Kacey Roberts
Rocket Lab has secured a contract with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to provide solar panels that will power small, autonomous robots programmed to work as a team to explore and collect data on lunar and planetary surfaces.
For the effort, the contractor said Friday it will use the inverted metamorphic multi-junction solar cells that its recently acquired subsidiary SolAero Technologies developed for the solar panels.
IMM solar cells have 40 percent less mass than standard space-grade solar cells. Rocket Lab used the same batteries to launch General Atomics‘ GAzelle spacecraft earlier this month.
The shoe-sized rovers are part of JPL’s Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Explorers project, which is slated for a technology demonstration within the next five years through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.
