Not a Mercury or Saturn, but It Goes Way Off Road

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

By John Schwartz

The New York Times

HOUSTON

It turns on a dime and parallel-parks like a dream.

On the downside, it’s a little pricey – at $2 million or so – and its top speed is a pokey 15 miles an hour.

Still, there’s a lot to like about the concept car taking shape here at the Johnson Space Center.

Did I say car? The new moon buggy conceived by space center engineers is anything but a car or a buggy. Its official name is Chariot, and this, my friends, is a truck. A heavy duty workhorse of a truck.

“America basically created the truck,” said Lucien Junkin, the chief engineer on the project. And so, he says, why not take a truck to the moon if NASA, as planned, takes humans back, beginning in 2020?

This model took a year to build. It looks kind of like what you’d get if a monster truck had a menage a trois with a flatbed trailer and a medieval siege engine.

At one end is the driver’s seat – actually, a rotating turret with a computer screen and a joystick – along with a host of cameras, lights and sensors that would let the rover be driven by remote control, or even to make its way along the barren plains of the moon or Mars with a degree of autonomy.

The astronaut driver would snap himself or herself into the turret – it’s designed to accommodate a space suit – with a rigid seatback inspired by those in NASCAR.

“We want light, but we want strong,” Junkin said.

This baby is loaded. For one thing, its six sets of wheels can be independently steered so that it can revolve in place – or “crab” – to the left and right on its way uphill. To use a terrestrial example, it could slide sideways into a tight parking space.

It also has an active suspension – really active. The driver can raise or lower the chassis from ground level to about 28 inches high.

Junkin sees his robotic creation as the kind of machine that could land on the moon in the years before humans return, potentially clearing a patch of land and preparing it for construction. The team has tested a bulldozer blade for the front of the rover and started pushing gravel around. “It worked so well, I was surprised,” he exclaimed.

But at 4,500 pounds, this beast is far too heavy to hoist moonward. It is far too big as well. The first lunar rovers of the 1960s folded up like mechanical origami, and so did the Mars rovers; the moon truck will almost certainly need some of that Transformer magic as well.

Its off-the-shelf parts – commercial tires, cheap Webcam – would never make it in the extreme environment of space. “Our thought is, we can take a version and run it around and test it” here, Junkin said, and then make choices about what works and what trade-offs need to be made.

The features will be lined up against one another, and crabbing wheels might be seen as adding too much weight or cost. But the six wheels might prove so advantageous that they have to stay.

NASA has suggested that the final version might even be a covered and pressurized vehicle that would allow its passengers to work in the same shirtsleeve environment that they enjoy on the space shuttle and the International Space Station; suits would be incorporated into the exterior of the vehicle with the back of the suit open so that the explorers would step into them, seal up and then walk out onto the lunar surface.

Such concepts go too far for some at NASA of a more critical bent. One scientist, who insisted on anonymity out of concern for his career, called the current thinking on moon rovers “sheer fantasy” that relies on plans for something that would be too heavy and too expensive, and would leave astronauts too vulnerable to the intense radiation that washes over the moon.

Originally published by BY JOHN SCHWARTZ.

(c) 2008 Virginian – Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.