NASA awards contract
September 21, 2008 by david.gump
Astrobotic Technology
wins NASA contract
PITTBURGH, PA – August 3, 2008 – The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has awarded Astrobotic Technology Inc. a contract to develop concepts for moving lunar soil in preparation for the agency’s coming Moon outpost. The contract will be executed in cooperation with the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.
NASA’s Surface Systems division of its lunar Constellation Program selected Astrobotic Technology and ten other firms to conduct 180-day studies on key challenges of operating on the Moon. Other winners sharing in the $2 million of awards granted included major firms such as Boeing, Honeywell, United Space Alliance and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.
“These studies provide new ideas to help the Constellation Program develop innovative, reliable requirements for the systems that will be used when outposts are established on the Moon,” said Jeff Hanley, the Constellation Program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The Constellation Program is building NASA’s next generation fleet of spacecraft – including the Ares I and Ares V rockets, the Orion crew capsule, the Altair lunar lander and lunar surface systems — to send humans beyond low Earth orbit and back to the moon. NASA plans to establish a human outpost on the moon through a successive series of lunar missions beginning in 2020. Lunar surface systems may include habitats, pressurized and un-pressurized rovers, communication and navigation elements, electrical power control, and natural resource use.
