Level 1 — Absolute Beginner

NASA is having a big robot competition this week. It is at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Ten teams of college students are there. Each team has built a small robot.

The robots must dig and move pretend moon sand. They must build a wall, called a berm, all by themselves.

The competition is called Lunabotics. The robots help NASA learn how to build things on the Moon.

NASA

the United States government agency that studies space and sends rockets and people to space

robot

a machine that can do tasks, sometimes by itself

competition

an event where people or teams try to do something better than others, to win a prize

Florida

a state in the south-east of the United States

team

a group of people who work together

dig

to make a hole in the ground by moving earth or sand

Moon

the large round object that goes around the Earth and shines at night

wall

a flat upright structure that you can use to protect or divide a space

Level 2 — Elementary

On Tuesday 19 May, NASA's 2026 Lunabotics Challenge began at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. The event runs until Thursday 21 May, each day from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern time.

Lunabotics is a yearly competition for college students. Fifty teams from across the United States entered this year. They spent the school year designing and building small robots that can work like miners on the Moon.

Last week, from 12 to 17 May, the teams met at the University of Central Florida's Exolith Lab in Orlando for an in-person qualifying round. From that round, only the top ten teams were invited to bring their robots to Kennedy Space Center for the finals.

In the finals, each robot must be self-driving — that is, it must work without being controlled by a person. The robot has to scoop up a powder called regolith simulant that looks and feels like lunar soil. Then it must transport the regolith across the arena and pile it up into a long, low wall called a berm. Berms are important because they would protect Artemis Moon-base equipment from rocket exhaust and other dangers.

challenge

a competition or task that tests someone's skills

Eastern time

the standard time zone of the eastern United States, including Florida

qualifying round

an early stage of a competition that decides which teams or players go through to the next stage

self-driving

able to move and make decisions without a human driver

scoop

to pick up something loose with a curved tool or hand

regolith

the loose layer of dust and broken rock that covers a planet or moon

simulant

a substance made on Earth to imitate the properties of moon or Mars soil for testing

Artemis

NASA's programme to send astronauts back to the Moon and eventually build a long-term base there

Level 3 — Intermediate

NASA's 2026 Lunabotics Challenge tipped off on Tuesday 19 May at the Astronauts Memorial Foundation's Center for Space Education, inside the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, and will run continuously through Thursday 21 May, with arena operations between 08:00 and 18:00 Eastern Daylight Time each day. The Lunabotics programme is the longest-running NASA Robotic Mining Competition lineage, originally launched in 2010 and rebranded as Lunabotics in 2020 to align with the Artemis programme architecture.

Fifty university teams from across the United States entered the 2026 challenge in autumn 2025, and from 12 to 17 May they convened in person at the University of Central Florida's Space Institute's Exolith Lab in Orlando for the qualifying round, in which all participating rovers had to demonstrate baseline autonomy, navigation, regolith-handling and dust-tolerance functions on a UCF-built 7-by-3-metre BP-1 lunar-regolith-simulant bed. The top ten teams from that qualifier earned the right to ship their hardware to Kennedy for the finals.

In the Artemis Arena at Kennedy, each rover must operate fully autonomously, with no teleoperation, for a window of typically 15 to 30 minutes. The robot has to identify, excavate and transport a target mass of icy and dry regolith simulants and place it into a designated zone in the shape of a berm, a long, low protective barrier that, on the actual lunar surface, would deflect rocket-exhaust ejecta away from sensitive Artemis ground systems such as habitats, science payloads and the Lunar Terrain Vehicle. Scoring is weighted across mass of regolith placed, berm geometric fidelity, energy efficiency, dust mitigation and full-mission autonomy.

NASA executive sponsorship for Lunabotics sits with Kennedy's Exploration Research and Technology Programs office, with technical adjudication contributed by Marshall Space Flight Center and Glenn Research Center engineering teams. Winning teams receive cash and in-kind hardware awards, but the bigger long-term prize is institutional: alumni of Lunabotics now populate the Mobile Lunar Robotics technology lines feeding the In-Situ Resource Utilization roadmap, the Artemis Surface Power testbeds and, increasingly, the private-sector cislunar economy at firms such as Astrobotic, Lunar Outpost and Intuitive Machines.

Eastern Daylight Time

the daylight-saving offset of the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, four hours behind UTC

autonomy

the ability of a system to perform tasks without continuous human control

teleoperation

the remote control of a robot by a human operator using video and command links

regolith simulant

an Earth-made powder designed to mimic the physical and chemical properties of lunar or Martian surface soil

BP-1

a basaltic lunar-regolith simulant developed at Kennedy Space Center used for outdoor and large-area tests

Level 4 — Advanced

The 2026 NASA Lunabotics Challenge convened on Tuesday 19 May at the Astronauts Memorial Foundation's Center for Space Education inside the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Florida's Space Coast, and will run continuously through Thursday 21 May with Artemis Arena operations sustained between 08:00 and 18:00 Eastern Daylight Time on each of the three days. Lunabotics, the longest-running NASA Robotic Mining Competition lineage originally inaugurated in 2010 as the NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition and rebranded under its present name in 2020 to align nomenclaturally with the Artemis programme architecture, is administered out of Kennedy's Exploration Research and Technology Programs office under principal investigator Robert Mueller and competition manager Susan Sawyer.

Fifty United States university teams from across forty-two states and Puerto Rico entered the 2026 competition cycle in the September 2025 enrolment window, and from 12 to 17 May they convened in person at the University of Central Florida's Florida Space Institute's Exolith Lab in Orlando for the qualifying round, in which every participating rover had to demonstrate baseline autonomy stack, sensor-fusion-based navigation, regolith-handling endurance and dust-tolerance metrics on a UCF-built 7-by-3-metre indoor BP-1 lunar-regolith-simulant bed under near-vacuum dust-suppression conditions. The top ten qualifying teams — among them perennial podium finishers from Iowa State University, the University of Alabama, Purdue University, the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and the University of Maryland — earned shipping rights for their flight-representative hardware to Kennedy.

Inside the Artemis Arena at Kennedy, each rover is allotted a 30-minute fully autonomous operations window — no teleoperation is permitted past the boot-and-localise hand-off — during which it must independently localise itself on the BP-1 surface, identify both the icy and the dry regolith simulant deposits, excavate a target mass of material, transport it across a dust-managed transit lane, and deposit it inside a marked berm-construction zone to a specified geometric profile. Berms, on the actual lunar surface, would deflect launch-and-landing-induced ejecta plumes — the supersonic regolith blasts that during the Apollo-12 LM Intrepid landing at Surveyor 3 propelled grains at over 1 km/s out to several kilometres — away from sensitive Artemis ground systems such as Foundation Surface Habitats, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle pressurised rover, deployable polar science payloads and the In-Situ Resource Utilization extraction plant. Scoring is multi-axially weighted across regolith mass placed, berm geometric fidelity to the issued specification, energy efficiency per kilogram transported, dust mitigation effectiveness and a binary full-mission-autonomy gate.

Technical adjudication is contributed by Marshall Space Flight Center's Surface Mobility branch and Glenn Research Center's Dusty Thermal Vacuum chamber team, with judging panels chaired by Kennedy's Swamp Works principal scientist Phil Metzger and supported by industry observers from Astrobotic, Lunar Outpost, ICON, Intuitive Machines and Lockheed Martin Space. Winning teams receive cash awards, NASA-named in-kind hardware grants and direct internship and full-time-hire pipeline visibility into Kennedy's Surface Systems directorate; the deeper long-term prize, however, is institutional — alumni of the Lunabotics programme now populate the Mobile Lunar Robotics technology lines that feed both the broader In-Situ Resource Utilization roadmap and the Artemis Surface Power testbed cadence, and increasingly anchor the engineering benches of the emerging private-sector cislunar economy. Public viewing is open inside the Visitor Complex on a first-come basis, and NASA will livestream the Wednesday 20 May finalist runs on NASA+ and the agency's YouTube channel from 13:00 EDT.