Want your name on the Moon?

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Want your name on the Moon? UT-Austin engineers design message-writing rover








by: Billy Gates
Posted: / Updated: 

AUSTIN (KXAN) ā€” A group of University of Texas at Austin engineering students want to put you on the Moon. 
Well, maybe put your name on the Moon at least, or perhaps a haiku.
A group of 10 students designed a rover that can be programmed to write short messages on the Moonā€™s surface, and then snap a photo of its work to send back to Earth. It was a capstone project for Cockrell School of Engineering students, and itā€™s called LEGACI, short for Lunar Engraver with Geologic Autonomous Carving Instrument.
ā€œWhen I was walking back from that class to my apartment in West Campus, I tend to look at the ground when Iā€™m walking, and I saw this piece of cement on the sidewalk where, you know itā€™s like semi-set and people will start carving stuff in it ā€“ like theyā€™re name or the year theyā€™re gonna graduate and stuff like that ā€“ I was like, that kinda looks similar to the surface of the moon. Itā€™s very similar. I was like, people love to do this. We can make something that would be able to do this on the moon,ā€ UT graduate Brianna Caughron said.

This message by the LEGACI rover took 445 seconds to complete, and with the current prie tag at $9.99/second, would cost $449.55. (Photo from University of Texas Engineering)
NASA honored the student team with two awards in a design competition, one in the projectā€™s theme category and the other for excellence in commercial innovation. 
How does the rover make money? It would charge people not by how long the messages are letter-wise, but for how long the rover takes to write the messages. It charges $9.99 per second, so for example, the message in the top photo took 445 seconds for the rover to complete, so the price tag for that is $449.55.
The team expected the average moon message to cost between $500 and $600.


ā€œAt first glance, this concept seemed a little out of left field,ā€ team member Nader Syed said. ā€œBut thanks to months of work by people I was lucky enough to be on a team with, it became tangible. Real. And I think thatā€™s engineering in a nutshell ā€” making an idea real, something out of nothing. Iā€™m really proud of this project and this team, and I know Iā€™ll remember this for a long time.ā€
The 10 students were seniors in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics when they developed the project and graduated in May 2020: Samuel Adams, Ali Babool, David Baier, Brianna Caughron, Jack Davidson, Justin Ganiban, Kevin Hicks, Akshat Ramadurai, Rebecca Wang and Syed.


CAM

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