Astrobotic Technology
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| Private | |
| Industry | Aerospace, Robotics |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Headquarters | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA |
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Key people
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Number of employees
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11-50 (As of 1 July 2012[update]) |
| Website | www |
Astrobotic Technology is an American privately held company that is developing space robotics technology for planetary missions. It was founded in 2008 by Carnegie Mellon professor Red Whittaker and his associates, with the goal of winning the Google Lunar X Prize. The company is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
As of August 2012[update], the company was partnered with Carnegie Mellon University, International Rectifier, Ansys, AGI, Alcoa, and Caterpillar.
As of November 2015, the company partnered with German Aerospace Center Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR).
As of June 2016, the company partnered with Airbus Defence and Space and DHL.
The team articulated an ambitious goal from the start in 2008: they hope to be the first to land their spacecraft "Red Rover" on the Moon, using the lander, named "Artemis Lander". Since its formation, Astrobotic has maintained a spot in the top three rankings for Evadot's third-party Google Lunar X Prize Scorecard. The company's first running prototype of Red Rover was completed the same year, and on July 28, 2008, NASA awarded Astrobotic funding for its "Regolith Moving Methods" proposal.
In 2009, Astrobotic began to receive a series of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding from NASA totaling over $795,000 to investigate prospecting for lunar resources.
On October 15, 2010, NASA awarded a contract to Astrobotic for Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) firm-fixed price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts with a total value up to $30.1 million over a period of up to five years, and in December, NASA's $500,000 ILDD project for further Lunar Demonstrations Data was awarded to Astrobotic.
As of February 2011[update], both the descent stage and the lunar rover are now unnamed. Originally named "Red Rover" and "Artemis Lander", respectively, Astrobotic indicated in 2011 that they were reserving naming rights, as well as selection of the planned location for the lunar landing, for their payload customers. "We have to sell a lot of payload to make the economics work, ... the customers will decide where we go". Later, the rover continued to be called "Red Rover" and the lander was now called "Griffin".
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Wikipedia