Michigan Tech Engineering

With everyone’s eyes to the moon following the successful flight of the Artemis II, Michigan Tech’s Astro-Huskies are making sure robots are ready for the lunar surface.

The team placed third in this May’s NASA Lunabotics Challenge, an annual year-long competition in which university student teams design, build, and test prototype lunar construction robots. Their prototype MOOSE, or Mobile Operations for Off-world Surface Excavation, successfully qualified to the finals at the Kennedy Space Center where judges assessed berm size, robot weight, communications, energy use and automation to determine overall scores.

“I'm so incredibly proud of what the team achieved this year,” said Katherine Rauscher, mechanical engineering senior and team project manager. “It was absolutely worth it to see everything pay off with our record-breaking performance at competition.”

Meet MOOSE and learn more about the team’s success in the College of Engineering blog: https://blogs.mtu.edu/engineering/2026/06/22/from-campus-to-cosmos-mtu-astro-huskies-place-third-in-nasa-lunabotics-challenge/