A helping hand for lunar exploration

Earlier this year, a member of the Spaceship ECSAT team quickly created and tested technology that aims to tackle the time-delay challenges of tele-operating a robotic regolith manipulator on the Moon.

Led by robotics doctoral student Joe Louca, the project could be an early step to developing virtual reality tools to help scientists remotely handle rocks and dust on the lunar surface. It could also facilitate the curation of extraterrestrial samples when they are returned to Earth for analysis.