Australia's space program has unveiled a prototype of the rover it will send to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program. The Australian Space Agency unveiled 'roover' – after an 18 month design process. Roover will be tasked with collecting lunar soil.. And bringing it back down to earth for analysis.
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00:00In developing RUVA, we're going to advance the capabilities of the nation in the AI that
00:06can drive robots, in computer vision, and this is going to have advances in technologies
00:11for many sectors, agriculture, mining, improving the productivity of these sectors.
00:17And so this is about investing in a space program to improve life here on Earth.
00:21So RUVA will go to the moon later this decade on a flight with NASA, and it's got an important
00:26mission to collect soil on the moon, known as Regolith, and it's going to analyse that
00:31soil.
00:32If we can analyse it, we can understand if there's oxygen, if there's water in it, and
00:35that's going to sustain human presence on the moon.
00:38Artemis is the program, US-led, but now there's 50 countries that have signed up to what are
00:44known as the Artemis Accords, and Australia was one of the first countries to sign up
00:47to that.
00:48This is about returning to the moon, but returning to the moon for a permanent presence.
00:53And so over the next decade, we'll see lots of robotic exploration, but also human exploration.
00:58And RUVA is going to build on Australia's longstanding partnership with NASA in areas
01:02such as deep space communications.
01:05Design is a really important aspect.
01:07We've captured the nation with this program, back to the naming competition.
01:10We had 8,000 entries, we had thousands of schoolchildren involved, and having something
01:15that is aesthetically pleasing as well, but functional, function here is critical, has
01:21resulted in this wonderful design.