Moon Rover will be powered by NVIDIA Tegra

Pretty prestigious really, ever heard of the Google Lunar X-Prize challenge ? It is a $30M competition that will select what is considered the best solution for launching a rocket into space, putting a human crew in an orbiter around our planet Earth and then going ahead with the next step.

A next step is the launching of a lunar rover, a small machine that would travel across the surface of our planet's satellite, reduced gravity and all.  NVIDIA Tegra platform (Tegra 3) could show its assets, within a year or so (launch is in December, 2012).

Team Synergy Moon is collaborating with Martin Peniak, a scientist that worked on the Mars Rover Simulator (the one built in conjunction with the European Space Agency). Building on his experience with ESA, Martin chose NVIDIA's CUDA technology as a basis for its work.

His idea is to use more than one Tegra system to make a rover with autonomy of movement. The Tesla Lunar Rover and Tesla Surveyor are what the devices are called.  The idea would be for an autonomous Lander, with several rovers packed in, to be launched from the orbiter to the moon.