GLOBAL CHALLENGES

Planetary Exploration Rover Ditches Wheels

A NASA astronaut has proposed a hovering-craft-like design to sidestep the Mars rover�s problem of wheels getting stuck in sand. The experimental design being prototyped by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory will be entered in Google's Lunar X-Prize for the first commercial rover to traverse the moon.

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Planetary Exploration Rover Ditches Wheels
The rover called Spirit has become a "stationary science platform" on Mars, but not by choice. After months of attempting to free its wheels from a Martian sand trap, NASA has simply given up. That gave NASA astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an idea: why not equip rovers with a gas thruster that allows them to rise above obstacles? The result is called the Terrestrial Artificial Lunar and Reduced Gravity Simulator, or Talaris, as described at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Space Conference in late August.

Talaris carbon-fiber rover harnesses compressed nitrogen-gas thrusters to vault over obstacles�fans at corners of prototype simulate lunar gravity (source: Ephraim Lanford and Ryan McLinko, MIT).

The Talaris project is a joint development effort at MIT and Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, and aims to win the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize for the first team that can transport a robotic rover to the moon, travel on its surface for 500 meters and transmit images back to the Earth. The MIT/Draper team, called the Next Giant Leap, is working with Sierra Nevada Corp. (Sparks, Nev.) on a vehicle to take Talaris to the moon, and joins 20 other teams all planning to invade the moon with competing rovers by the contest deadline of 2014.

Next: In the Scaled-Down Prototype Stage >>