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Completed TRL 4 (started at 3, targeting 5)
Over the past 8 years, NASA has been developing low cost, high-capability rovers. These rovers have varied in scale from crew sized rovers to science rovers. With this experience within the agency, the HRS team has the opportunity to give back some of these capabilities for new NASA missions and larger national needs.
This activity will design and build a single wheel module and field test the prototype in an outdoor test area at JSC. The single wheel testbed provides liquid cooling/heating to the actuators to allow them to function in locations where the temperature varies vastly from one side to the other, such as on the lunar surface.
The HRS team will continue to develop partnerships within and outside of NASA in the area of rover development. In the first quarter of FY14, the HRS mobility team will prepare an Analysis of Alternates for the AES Resource Prospector, a lunar precursor mission scheduled for 2019, which will prospect for volatiles at the lunar poles. AES asked the HRS team to look at alternative designs, schedules and costs as a risk reduction effort.
This technology provides initial capabilities for access to extreme terrain on planetary surfaces and on Earth, allowing the robotic system to actively transfer heat where needed. The single-wheel testbed provides liquid cooling/heating to the actuators to allow them to function in locations where the temperature varies vastly from one side to the other, such as on the lunar surface. This approach is analogous to how warm blooded animals manage heat within their bodies.
This technology could potentially be used on the AES Resource Prospector or other future planetary rovers.
HRS has also identified a broader national need for a no-emissions rover at Summit Station in Greenland, supporting the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) polar program. Scientists will need to conduct a 3-mile daily commute between the Summit Station “Big House” and the Isi station to monitor experiments. The instruments and measurements at Isi station are sufficiently sensitive that using internal combustion for the commute would compromise the science.
HRS is also pursuing partnerships for transferring NASA by-wire rover technology for a joint US Army/Department of Energy project to build automated vehicles for taking wounded soldiers to their appointments at Ft Bragg, North Carolina and as disaster relief vehicles.
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