The Next Web

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Meet RASSOR, the robot that could help us colonize the moon

The Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot — RASSOR, for short — is the robot that will help NASA find water on the moon, and could eventually lead to a permanent, manned lunar base. RASSOR is an excavator that NASA hopes will extract water, ice, and fuel from lunar soil. It’s able to traverse steep slopes, climb over rocks, and dig for and collect soil before taking it to a processing plant for water extraction. NASA says that RASSOR will “be the feeder for a lunar resource processing plant, a level of industry never before tried anywhere besides Earth.”