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William L. 'Red' Whittaker is an American roboticist and research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the Fredkin Research Professor at the Robotics Institute and director of the Field Robotics Center. A pioneer of field robotics, he led the team that built robots to inspect and repair the damaged Three Mile Island reactor basement, work that led to the founding of CMU's Field Robotics Center. He founded Astrobotic in 2007 with associates from Carnegie Mellon, initially to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize, spinning the company out of his lunar-robotics research to commercialize planetary landers and rovers.
John Thornton earned a mechanical engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was recruited to Astrobotic at its inception by founder Red Whittaker. He joined as mechanical engineering lead, overseeing the design and fabrication of early hardware prototypes for planetary rovers and landers, and was promoted to CEO soon after. Under his leadership Astrobotic secured multiple NASA contracts, including a roughly $79.5 million award to deliver payloads to the Moon, and developed the Peregrine and Griffin lunar landers. He has been named CEO of the Year at the Pittsburgh Tech 50 Awards.
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Peregrine is Astrobotic's small-class lunar lander, which in January 2024 became the first US commercial lander to reach space, though a propellant leak ended its Moon attempt. Griffin is a far larger lander, designed to carry roughly five times Peregrine's payload, including rovers, to the lunar surface for NASA and commercial customers under the CLPS program. Together the two platforms give Astrobotic a delivery range from small instrument payloads up to large surface assets supporting Artemis and a future lunar base.
CubeRover is Astrobotic's modular, lightweight robotic rover built to a standardized form factor, developed with NASA support to provide affordable mobility for instruments on the lunar surface. LunaGrid is the company's lunar power system, designed to generate solar electricity and distribute it via deployed cabling and rovers to landers and habitats, enabling operations through the lunar night. Both are core to Astrobotic's strategy of supplying the surface mobility and power infrastructure needed for a sustained presence on the Moon.
1 patent on file, but none with both an extractable figure and an abstract on Google Patents yet.
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