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Overview of Hyperspectral Sensors on Orbits
Published in Shen-En Qian, Hyperspectral Satellites and System Design, 2020
The Visible and Near-infrared Imaging Spectrometer (VNIS) is one of the main scientific payloads of China's lunar rover Yutu (“Jade Rabbit” in Chinese) of the Chang'E 3 mission, which reached lunar orbit on December 6, 2013, and landed on the moon on December 14, 2013. The Chang'E 3 mission included a lander and a lunar rover Yutu, each of them carried scientific payloads. After soft landing on the moon, Chang'E 3 carried out a lunar survey and scientific exploration activities, including (1) survey of lunar surface for topography and geological structure, (2) lunar surface material composition and available resource exploration, and (3) detection of the Earth's plasma layer and moon-based optical astronomical observation (Ye and Peng 2006, Dai et al. 2014).
Naturally Occurring Polymers—Plants
Published in Charles E. Carraher, Carraher's Polymer Chemistry, 2017
The rubber pneumatic tire is a complex of materials. However, today there is a great effort to construct and commercialize airless or nonpneumatic tires. Strides have been made to lower the maintenance of tires with respect to maintaining the “air” in tires. The goals are to eliminate flats, increase tread life, enable easier recycling, and improve handling. In the 1970s, NASA's Lunar Rover used airless tires designed by Fernc Pavlics and made by GM. The tires have a steel-mesh toroid, doughnut-shaped coils, attached to aluminum wheels. Traction on the microparticle dust moon terrain was achieved with the use of V-shaped titanium treads. While this tire achieved the moon-associated goals, they would be impractical for use on Earth.
The lunar module
Published in Jonathan Allday, Apollo in Perspective, 2019
The Apollo lunar rover was commissioned by the Marshall Space Flight Center, then designed and built by engineers at Boeing. The vehicle was powered by two 36 V batteries although as usual with redundant design, one battery alone was sufficient to operate all the onboard systems. The rover had a mass of 210 kg and could manage a range of 65 km. It was capable of reaching a speed of 10 to 12 km per hour on level ground. In practice, the range was restricted to a 9.5 km radius to ensure a reasonable ‘walk back’ distance to the LM should the rover be immobilised.
Wide-range routing method for lunar exploration rovers using multi-objective optimization
Published in Advanced Robotics, 2021
Reina Nakanishi, Genya Ishigami
The power generation cost is critical for a lunar rover because it varies with the intensity of sunlight and the posture of the rover. The power generation cost is given as follows: where η denotes the conversion efficiency of solar array panel on the rover, is the solar constant on the moon, and is the angle between solar ray vector and slope's normal vector (Figure 8). , , and are the binary variables that show the illumination condition at the edge between the ith and jth nodes and those on the ith and jth nodes. is the logical conjunction of and . Binary variables show the sunlit condition as one and shadow as zero. Though the costs derived from the mileage and rover's attitude are regardless of time, the power generation cost depends on the illumination condition at the lunar south pole that periodically changes in about 29 days. Therefore, the spatiotemporal cost map is considered as shown in Figure 9. The sunlight condition in each node is updated as time progresses during the rover travel [12].
Tribological behaviour of textured titanium under abrasive wear
Published in Surface Engineering, 2019
Xingliang Li, Wen Yue, Fei Huang, Jiajie Kang, Lina Zhu, Bin Tian
Friction and wear tests were conducted on an MS-T3000 ball-on-disc wear tester. The material of the upper ball was AISI 52100 steel, with a diameter of 6 mm and a hardness of 770 HV. The lower disc was the textured TA2 sample. The simulated lunar soil particles with the volume from 100 to 150 cm3 were added to the contact area above the texture feature. The tests were conducted at a load of 2 N (0.39 GPa [37]) with a linear gliding speed of 0.0628 m s−1. These parameters were close to the working condition of lunar rover drilling [38–41]. The testing duration was 30 min (113.04 m). All the tests were repeated three times.
A new architecture for simultaneous localization and mapping: an application of a planetary rover
Published in Enterprise Information Systems, 2021
Kuo-Kun Tseng, Jun Li, Yachin Chang, K.L. Yung, C.Y. Chan, Chih-Yu Hsu
As for the space exploration, Lunar rover plays an important role in exploring the moon or Mars, but because the moon or Mars can’t have the earth like GPS, and GPS can’t provide shelter and high-accuracy location. Therefore, the SLAM algorithm can be used to assist the positioning. It allows the lunar rover to remember its trajectory and provide a functional service for the lunar rover to return to the original point. Thus, we also applied our proposed algorithm to a space rover application.