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NASA's New Lunar Rover, Now Testing In Arizona
MarkWhittington writes "NASA has unveiled a new prototype lunar rover, called the Chariot, a production version of which is hoped to be operational on the lunar surface by 2019. NASA is now testing the Chariot lunar rover in Arizona, on terrain that resembles the lunar surface." Perhaps Arizona's an even closer match to the moon's surface than is Texas, or Moses Lake, WA where NASA was testing the last time we mentioned Chariot. (Here's a bit of video from the Texas round.)
The moon gets more rain and less Sun.
desert rover
Perhaps Arizona's an even closer match to the moon's surface than is Texas, or Moses Lake, WA
It puts them closer to the University(s) that have been taking over many of the projects. For NASA, it is a budget thing - for the Unis', it works as a recruitment tool when the public is looking, and play-time when not...
"One of the more unusual innovations is a pair of slip-on space suits attached to the back of the pressurized cabin. Rather than taking up room with a full-size airlock, a "plainclothes" astronaut simply slides into an empty suit, pulls a lever to close the hatch and detach, and walks away. The process can then be done in reverse to re-enter the cabin."
What about the dust? Everything I've read about lunar mission states lunar dust is super powdery and could be a real bitch in a pressurized environment...
(I know, with all the PHDs over at NASA they certainly thought of that... I'm certainly interested in how they plan to control that)
Is that going up with the astronauts or sent in a separate launch?
I mean really, how much more suitable can it be than here?
really make me regret my decision to not go to the Science and Math focused high school.
http://transformativeworks.org/
Will they find the mars rover there?
does it have GPS Nav?
I like this idea. I would send one a year and make
them run on remote control from earth as well. That way you could haul stuff from spot to spot, build a base, trailer them together...
I would haul all the stuff left behind on each mission to a central location to build a base. All those struts, tanks, electrics, etc. should be reused for parts or to build new stuff!
Make them modular like a truck, i.e. have the
ability to do flat bed(to haul big stuff), camper style(for manned missions), utility box(for robo missions)...
NASA is now testing the Chariot lunar rover in Arizona, on terrain that resembles the lunar surface.
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury. The Moon landing WAS INDEED fake. Man never stepped on the moon. They stepped in Arizona!
CHARIOT does have GPS, in fact. Part of the point of these analog campaigns is to develop and refine specifications for what is and isn't needed. The consensus is that GPS is a very good thing. Remember that we are still about 10 years from launch. Within that time, work will be done on positioning systems. No, it will probably not look a lot like GPS in terms of implementation - but there will almost certainly be some sort of (near?) real-time positioning system. It's actively discussed.
The other thing GPS provides - and at this stage it's almost more important - is hugely useful data about the actual test parameters. GPS ties a lot of this work together. CHARIOT has GPS, and so do the various suits and backpacks (for shirtsleeve ops) the suit subjects wear. High resolution spatial data is good for linking all the other data.
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Please lobby your US reps/senators to push for "robotic precursors". Used to be in the plan. Hardware is capable. Program canceled due to budget constraints. Not only a problem for operations / logistics and science, but sadly it's an international political issue that may restrict site selection if other bots get there first ("don't mess with our experiments"... because we require the same courtesy, that argument holds water).
And yes, CHARIOT is a platform, current testing is two ops concepts (pressurized vs unpressurized) and the difference is a module.
Why does it take so long for we Americans to get anything accomplished nowadays? Didn't the Apollo missions take only seven years to get from conception to landing, including development of command modules, lunar rovers, lunar modules, and a fairly reliable multi-stage rocket engine system? Why is a new lunar rover going to take 11 years to go into production when technology is so much more advanced now and innovation is at a faster pace than ever?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The more I have seen of it, the more rigid and less agile it has appeared. From TFA, apparently the wheels currently do not even have independent suspension, much less active suspension or articulation.
One step forward, two steps back?
first off, CHARIOT got to this point from nothing in 2 years. second, while you can say "we've been to the moon before" and be right, it's completely apples and oranges if you take even one small step beyond that.
0. i'll stick this one on top even though it's really part of another answer: You Aren't Excited About It. honestly that's the biggest problem. think hard about why your first impulse was to shrug this project off as slow and unexciting after you've read the other answers. then think about what's actually happening. then, and i'm completely serious, get excited about it! it's really exciting stuff! but this is a chicken-and-egg situation.
1. relative funding level. in this case, more money would actually help a *lot*. besides that, a lot of the money is going into rockets these days. the stuff the rockets are going to move around is sort of back-burner and shoestring (relatively speaking). unfortunately, all of this really needs to happen in parallel, because we don't want to get there and then have to figure out what we're going to do and how. Constellation is called an "architecture" for a reason. but the budget just doesn't support doing the necessary rocket stuff while adequately funding the basic conceptual experiments that give the rocket stuff raison d'etre. the analogs barely happened this year - in particular this one.
2. the NASA of Apollo was a completely single-minded organization. almost everything is different now, and NASA does a lot of work - very important work - that is not related (directly) to "putting stuff on the moon." but there is also a sad story to tell, mostly related to the competition for funding between 4 mission directorates spread across a bunch of centers (and their political relationships). at this point i'm almost convinced that it would be impossible for any single person to know everything that NASA is doing *even conceptually*. and going back to the first sentence of this point... the entire country was fully behind Apollo. it seems like hardly anyone even notices Constellation.
3. more complexity -> more testing. next time NASA astronauts are on the moon they're going to be doing a heck of a lot more than landing, grabbing a few rocks and going home. we're talking lunar infrastructure and long term experimentation, multi-day traverses, etc. this is orders of magnitude more difficult than Apollo, and from what i've heard/seen, Apollo people involved in the current effort would not hesitate to agree with what i'm saying here. the new rover is not going to be abandoned as junk after a few uses. this is a modular concept with a lot of intended uses.
4. did i mention funding? seriously. this is not a "mythical man month" problem at this point. funding comes from congress. congress allocates funds according to the demands of constituencies. that's you.
want this to look and feel more like Apollo did in its day? support it. especially politically, but even just talking about it and attempting to appreciate what's being done would help.
-anonymous from flagstaff
...from a few hours to a few minutes! it's beautiful. :)
This looks a lot like an old dusty machine sitting in the shadow of the rockets in Huntsville. I can't recall the name of the thing, but if I recall correctly, it was supposed to be a Lunar survey vehicle.
The thing handles like a dream. CHARIOT is significantly more capable than the chase humvee except in terms of top road speed.
that is exactly how suits are handled inside of top notch isolation rooms. This is the exact same concept.
The object in the 60's wasn't I suspect to put a man on the moon, but to gain control of space. I do not understand otherwise why it is so difficult to repeat what was done 2 generations ago.
You also had a population then that believed in creating science rather than it being someone else's problem. Today, you are much better off being a lawyer or PR consultant or something and just buying it. This is probably true for for many OECD countries. Science is not cool. (Evolution vs creationism, yada, yada yada.)
So the next president has a number of real problems. He inherits an economy that really has problems supporting moderate comfort let alone excesses like war. How do you justifying paying money for cosmology? People get as much excitement from a computer game. To most, it isn't real anyway. That is the force behind the 'it-was-done-on-a-set-in-Nevada' jokes.
I have been a professional scientist, and I would have to agree with you. In terms of value for money, the new lunar rover lacks punch. In essence, the argument is that NASA, given 11 years more work and a squillion dollars, can put a cut down Winnebago on the moon. That's a hard sell. I'd get paid more as a PR guy pushing it than I would as a scientist developing it.
So, we stay on Earth. It has the good side effect of removing any delusion that there is anywhere to go if we screw the environment too much.
Meantime...
Good boy, Mars Rover. No need to heel. Just keep digging for bones.
it is not just that. Last time, it was designed to simply show that we COULD land on the moon. Nothing more. More importantly, the saturn V design was actually based on saturn I, which was started in the 50's (something like 57 or 58). It actually took more than a decade to design and build.
Now, we are looking at it taking longer due to congress stretching it out, but also, we are not JUST going to the moon. This is about putting a base there. The rover before was literally a slow go-cart. THIS is an electric RV. In fact, we are looking at 62 miles, but the reality is that by 2015, we will have capacitors that will hold many times that amount. We will probably see storage that will allow us a couple of hundred miles. And this is just a rover.
We will almost certainly go back with inflatable habitats that will be buried. My guess is that bigelow, spacex, and armadillo will team up to go there by 2016 or sooner. Bigelow will put his first habitable station up by 2011. SpaceX will be servicing those and the ISS for 4 years. And then along will come Ares I around 2015, which would eat big time into spaceX funding. So, Musk will push to go to the moon. Armadillo will want to go because they will have a craft that will do vertical take off and landing. That will be needed to serve as a freight/personal carrier on the moon. Simply put, Armadillo will not really have much luck competing against not just spaceX, but also virgin rockets and other high altitude rockets. So carmack will have a strong incentive to put his work on the moon. It really comes to, these 3 will push us to the moon so as not to compete directly with the feds.
My big prediction is that we will see Ellis, McNealy, Gates, jobs, or most of all Allen be involved in this in a BIG way within 2 years. At that time, these guys will get BIG dollars all lasered on getting us to the moon quickly, and owning some of the prime spots.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The new rover will enable serious long-term scientific work on the Moon. We've never had that before. And we're not only lucky to have this nice habitable planet to live on; the Moon is actually the best place in the solar system to study the history of our neighborhood. Understanding that history could lead to tremendous advances in every area of science influenced by, well, where we are and how we got here. (I think that's most of science.)
There is really no other way to get that information efficiently than being on the Moon.
Arizona? Hey, wasn't that where the original mission took place?
Okay, with some more seriousness though (because I know it will come up), there are some pretty sound rebuttals to the U.S moon landing conspiracy. Here's some more info on the theories and some possible reasoning
One of my personal favorites is the claim that it could have never happened because the astronauts could have never survived the Van Allen belt. James Allen himself said this was silly. I remember hearing that the astronauts would had to have spend a month in the belt to reach a reasonably harmful exposure.
Since I don't believe in the conspiracy, I guess that makes me a coincidence theorist?
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Yes, I can remember standing outside a television shop in Harbour Square in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, watching Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder. It was a different world then. Then, the United States was the richest nation in the world, and was engaged in a geopolitical struggle with Russia, primarily, and China, secondarily. Going to the moon was at least partly a triumphalist assertion of US economic and technical dominance - you could, and no-one else could. And, because going to the moon was effectively an act of war performed by warriors, safety was not an especially big concern.
The world has changed. The US and Russia are both essentially bankrupt, with debts mainly to China which there is no possible chance of repaying; we're looking at a real possibility of a US sovereign default in the next ten years, and Russia could default on its debts this year.
Whoever the next US president is, whatever his priorities are - heck, even if it's Buzz Lightyear - the only language spoken on the moon in 2020 will be Mandarin.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
and other useless 60s phrases.
Is NASA trying to do anything new or is it just re-living old glories? We did this already now get on with something new.
I'm all for new science I am not for keeping a bunch of useless wanna bes in jobs on the public dollar.
Mars is/was new. Sending the rovers was great. We need to send some more/better rovers. Which planet do we need to send rovers to next. IMHO, this is what NASA should be doing for the next 50 years, cheap rocket delivery of data gathering rovers.
The shuttle missions should be put out to tender and NASA should not bid. Why? Because if you fail to deliver do not expect ever to get another tender. LEO etc should all be commercial by now.
NASA should be doing blue sky not repeating itself or ferrying kiddies toy experiments around.
Call it a lunar SUV...plenty of room for collecting rocks. But I think they'll have a major problem with it collecting dust everytime astronauts exit or enter the vehicle. If keeping the shuttle orbiter clean of freeze dried caca is a problem, imagine what problem moon dust will be on lunar vehicles that are covered.
The thing better be prepared to drive there on its own, considering the "progress" of the Ares program.