Official Logo for Team Synergy Moon

Semiconductor products are used on numerous scientific and military projects. However, this is the story we just had to share with you. NVIDIA Tegra 3 is heading where no contemporary semiconductor chip has gone before – to the Moon.

While there is a lot of discussion on forums what manufacturer does what, regardless of if we talk about cars or soccer teams, there is no denying that sometimes, something magical is happening with the semiconductor products.

A privateer team called Synergy Moon is getting ready for their entrance for the Google Lunar X-Prize challenge, a $30 million competition of privateer teams who are working on launching a rocket into space putting human crew in an orbiter around Earth. This is followed by a sending a rover to land on the Moon.

In order to develop the lunar rover, Team Synergy Moon was joined by Martin Peniak, young scientist famous for his work on the Mars Rover Simulator developed in conjunction with ESA (European Space Agency). Impressed with an article about neural network using NVIDIA's GPU acceleration, Martin selected CUDA to be the base of all future work.

One of his projects is the Tesla Lunar Rover and Tesla Surveyor, both of which are going to utilize multiple Tegra systems to achieve autonomy of movement while

Currently, the launch is scheduled for December of next year, consisted out of Earth orbiter inhabited by astronauts such as team leader Mr. Miroslav Ambrus-Kis and documentary producer Nebojsa Stanojevic, while the autonomous Lander packing several Lunar Rover will be launched from the orbiter to the moon, where it will utilize Martin's patterns running on NVIDIA Tegra 3 hardware.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but seems like NVIDIA-powered hardware just might win the $30 million prize.


Leave a comment