With its solar panels open, a small rover that is bound for the Moon sits in a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Jan. 26, 2024. This is one of three rovers – each about the size of a carry-on suitcase – that are part of the agency's CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) technology demonstration.

CADRE is designed to show that a group of robotic spacecraft can work together as a team to accomplish tasks and record data autonomously – without explicit commands from mission controllers on Earth.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL manages the CADRE technology demonstration project for the Game Changing Development program within NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington. CADRE will launch as a payload on the third lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines, called IM-3, under NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, which is managed by the agency's Science Mission Directorate, also in Washington. The agency's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and its Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, both supported the project. Motiv Space Systems designed and built key hardware elements at the company's Pasadena, California, facility. Clemson University in South Carolina contributed research in support of the project.

For more about CADRE, go to: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/cadre