As many as seven Indian teams are participating in the final round of a National Aeronautical and Space Administration (Nasa) competition to create a device to mine precious elements on the moon and bring them back to earth.
Twelve international teams have been selected by Nasa, the premier space agency of the US, and of the seven from India, one is from Visakhapatnam.
The challenge is for students to design and build a remote controlled or autonomous excavator.
The Lunabotics mining competition will be held in the US from May 23.
The team from Visakhapatnam comprising students of GITAM University has prepared a robot that will crawl along the hostile terrain of the moon, picking up regolith (moon dust) and depositing it in a container for shipment back to earth.
Nasa will test the efficiency and durability of the robots in an artificial atmosphere resembling the lunar terrain. The task given to each of the teams is that their robots should collect and deposit a minimum of 10 kg of lunar simulant within 15 minutes.
“The regolith of the moon is said to contain elements like uranium and thorium of high nuclear grade,” said Mr Raj Kumar, a third-year student of mechanical engineering at Gitam University and one of the five members of the team that designed the robot called Lunabot.
