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NXT and Lunar X PRIZE


Okay, here's a little thought experiment. Ignoring getting the robot to the moon (the rocket side of the equation), what would it take to get an NXT robot to win the Lunar X PRIZE?

Here is the contest objective described in the simplest terms (taken from the official website):

"To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a team must successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a “Mooncast”, back to Earth."

So, a few things:

From Ask an Astronomer: The temperature on the moon varies from -387 Fahrenheit (-233 Celsius), at night, to 253 Fahrenheit (123 Celsius) during the day. Because the moon has no atmosphere to block some of the sun's rays or to help trap heat at night, its temperature varies greatly between day and night.

This leads to some questions:

1. At what temp will plastic (specifically, LEGO NXT Technic plastic) shatter?
2. At what temp will rubber shatter?
3. Can the NXT Brick be insulated somehow to protect it from these temps? Does circuitry degrade at these temps?

I think most of us will agree that sending an NXT robot to the Moon's surface is probably a bad idea. But there's a saying that I'm going to modify a bit - "The only difference between the difficult and the impossible is cost."

So, given some funding, how would a dedicated group of LEGO NXT fans go about building a robot that is NXT based that could participate in the Lunar X PRIZE? Cast components out of metal? Insulate the Brick inside some sort of shell?

(Don't take this too seriously, folks... have fun with it and keep the discussion positive)

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