Rovers Are So Yesterday. It’s Time to Send a Snakebot to Space

If the boxy Opportunity rover could elicit years of anthropomorphized love and goodwill, then surely Earthlings will warm to the idea of sending a snake-shaped robot to the moon. In fall 2021, students from universities across the United States set out to design a robot that could survive extreme lunar terrain and send data back to Earth. The winning team, of students from Northeastern’s Students for the Exploration and Development of Space club, took home the top prize in November and now hope to turn their winning design into an advanced prototype that could actually be sent to the moon. Using $180,000 of NASA funds, the students focused on designing a robot that could navigate Shackleton Crater—a 13-mile-wide basin near the lunar south pole where NASA confirmed the presence of water ice in 2018. “We looked at this whole suite of different robot designs and thought, is there any way we could combine different locomotions?” recalls Yash Bhora, a physics major who helped build software for the team.