The CADRE program looks to make future NASA missions to the moon more efficient by enabling new science projects and supporting astronauts.
NASA is preparing to send a trio of miniature rovers to the Moon in order to test how well they can cooperate with one another with little to no direct input from mission controllers back on Earth. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) program looks to make future missions to the moon more efficient by enabling new science projects and supporting astronauts on the lunar surface.
As NASA moves closer to placing humans back on the surface of the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the space agency is also preparing for a long-term presence on the lunar surface. There are quite a few projects in the works, such as ones testing out the best way to provide shelter and power for astronauts who will be spending long periods of time on the moon’s surface. One of those projects, CADRE, consists of three rovers that will be powered by solar panels and operate autonomously.
„Our mission is to demonstrate that a network of mobile robots can cooperate to accomplish a task without human intervention – autonomously,“ remarked Subha Comandur, CADRE project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. „It could change how we do exploration in the future. The question for future missions will become: ‚How many rovers do we send, and what will they do together?'“
Once the rovers have made it to the moon, mission controllers on Earth will send a broad set of directives to the rover’s base station.
