Lunar vehicles

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Let's talk about the Lunar vehicles. Lunar roving vehicle or simply lunar rover was generally designed to move on the Lunar surface. Some rovers were design to move astronauts on the surface such as rover in Apollo program, other were designed as a moving robots, such as Soviet Lunokhod or Chinese Yutu.

Lunokhod 1 was the first rover on the lunar surface landing on November 1970 (Luna 17, lifted by the rocket Proton-K) after the first unsuccessful mission Lunokhod 1A (0) in 1969. Rover was working for 11 month.

Lunokhod was remote controlled robot. The rover worked during the lunar day, stopping for charging the batteries via the solar panels. Rover hibernated during the lunar night. The internal components were heated by radioisotope heater unit to keep operational temperature. The rover consisted of TV cameras, spectrometer, X-ray telescope, radiation detector, and extendable devices to get the lunar soil. The weight of the rover was 840 kg and was 135 cm high.

Apollo Roving Lunar Vehicle was a battery powered 4 wheeled lunar rover used by 3 Apollo missions (15,16, and 17) in 1971 and 1972. It was also called as Moon buggy. And it looked like a real car on the Moon. Rover carried two astronauts, their equipment, and lunar samples they took.
If you think to buy it, the prize was 38 000 000 $ at that time.

Apollo 15 mission
It was used by Apollo 15 crew and it extended the distance of their exploration. The top speed was supposed to be 13 km/h, however E. Cernan managed to get 18 km/h. The vehicle has 210 kg and was 3 m long. They were designed to hold 490 kg.

Rover was powered by two 36V silver zinc potassium hydroxide non-rechargeable batteries. 4 rovers were made ready to fly, from which were 3 transported and left on the Moon by particular Apollo missions.

Lunokhod 2 was the second Soviet unmanned lunar rover, which was taken by Luna 21 on the Moon in January 1973.  This mission was supposed to be followed by Lunokhod 3 in 1977, but the mission was cancelled.

Chernobyl accident: Lunokhod designers made within 2 weeks rovers to help in Chernobyl accident. Due to high radiation level both rovers failed.

Yutu is Chinese lunar rover in December 2013 as a part of Chang'e 3 mission. It was again unmanned lunar rover having about 140 kg and payload about 20 kg.




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