The Best Way to Explore Lunar Craters Is a Giant Robot Ball

On a good day, the rock quarry in central Texas is about 370,000 kilometers (230,000 miles) from the moon. But last February, when Rishi Jangale watched his 1.8-meter-wide, 150-kilogram inflatable robot roll effortlessly over rocks, gravel, and wet clay, his imagination turned the quarry into the lunar surface instead.Jangale is an upbeat mechanical engineer nearing the end of his Ph.D. at Texas A&M University, in College Station, Texas. He and his labmates have been working on this big tan