KSC-2012-3091

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Teams taking part in NASA's Lunabotics Mining Competition gather inside the Apollo/Saturn V Center at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida for the awards ceremony at the end of the event. They are seated beneath the first stage of the Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts to the moon. The competition challenged university students to build machines that could collect soil such as the material found on the moon. Working inside the Caterpillar LunArena, the robotic craft dug soil that simulated lunar material. The event was judged by a machine's abilities to collect the soil, its design and operation, size, dust tolerance and its level of autonomy. Photo credit: NASA/Jim Grossmann