JOSH: NASA’s explorers are readying up for a road trip.
First, through the desert of Northern Arizona, and later,
worlds beyond out own. We’ll take you along for the
ride, on the Lunar Electric Rover, next on Real World...
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JOSH: NASA has big plans to explore worlds beyond our own,
someday. And in order to make those plans reality, they have
already started developing and testing many of the tools
that will make it happen.
One such tool is a major mode of transportation and
exploration that can be used on the moon, Mars, an asteroid,
or other places in the universe.
It’s the LER... the Lunar Electric Rover, and NASA is
kicking the tires and taking it for a test drive.
MIKE GERNHARDT: So the LER is a concept we came up with to
optimize human safety and efficiency while doing
planetary exploration. JOSH: Mike Gernhardt is an
astronaut and the LER Project Manager.
MIKE: We have two astronauts in each one, and we go out for
long traverses up to... possibly up to a thousand
kilometers in two weeks or longer at a time.
JOSH: The LER is kind of like an RV your family might explore
our world in. But instead of going to the Grand Canyon,
NASA astronauts will explore canyons on the moon or Mars.
And the LER is build to do a few things, this RV can’t.
MIKE: So it’s fly by wire so you have a joystick and it goes
forward, sideways, reverse, or yaw.
And you can combine all those maneuvers in any combination
you want so for example, we can go crabbing around a crater or
rock and it really optimizes your ability to
make observations.
JOSH: This is one of the monitors on board the LER.
The markings on this dial are the same as you would find
on a protractor. A protractor allows you to measure angles.
The LER is designed to turn at acute angles.
An acute angle is any angle less than 90 degrees.
The small turning radius gives the LER flexibility in its
movements, allowing the vehicle to turn in very tight circles.
MIKE: So this thing has an electronic transmission.
And we’ve got park, neutral, low and high.
And when we’re off road like this we stay in the low gear.
Top speed is 15 kilometers per hour which is just
under 10 miles per hour.
JOSH: Which might not seem like much to someone like you, used
to cruising the interstate at 100 kilometers per hour.
But compare the LER to the rovers exploring the moon,
which travel just 40 meters per day. It would take the Mars
Rovers 24 years to cover the same distance LER travels
in a day. That moves exploration to the fast track.
MIKE: The cool thing is all the visibility we have, the lower
part, for observing the rocks and stuff. And then that
helmet bubble, you can actually lay down there and put your
head in that bubble, and I can drive that within about an inch
or two of any rock that your interested in. That’s
actually closer than you can really get your helmet on this
suit, without falling down.
JOSH: And because the astronauts can sleep in it,
it allows for much more exploration in a shorter
amount of time.
MIKE: And then instead of having to come home every night
to a hab or your lander, you can sleep in the vehicle and
keep going. And that allows us, you know, much more
efficiency on the exploration on the moon.
And it’s very relevant to the Mars forward work, where you go
to Mars you want to have some mobility.
It’s like if you landed here on Earth in the middle of west
Texas, and could only travel 10 kilometers, you’d have a very
different view of the Earth than if you could travel
hundreds of kilometers.
JOSH: This is major advancement over Rovers used during the
Apollo mission. Back then, Astronauts could only go as
far as ten kilometers... which is how far they could walk in
their space suits, back to the lander, in the event of a
rover brake down. With the Pressurized LER, astronauts can
go almost 250 kilometers.
That’s 25 times the exploration power as compared to Apollo.
And since NASA plans to employ two LER’s for each mission,
it makes exploration even safer for astronauts.
MIKE: If one of the rovers fails, all four crew can get
into the other one and come home, so we have built in
redundancy on the way out.
JOSH: In August and September, 2009, NASA sent LER to the
Northern Deserts of Arizona to do a mission similar to one
Astronauts would conduct on the moon. LER was the centerpiece
at this event, known as Desert RATS,
Research and Technology Studies...
The idea was to put LER to the test, running a mission with
two astronauts, running from base camp, hundreds of
kilometers into the desert and back again, doing various
activities, analogous to the kinds of things astronauts
would have to do on the moon or Mars.
Each day, the astronauts did three to four short walks out
of the rover, similar to the Extra-Vehicular Activities,
or EVAs they would do on the surface of the moon
or another planet. MIKE: On the back of the
vehicle, we have what we call suit ports.
You can think of these as step in space suits. And we
basically just open a hatch inside the vehicle.
We open the back hatch to the suit and then we step
in the suit. We have electric actuaries that close all these
things up, we do leak checks, and literally 10 minutes later
we’re boots on the surface of the moon.
So that’s a huge break through.
That allows us to do these short space walks.
JOSH: Compare that to EVAs on the space station, where it
takes 6 hours or longer to get out. So for a 2 hour space
walk, Astronauts have to spend 8 hours in the space suit.
MIKE: It really kind of beats you up, because it’s stiff as a
board. But if you do a half an hour in, an hour out, half an
hour in, you know, short EVAs, it doesn’t have
that cumulative effect on you.
JOSH: This years’ Desert Rats event was supposed to be
just like the real thing.
MIKE: We are running them like a real mission. We have a
timeline, we have capcoms, we have science backrooms,
and we are a very high fidelity simulation of a real mission.
JOSH: The tests went really well. Mike and the crew
emerged from the LER after 14 days,
the mission was a huge success.
You can learn more about LER at www.nasa.gov.
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