[X] My Assistant

[JRehling]

As plans to explore the Moon move forward, I wondered about the possible success of MER-like rovers sent to the Moon. There are a number of contrasts with Mars:

The same "drive train", in half of martian gravity, could easily carry a much larger set of instruments.

Communications would be almost instantaneous.

Rovers on the lunar near-side would ALWAYS be in radio contact with Earth. No relays necessary.

The lunar sol is 14 days.

Combine those last three points, and you could imagine HUGE (by MER standards) drives performed in a single sol. Or a large number of IDD explorations in a modest-sized area.

The rover would have to survive a lunar night. Some of the mass advantage could be put into heaters.

(Apparently) no issue with dust covering the solar panels.

No seasons. No winter.

Twice the solar power, all things being equal.

MER fans ought to drool. Downside, of course: the Moon may not be as interesting for you as Mars. But there's still plenty there to study.
Operations wise, imagine two "packs" of rovers (a pack could be as small as one rover) sent to different latitudes but the same longitude. Send one pack to someplace near the eastern limb and somewhere near the western limb, so that the fraction of the time that one pack would be in in daylight would approach unity. Have three or four teams on Earth that operate 8 hour shifts to keep each rover in constant action throughout the lunar day. When night falls on one pack, it would not be long until the other pack experienced dawn.

Without the delta-v requirements of interplanetary cruise, it should easily best the cost of MERs. For the launch cost of a New Frontiers mission, two pairs of rovers could be launched to support this kind of exploration, and could last seemingly indefinitely. Four sites with very long drives at each could explore a great variety of the lunar service.

[djellison]

To be honest - while the idea is quite romantic - there's probably little you would end up feeding forward from the MER design into a lunar rover. The requirements are quite different - particularly thermally I'd have thought. You would want realtime video requiring serious bandwidth etc etc. Perhaps the mobility system could be used - but not much else I wouldn't have thought. I seem to remember this debate already happenign though

Doug