For the last 50 years or so we've been using wheeled robots and vehicles to
explore other worlds from secret soviet lunar Rovers for the first lunar car to
the latest mars rovers we owe a lot to our extraterrestrial will helpers. NASA
recently released new concept art for the Mars 2020 Rover the robotic lab
shown in action in its potential landing sites on Mars
currently three locations being considered and a final decision will be
made in 2018/19. If these images look somewhat familiar to ones you've seen
before it's because the new rover is the same core design as curiosity the Mars
Science Laboratory which has been exploring the red planet since 2012. Both
Rovers are developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and are about the
size and weight of a Mini Cooper these are both big heavy Rovers. Curiosity
and the 2020 Rover followed decades of mobile robots and cars landing on
foreign worlds some of these are still in action. Everyday NASA sends instructions
to curiosity to do new science on Mars and the 2004 robot opportunity is still
roaming around Mars after 13 years. To date opportunity has traveled further
on the surface of Mars with any other robot, a total of 43 kilometres of 27
miles , not a lot granted but then it only has got a top speed of 180 meters
per hour 196 yards but normally travels at about 20% of that speed around 36
meters or 39 yards per hour however the second place of the distance rankings
goes to one of the first extra-terrestrial Rovers, Lunokhod 2
The Soviet Lunokhod whose name means "Moon Walker" was a fully automated
Explorer built in secret by the Soviets to compete with NASA's manned
Apollo programs. The chief designer assigned to the project was the tank
designer Alexandre Kemurdzhain who had previously worked on heavy
tracked vehicles and hovercraft and had a reputation for creating innovative and
capable vehicles gathering a team of his former
colleagues to work with him Kemurdzhain's first prototypes for the moon rover
used tracks like a tank, however in testing these designs got
stuck in difficult trade more often than Rovers with free moving wheels. Switching
to a new design with eight independently powered wheels Kemurdzhain's prototype
could keep moving even if all but three got stuck, a level of redundancy that
would be essential for an extended exploration where there was no chance of
recovery if anything went wrong. Kemurdzhain's team knew that survival
through the extreme temperatures on the moon was going to require some extreme
engineering. To deal with this Lunokhod had a lid or "frying pan" as it was
known that opened up to uncover the solar panels these would charge the rover
during the lunar day and then close to protect the electronics from the
harsh cold of the lunar night where the temperatures could drop as low as minus
173 degrees centigrade of - 279 Fahrenheit. With the lid closed the Lunokhod
used a polonium-210 radioisotope heater to warm its electronics until
sunrise 14 Earth days later. On February the 19th 1969 the first Lunokhod was
loaded onto the Proton rocket ready to launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan. There was still a chance for the Soviets to score a victory in the
space race against the Americans. Two months earlier Apollo 8 had flown astronauts
Borman, Lovell and Anders around the moon but Apollo 11 was still six months away
if the Lunokhod worked the Soviets would be the first to move freely across
the lunar surface with their fully automated Rover. However a few seconds
after the launch the Proton rocket exploded spreading the Lunokhod and
its polonium-210 heat source through the Russian atmosphere.
Because the program was secret and Soviets didn't publicize their failures the rest
of the world wouldn't know about the would be the first moon rover until years
later when Soviet documents would be declassified. Ultimately it would be 16
months after Neil Armstrong's first historic steps on the moon by the time
Kemurdzhain's team finished another Rover which in typical Soviet star adopted the
name Lunokhod 1, effectively airbrushing the first failure from the
Soviet space history. Seven days after launch the Luna 17 Lander touched down in
the northwest edge of a mare Imbrium or sea of rains then responding to
commands from earth the pioneering Rover rolled down the Landers ramps to make
the first wheeled tracks on the Moon Lunokhod 1 successfully operated for ten
months taking more than 20,000 photographs and conducting 500 Soil tests
over six and a half miles or 10 and a half kilometers. In 1973 Lunokhod 2 went
even further exploring 59 kilometers or 24 miles of the moon in just five months
by the time Lunokhod 2 completed its exploration NASA had proven it's own
very different solution for traveling on the moon's surface. The lunar roving
vehicle (LRV) first used on the Apollo 15 mission was a lightweight "dune buggy"
style car weighing 210 kilograms on earth or just 35 kilograms in the
moon's low gravity but during the planning stages that iconic dune buggie
appearance of the LRV was far from assured. Early concepts tried
out giant 12-foot wheels even a corkscrew propulsion system to deal with
the possibility of a quicksand like lunar surface.
it was only in 1966 when NASA's surveyor 1 robotic Lander confirmed but the
moon's surface was indeed able to support a heavy probe that the set of
compact wheels were chosen. In development
several Rover concepts were considered including a mobile pressurized cabin
providing a base of operations to support exploration of the lunar surface
for up to 2 weeks the four tonne MOLAB or mobile lab
would be launched on a Saturn V rocket with the crew following on in a second
Saturn V soon after. However as budget restrictions allowed for only one Saturn
launch per follow mission the MOLAB concept was abandoned in favour of a
lighter vehicle. General motors were subcontracted to make the wheels and the
drivetrain for the four Rovers which were then assembled by Boeing, one LRV
was made for each of the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 mission and an additional rover
was used for spare parts after the program's cancellation. as with the Lunokhod
designed the LRV was engineered for multiple redundancies. The rule was that
no single point of failure shall have abort the mission and no second failure
shall endanger of a crew. The rover's performed well and also doubled up as a
mobile remote control camera platform to record the crews departure from the moon.
In all they traveled a combined distance of 59 miles or 95 kilometers across the
three missions. On the final Apollo excursion astronaut Gene Cernan reached
11.2 miles per hour or 18 km/h on the taurus littrow valley
setting an unofficial lunar land speed record which still stands to this day.
Unlike the manned moon missions the first astronauts on Mars in the 2030s
will have at least 18 months to explore their environment before returning to
Earth, a mission of this duration makes it possible to explore a much large area
and demands a much more capable extraterrestrial car. One of the
candidates for the job is NASA's Mars space exploration vehicle or SEV which
follows on from the development of the MOLAB in the 1960s. Like the MOLAB the
SEV is much heavier than any existing Rover.
Weighing in at 6600 pounds or almost three metric tonnes with this extra
weight however comes a range of new capabilities the SEV can explore up to
125 miles or 200 kilometers in a single excursion, with of a top speed of 12 miles now
or 19 kilometers per hour. The vehicle can also carry a payload of one
ton of samples for supplies. Inside the cabin the two crew seats can recline
into the bed and a small bathroom of a showerhead that produce a mist or water
for bathing. Variants of the SEV also include a spacecraft version which could
visit asteroids called the MMSEV and an alternate version with enough propulsion
to land on the moon riding into space on the new upcoming SLS Launch System the
SEV could be doing science for the earth moon system by the mid-2020s. Perhaps
astronauts in these vehicles will discover the first signs of life beyond
our world between the long shadows of the Rovers that went before. So thanks
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