Pasta La Vista baby
A team of
Italian boffins has come up with a cunning plan to send robots to the
moon.
Team Italia is hoping to win the Google Lunar X Prize by sending robots
which look like spiders onto the lunar surface. All the major Italian
aerospace and engineering universities, as well as the two largest Italian
aerospace companies are behind the scheme.
Boffin Alberto Rovetta, a
professor of robot mechanics at Politecnico di Milano has designed lunar robots
resemble skittering spiders or crabs that could deploy as a swarm of mobile
cameras and sensors on both legs and wheels.
To win the price they have to
get a robot on the moon, move at least 500 meters and beam high definition views
back to Earth. The project is seen as an attempt by Italy to take a leading
role in space exploration.