Moon Patrol
Upon arriving at the moon as early as Decembers of 2019, Orion astronauts will be needing surface transportation. NASA will be exploring the surface with moon buggies again, just as they did on 3 of the Apollo missions almost 40 years ago. However, this time, the developments made in rover technology over the last 25 years will be invaluable in creating a new generation of transport vehicles. Like their unmanned counterparts that have explored the surface of Mars for an unexpectedly long 3 years now, they will be able to navigate boulders, tackle hills of up to 30deg slope (in light Martian gravity) and drive up to 7mph. This will give the new vehicles an effective range of up to 6 miles (9.7 km).
As early as 2005, NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Cape Canaveral, Fla., announced preliminary tests of their new multi-use lunar exploration vehicles. The new rovers are part of the Science Crew Operations and Utility Test bed (SCOUT) project that is responsible for designing and building entire the robotic component of what officials are calling “EVA squads.” Teams working on the new devices include no fewer than 6 NASA agencies, universities, institutes, research organizations and aerospace firms.
The SCOUT rovers will be vastly more useful than their Apollo-era counterparts with simple voice and hand signal recognition as well as wireless remote control and communications relay stations. In a particularly ambitious use of robotics, the vehicles will work independent of human intervention to assist other robotic devices in performing simple tasks on the lunar surface. It is even designed to keep an eye on the astronauts and follow them around like a puppy.
Tests on Earth have early prototypes maneuvering in the Arizona desert. In combination with the new Constellation Program prototype space suits, the SCOUT rovers are now demonstrating their prowess at keeping the human occupants supplied with fresh oxygen, power and coolant. Tests with manned, remote and independent operations have all gone very well in the two years they’ve been conducted.
The SCOUT rovers are more physically substantial than the Apollo rovers, in part, because they’re made to be used through many missions. Each one that is brought to the moon will add to the fleet of robotic devices that will assist with the base construction that could begin in earnest with the first lunar landing, currently scheduled for December 2019. These missions will represent the most extensive use of robotics to date, keeping in line with the Constellation Project’s stated mission of putting human safety before all other considerations.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 12:43 am and is filed under Technical Concerns, The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
