ia’s Tegra 3 might be heading to the moon! If you haven’t heard about the $30 Million Dollar Google Lunar X-Prize which is for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon.
The international competition involves being able to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface and send images and data back to the Earth.
One of the 28 team called Synergy Moon plans has partnered with former Mars Rover Simulator scientist Martin Peniak, who plans to build an Nvidia Tegra based moon rover with autonomy of movement. The moon rover will be using Nvidia’s CUDA programming language and the team has decided to its robot the Tesla Lunar Rover and Tesla Surveyor.
“The Tesla Surveyor is a spherical rover, designed as a virtual excursion vehicle. Equipped with twin high definition video cameras for stereoscopic vision, the Tesla Surveyor will take viewers on a trip across the surface of the moon,” said Synergy Moon on its website.
The rover is going to be a more traditional four wheeled rover, designed as a virtual prospector, with sensors and cameras to examine the environment and identify the mineral content of the rocks and lunar regolith.
If they end up sending it to the moon we’ll be able to check out 3D footage with its stereoscopic camera and if you’re keen on taking it for a spin it will have internet based controls that will allow anyone to take it over, if they have proper authorization.
The team plans to release its autonomous lander, packed with Tegra-based rovers, from an orbiter to the moon, there is a tentative launch date of December 2012.
If you’re still not sure exactly what this is going to look like, lucky for us there is a video, we just hope that the actual event isn’t accompanied by such cheesy music.
Via EeTimes
