Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic will be sending its CubeRover platform to the moon under a new award from NASA. The company will use CubeRover to test technologies for surviving the lunar night and communicating across greater distances on the moon’s surface.
Lunar night survival is trickier than one might think. Nights on the moon are long — up to 14 days of darkness at a time — and frigid, with temperatures dropping under –200 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures that low pose a major threat to power components like batteries, and effectively put a stop to many lunar missions before they can even begin.
It’s a big problem for NASA, which has ambitions of conducting extended lunar missions with uncrewed landers and …
