McGill LunarEx
The McGill Lunar Excavator Team is a group of undergraduate engineering students collaborating to construct a fully automated lunar digging robot. We are designing and building the excavator to compete in NASA's 2012 Lunabotics Mining Competition at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The 2012 Lunabotics Mining Competition, based on NASA’s former Regolith Excavation Challenge, aims to encourage innovation and foster new interest in space exploration and technology. Our challenge calls for harvesting simulated moon rock, called lunar regolith. This is the prospective first step towards exploiting the Moon’s natural resources. The unique physical properties of lunar regolith make excavation a difficult technical challenge. Advances in lunar regolith extraction have the potential to significantly contribute to the National Space Vision and space exploration operations.
