The Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System, or WORMS, is a reconfigurable, modular, multiagent robotics architecture for extreme lunar terrain mobility developed by MIT’s Space Resources Workshop for NASA’s 2022 BIG Idea Challenge. The system could be used to assemble autonomous worm-like parts into larger biomimetic robots that could explore lava tubes, steep slopes, and the moon’s permanently shadowed regions.
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Credit: Pavel Odinev (Skoltech)
Researchers from Skoltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have analyzed several dozen options to pick the best one in terms of performance and costs for the last mile of a future mission to the Moon - actually delivering astronauts to the lunar surface and back up to the safety of the orbiting lunar station. The paper was published in the journal
Acta Astronautica.
Ever since December 1972, when the crew of Apollo 17 left the lunar surface, humans have been eager to return to the Moon. In 2017, the US government launched the Artemis program, which intends to bring the first woman and the next man to the lunar south pole by 2024. The Artemis mission will use a new orbital platform, dubbed the Lunar Gateway, which is going to be a permanent space station from which reusable modules will bring astronauts back to the Moon. This new approach requires a reanalysis of the optimal landing approaches; the private companies contracted by NA