south pole was obtained with images taken by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA's SMART-1.

The pictures were taken between Dec 2005 and March 2006, during lunar southern summer. When obtaining the images, SMART-1 was flying over the south pole at a distance of about 500 km, allowing individual images with small-field (about 50 km across) high resolution views (50 m/pixel).

Each individual image includes areas imaged with colour filters and a more exposed area. The differences have been corrected accordingly to obtain this mosaic. The mosaic, composed of about 40 images obtained over more than 30 orbits, covers an area of about 500 by 150 km. The lunar near-side facing Earth is at the top of the map, while the far-side is at the bottom.

Credits: ESA/SMART-1/Space-X (Space Exploration Institute), ESA/SMART-1/ AMIE camera team

Announcement of Opportunity for the ESA Lunar Robotics Challenge

Selected teams

Universität Bremen Jacobs University Universidad Politecnica de Madrid Oulun Yliopisto (University of Oulu)Università di Pisa Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna Surrey Space Centre, University of Surrey Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule - ETH)