One of three small lunar rovers — part of a NASA technology demonstration called CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration ) — is prepared for shipping in a clean room on Jan. 29, 2025, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The project is designed to show that a group of robots can collaborate to gather data without receiving direct commands from mission controllers on Earth, paving the way for potential future multirobot missions. The autonomous rovers, plus a base station and camera system, will launch to the Moon aboard IM-3, Intuitive Machines’ third lunar delivery, which has a mission window that extends into early 2026, as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services ) initiative. The CADRE hardware was delivered from NASA JPL to Intuitive Machines on Feb. 9, 2025.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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