Three small rovers bound for the Moon – part of NASA's CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) technology demonstration – are arrayed in a clean room at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Jan. 26, 2024.

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

Each about the size of a carry-on suitcase, the rovers will ride to the Moon's surface aboard a lander equipped with the hardware elements that sit behind them in this image: from left, the situational awareness camera assembly, one of the deployers that will lower the rovers onto the lunar surface, and the base station with which the rovers will communicate via mesh network radios.

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 is a payload under NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, which is managed by the agency's Science Mission Directorate. 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 facility. Clemson University in South Carolina contributed research in support of the project.

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