Hit the books: How NASA picks the first lunar rover to shift across the moon

The concept of space travel was so new for us that when President Kennedy took out a famous Noonshot speech, even top NASA scientists really believed we could really land on the surface of the moon. Some think of crafts arranged there will only sink to Regolith the moon like it is a big and extraordinary Quicksand and Quicksand! In his latest book, across the Wilds Wilds: Lunar Rover and the victory of landing for the past month, journalist and former Fulbright, Earl Swift, examined the Mission of Apollo 15, 16, and 17 who was ignored, our last trip to the moon surface (at least until the artemis project occurred) , In the quote below, Swift took the reader in the jpl test course tour that hyper-browsing, lunar tread-shredding and battle for supremacy rover there between GM and Bendix.

All until 1962 and to 1963, both GM and Bendix oversee the surveyor program. Sure enough, coming summer, the jet propulsion laboratory put its requirements for Rovers, remote-controlled rovers that want to be stored on the boat. The vehicle will explore Lurrain up to a mile from the surveyor, while the driver returned on earth driving it with television eyes. Companies that are warned laboratories plan to bid the study of phase 1 design – the first stage of normal from every new hardware program – which they expect to supply their concept technical models. Proposal due in seven weeks.

Short time limit ensuring dilettantes. In October, the two companies left side-GM and Bendix-started work on a contract. GM is ready with a six-wheel design. The surveyor of the Lunar vehicle is six feet long on eighteen inches and weighs ninety pounds – half the size and half again as heavy as bedtime tests, with legs that definitely dropped the jaw. In “Lunarium” pavlics from rocks, craters, and slopes outside the Santa Barbara lab, he rode forty-five degrees, jumping over twenty-inches, and bending his steps up and more than thirty inches.

Bekker and Pavlics have worked on the idea for more than three years. Their main progress this time: wheels. Again, they are made of wire, but tied into a wide mesh that resembles a chain link, and is formed into a fat donut. Like the previous team’s wire tires, they were deflected when they hit a barrier and absorbed several cross-country lumps. They work with or without cloth coverings.

“We have a large program to try to come up with wire materials that will survive from the vacuum environment on the moon,” Remember John Calandro. “Frank has compiled a testing tool that created the vacuum environment we need.”

When fully directed to the mission, Rover will be surprised electronics, with subsystems supplied by RCA Astro-Electronics and by AC Electronics, GM Division in Milwaukee: it will have a stereo TV imaging rig, navigation and sophisticated control, and silver-zinc battery filled reset by solar panels. But part of Santa Barbara’s work, the vehicle itself, is a research in doing more with fewer. The hardware is constantly “assessed to see if something simpler might be able to do the same job,” Designer Norman J. James will remember. “The remaining part never broke ‘is a frasa that is often repeated.”

Bendix takes a very different approach. The SLRV is a Squarish robot, two-part, articulation, with sticky, feet that absorb shocks in the corners that end with a small Caterpillar track assembly. Achieving tracks independently to follow uneven land. The handler directs it to the command to slow down, speed up, or reverse the track on one side or another, and the pivot that connects the two parts. On the moon, it will be powered by a thermal radioisotope generator – small nuclear device – hanging in the back, and feathers with instruments and scientific antennas. Heighs one hundred pounds.