posted 09-01-2020 10:43 AM               

Astrobotic Awarded More Than $1 Million to Advance CubeRover Payloads

Astrobotic has been awarded two contracts by NASA to support the development of payloads for future delivery on its 4U and 6U CubeRovers — the world's first line of commercial lunar rovers. CubeRovers are standardized and scalable, providing planetary surface mobility services that support a variety of scientific and commercial missions.

The first $741,000 contract will fuel work on a novel ultra-wide, non-contact Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) antenna co-developed by Astrobotic and The Ohio State University. The antenna will integrate with a prototype of Astrobotic's 6U CubeRover, the largest of the CubeRover family, and then test its use on the ground. Useful for both Earth and planetary science applications, the single antenna can be integrated with diverse mobile platforms to better support lightweight, affordable, subsurface science investigations. GPR tech at this small, lightweight scale is nonexistent in the space market and could enable simple and reliable characterization of lunar lava tubes, subsurface water-ice, and the location of planetary ore deposits.

The second $375,000 contract will integrate a neutron detector with a ground prototype of Astrobotic's mid-size 4U CubeRover. The rover will house neutron-detecting technology developed by Radiation Detection Technologies, and test its use at a lunar surface analogue site. Neutron detectors are a key technology for finding lunar volatiles, like water. The neutron detector onboard the CubeRover will characterize and map the energy distribution of neutrons indicative of the presence of water ice bound in the lunar regolith. This will give scientists clues into where water is concentrated on the lunar surface, and how and when the Moon acquired its water, as well as insight into the inner solar system's history.

CubeRovers are built in three sizes, 2U, 4U, and 6U, and are based on internationally recognized CubeSat standards to simplify payload integration efforts. The rover trio introduces an off-the-shelf mobile platform for payloads that can host an array of instruments such as spectrometers, neutron detectors, cameras, and other important scientific sensors. These instruments will support payloads for extended mission durations at a reduced weight and lower cost, demonstrating new space technologies and filling key knowledge gaps in our scientific understanding of the Moon.

"We are incredibly excited to continue maturing our 4U and 6U CubeRovers in concert with our future payload users. These contracts allow us to support increasingly robust suites of payloads that enable affordable mobility on the lunar surface," says Michael Provenzano, Astrobotic's Director of Planetary Mobility.

Work for both CubeRovers kicked off this month and will continue through July 2022. The contracts will culminate with a lunar analog demonstration of each CubeRover unit, making all sizes of CubeRover available for subsequent infusion into an upcoming lunar mission.

With work on CubeRovers growing and with a recent $199.5 million new contract win from NASA, Astrobotic is expanding operations and growing its team. Career opportunities are available now at the Astrobotic website. The nation's best technical talent is invited to come make history with their team.

posted 10-01-2020 09:57 AM               

NASA Receives First Lunar CubeRover from Astrobotic

After three years of intensive engineering work, Astrobotic's CubeRover is on its way to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The CubeRover is designed to provide an affordable mobile outlet for scientific instruments and other payloads to operate on the surface of the Moon. This occasion marks the first time Astrobotic's Planetary Mobility department has delivered rover hardware to an outside entity.

Named for its modular, scalable design, the CubeRover was co-developed with Carnegie Mellon University, with input from a NASA team at Kennedy, and marks the completion of work on NASA's $750,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 contract to develop a lightweight rover with flight characteristics.

Astrobotic has since refined and commercialized the CubeRover product line with the goal of supporting mobility as a service with a variety of diverse payloads, making lunar access easier for smaller tech demonstrations and scientific investigations. The rover is also designed to be integrated onto multiple lunar landers for voyages to the Moon, facilitating its inclusion on a wide variety of future space missions.

Designing the compact CubeRover presented an array of engineering challenges for the Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon teams. Among many concerns, the teams were tasked with regulating the rover's temperature in extreme climate fluctuations, keeping its mass minimal, and ensuring the rover maintained optimum mobility for instruments operating on the rover. The teams created a robust thermal design able to endure temperatures ranging from space (-455ºF) to the lunar surface (260ºF). The result is the lightest commercial planetary rover ever created. The CubeRover was also outfitted with a calibrated camera used to orient itself relative to known objects on the lunar surface, such as Astrobotic's Peregrine lander. The ability for the rover's operation team to recognize its position on the Moon augments the value of the data, allowing payload customers to make informed decisions about where to travel next.

"Because our CubeRover is so light — in the four kilogram range — it dramatically reduces flight cost, making the Moon more accessible to more customers," says Mike Provenzano, Astrobotic's Director of Planetary Mobility. ""We're also including industry standard interfaces throughout the rover to simplify the payload integration process."

In the coming months, a team at Kennedy's Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations (GMRO) Laboratory will conduct a battery of mobility tests on the CubeRover in their analogous lunar regolith simulant — a terrain that closely mimics the mechanical properties of the lunar surface. These tests will measure the slopes, gaps, and other surface irregularities the rover can navigate. Drop testing will ensure the rover is not at risk of tipping over during its deployment from a lander to the lunar surface.

Astrobotic's work on CubeRover will continue through its $2M Tipping Point contract with NASA, concluding in February 2022. This program funds the flight qualification of the 2U CubeRover product line, and also outfits the rover with a set of advanced features including a lighter all-wheel-drive system, a solar array for recharging, adaptive image compression, and additional interfaces to support a wider variety of landers and payloads.

posted 12-17-2020 09:24 AM               

Astrobotic’s CubeRover Completes Successful Mobility Testing

Astrobotic’s CubeRover successfully completed more than 150 mobility tests inside a 120-ton enclosure designed to mimic the surface of the Moon. These tests will further inform the final wheel design of all three sizes of the scalable CubeRover line.

Because CubeRovers are smaller than any rover that has operated on the lunar surface, only estimates from prior NASA missions with large rovers could inform initial engineering efforts. With eleven sets of wheels to test, the Astrobotic crew headed to NASA Kennedy Space Center’s (KSC) to conduct maneuverability and traction force testing on the lunar dust simulant.

“This is really a new frontier Astrobotic is exploring – we are pushing the understanding of small-scale mobility on the Moon. Larger rovers and smaller rovers interact differently with lunar regolith simulant,” says Troy Arbuckle, Planetary Mobility Lead Mechanical Engineer at Astrobotic. “The data we collected is invaluable. Two sets of wheels exceeded testing expectations, informing our path forward to continue maturing the CubeRover line.”

Astrobotic partnered with KSC under a $2M Tipping Point contract with NASA to conduct testing in KSC’s Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations laboratory. The lab consists of a flour-like dust that compacts to a hard rock when compressed. Draw bar pull, slope, and point turn testing data collected from the CubeRover sensors and other hardware informed the performance of CubeRover wheels in an analogue lunar environment. Some wheel sets were capable of climbing 30-degree slopes while others successfully navigated and turned in deep regolith.

“The team at KSC has been extremely accommodating and knowledgeable. They got down and dirty moving around the lunar regolith to diversify our testing on CubeRover. We are all looking ahead for more opportunities to work together. We decided to drive the CubeRover alongside KSC’s RASSOR rover to simulate how RASSOR could dig a trench and CubeRover could drive in, collect samples, and drive back out,” says Astrobotic’s Troy Arbuckle.

Astrobotic will continue work optimizing the shape and size of CubeRover’s wheels. Additional testing will continue at Astrobotic headquarters in Pittsburgh to verify rover deployment methods, solar panel deployment, thermal vacuum survivability, launch survivability, and more. Efforts for CubeRover will culminate in a high-fidelity engineering unit, followed by a flight qualified product in 2022.

posted 08-24-2022 10:45 AM               

CubeRover Funded for Survive-the-Lunar-Night Mission

Astrobotic has been selected by NASA's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Sequential Phase II program to develop, test, and fly lunar night survival and communication technologies onboard its CubeRover platform. The effort will culminate in a commercial flight to the Moon for CubeRover on an upcoming Astrobotic lander mission, where it will demonstrate the platform's ability to survive the harsh environment of lunar night and utilize satellite relays to traverse long distances.

Surviving the lunar night is no small feat. Temperatures can easily drop to – 200⁰C, which would typically disable thermally sensitive components like batteries and electronics and end a rover mission after just one lunar day of operation. To help address this challenge, Astrobotic has also been subcontracted by Advanced Cooling Technologies, Inc. (ACT) on a separate NASA Sequential SBIR for $1.8M to develop, integrate, and demonstrate lunar night thermal systems aboard lunar rovers and landers.

"This mission has the potential to usher in a new era of robust lunar robotics where instruments and payloads can survive months to even years on the Moon's surface," says Mike Provenzano, Astrobotic's Director of Lunar Surface Systems. "CubeRover will survive longer and drive farther than any lunar rover in its class with this flight, taking Astrobotic a major step forward in opening the Moon to sustained long-term robotic operations. In fact, we even have 1 kilogram of payload space still available on this mission for a payload team looking to take advantage of this capability."

To make full use of lunar night survivability and robust operations, rovers also need to be capable of driving long distances away from their host landers. This poses a significant communication challenge, where a rover's host lander may be over the horizon and unable to share a communication relay between Earth and the rover. To address this challenge, this mission will also demonstrate CubeRover's use of satellite communication relays, which will significantly extend its range.

"Some rovers are planned to rely on network protocols like Long Term Evolution, or LTE, (similar to how your cellphone transmits data) to transmit over long distances. However, these systems suffer from reduced line of sight visibility to their host lander and consequently cannot truly drive that far," says Cedric Corpa de Fuente, Lunar Surface Systems Lead Avionics Engineer. "We've known of this challenge since we started building rovers and it has been a major hurdle to overcome. Following this demonstration, our CubeRover product line's range of surface operations via satellite communications will be greatly extended."

This announcement comes on the heels of CubeRover's recently completed Critical Design Review with NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate Tipping Point program. The team will now move to complete CubeRover's flight qualification campaign—a major step towards preparing for future missions.

posted 10-31-2024 06:14 PM               

Bridgestone Partners with Astrobotic to Develop Lunar Rover Tire

Bridgestone Corporation today announced that the company has reached a collaboration agreement with Astrobotic Technology for joint development of a lunar rover tire.

Above: Astrobotic’s 24U CubeRover with tires developed by Bridgestone.

Bridgestone developed a concept model of first- and second-generation tires utilizing its knowledge cultivated for over 90 years of its tire development history, and conducted validation experiments, such as driving tests and simulations. Drawing on its global expertise in supporting all types of mobility on Earth, Bridgestone is now extending its support to the evolution of space mobility, tackling the challenges of lunar exploration. The company's innovations, honed in extreme conditions such as motorsports, will play a key role in advancing mobility on the Moon. Through this project, Bridgestone is committed to being essential for the future of mobility by taking on the challenges of the Moon's extreme and largely unexplored surface.

The Bridgestone lunar rover tire will be developed for the Astrobotic 24U CubeRover. Astrobotic has a legacy of developing lunar rovers for over 17 years, which includes 37 rover technology contracts from NASA and 6 distinct lunar rovers to date. Astrobotic's 24U CubeRover is built to provide mobility, power, and communication support for scientific instruments and payloads on the lunar surface. This 24U rover is about the size of a standard kitchen stove and boasts robust capabilities such as explicit steering, dynamic suspension, and long-distance communications to excel in harsh lunar terrain.

Above: Concept model of Bridgestone lunar rover tire.

The Bridgestone lunar rover tire applies the skeletal structure of metal spokes and features an elastic structure that can deform when driving over obstacles, like lunar rocks. This design aims to maximize shock absorption, traction, and to improve energy efficiency — vital for extended missions. This elastic tire reduces stress on the rover's drivetrain and aids in smooth turning. In the near future, Astrobotic and Bridgestone will qualify the tires for the launch and thermal environments of space.

The co-development of the Bridgestone lunar rover tire with Astrobotic is core to the Bridgestone philosophy of collaboration and co-creation with its business partners. By demonstrating Bridgestone's challenge and pursuit of excellence to its partners, the company is fostering empathy and trust and conducting activities to expand its network in the space industry and co-creation opportunities with international partners. This collaboration with Astrobotic, a leader in space exploration and technology development, marks another step in Bridgestone's efforts to create new opportunities for co-creation with international partners.

Through empowering space mobility by the lunar rover tire development, Bridgestone strives to achieve the corporate commitment of "Extension: Committed to nonstop mobility and innovation that keeps people and the world moving ahead" described in its "Bridgestone E8 Commitment."