Turn left at transquility base: Astrobotic's autonomous navigation will help lunar landers, rovers, and drones find their way

Abstract

NEIL ARMSTRONG made it sound easy. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed, he said calmly, as if he had just pulled into a parking lot. In fact, the descent of the Apollo 11 lander was nerve-racking. As the Eagle headed to the moon's surface, Armstrong and his colleague Buzz Aldrin realized it would touch down well past the planned landing site and was heading straight for a field of boulders. Armstrong started looking for a better place to park. Finally, at 150 meters, he leveled off and steered to a smooth spot with about 45 seconds of fuel to spare. • If he hadn't been there, who knows what would have happened, says Andrew Horchler, throwing his hands up. He's sitting in a glass-walled conference room in a repurposed brick warehouse, part of Pittsburgh's Strip District, a hub for tech startups. This is the headquarters of space robotics company Astrobotic Technology. In the coming decades, human forays to the moon will rely heavily on robotic landers, rovers, and drones. Horchler leads a team whose aim is ensuring those robotic vessels can perform at least as well as Armstrong did. • Astrobotic's precision-navigation technology will let both uncrewed and crewed landers touch down exactly where they should, so a future Armstrong won't have to strong-arm her landing vessel's controls. Once they're safely on the surface, robots like Astrobotic's will explore the moon's geology, scout out sites for future.