Scientists Bounce Laser Beams Off Lunokhod 1: Old Soviet Moon Rover

Laser beams shot to the moon from Grasse (MéO) station in Calern, France successfully targeted the reflector on the Soviet Union's old Lunokhod 1 rover, which trekked across the moon's landscape more than four decades ago.

Lunokhod 1 was the first remote-controlled rover ever to land on another celestial body. The wheeled vehicle was carried to the lunar surface by a spacecraft called Luna 17, touching down in the Sea of Rains on Nov. 17, 1970.

Among its instruments, the rover toted a French-built laser retroreflector consisting of 14 corner cubes that can reflect laser light beamed from Earth.

Attempts to contact the rover after the lunar night that began on Sept. 14, 1971, were unsuccessful, apparently due to a component failure on the rover.

Lunokhod 1's days of rambling around the moon formally ended on Oct. 4, 1971, after 11 lunar day-night cycles (322 Earth days).

Read the full paper here: Laser Ranging to the Lost Lunokhod-1 Reflector:  http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5720

Self-righting Heli-vehicle: Bounce and Fly

This self-righting probe is designed to travel deep into obstacle-ridden spaces such as caves and rubble-laden buildings to video what it finds.

It is being developed for the Army Research Lab in Aberdeen, Maryland, by Eric Beyer and Mark Costello, a pair of robotics engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

The army wants this capability because today's military robots, which run on small tank-style tracks, cannot cope with irregular surfaces and obstacles such as rubble or boulders.

"They usually have trouble and get stuck with even low obstacles and walls a couple of feet high," says Costello. Small helicopters are one alternative, but continuous flying drains the batteries fast.

So their answer - which Costello freely admits is Weeble-inspired - is a rotor-powered, bottom-heavy, self-righting vehicle that spends most of its time on the ground, thus conserving battery power. Instead of flying around, it hops, using a pair of contra-rotating rotors (to avoid the need for a tail rotor) mounted on an aluminium base. All this is encased in a spherical cage made of strong carbon-fibre spars (see diagram).

To steer in flight, the robot swings a weight to tilt in the direction it needs to hop (Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics, DOI: 10.2514/1.41331). Whichever way it lands, the weight of the base rights it. Don't take our word for it - Watch the Video!