Bringing the Moon to Michigan
2025 MTUengineering graduates Parker Courte-Rathwell, Danny Ezzo and Ingrid Halverson developed a hypogravity simulator prototype from scratch as part of MoonStep, their NASA-funded capstone Senior Design project.
The MoonStep team worked with Assistant Professor Tan Chen in Michigan Tech's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Steven Elmer, an associate professor at St. Catherine University who's also an affiliated professor in Tech's School of Health, Human, and Biological Systems. Their simulator used elastics and pulleys to offload five-sixths of a person's body weight, mimicking the gravitational conditions on the moon's surface.
A year later, a new team of Huskies are refining the next generation of the MoonStep simulator. And in Chen's Robotics, Locomotion, and Applied Control (ROLAC) Lab, where researchers are developing a human musculoskeletal model and reinforcement learning algorithm to study human gaits on the moon, MoonStep plays a key role in understanding and testing those models.
Learn more about MoonStep, the ROLAC Lab, and their connections to NASA's Artemis Program.
