Britain aims to be fourth nation to land on lunar surface, with robotic craft that fits in a hand
BRITAIN aims to become only the fourth nation to land on the Moon by sending the world’s smallest robotic rover in 2021.
The revolutionary device, built by tech start-up Spacebit, will move on legs – and be able to take selfies.
Weighing 1.5kg, and able to fit into a human hand, it’s a fraction of the weight, size and cost of wheeled rivals.
Previous Russian rovers were more than two metres long. Every 1kg of equipment adds about £1million to the cost of a mission.
The UK rover aims to send mapping data of caves and tunnels to Earth for 10 days before its battery freezes when lunar nights drop to minus 170C.
Astronaut Tim Peake, the first Brit to walk in space, said it could pave the way for a four-man Nasa mission four years later – the first time humans will have returned to the Moon in half a century.
Speaking at the unveiling of a working model at the New Scientist Live event yesterday at London’s ExCel Centre, he said: “We are looking at being able to live there, so we want to find resources [to] build habitats and inflatable modules.
“British people can get excited by this.”
The British rover will launch from a US site and will be the first lunar lander launched from American soil since the BY MARTIN BAGOT pioneering Apollo missions. The UK rover is the brainchild of Cambridge University graduate Pavlo Tanasyuk, who founded Spacebit and attracted funding. The Spacebit CEO said: “It’s important to have a robotic mission before humans go back to the moon.
“It’s been 50 years since the Apollo missions launched and we need to explore it so we know what to expect.
“Our goal is to go and see what is available for all humanity to explore.”
The rover will be the first thing to walk on the lunar surface since astronaut Gene Cernan on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Pavlo, 39, has pumped in his own money, which he made after founding an electric payment company in Ukraine where he grew up. Pavlo added: “Lunar caves might provide a more stable range of temperatures. It will spend up to 10 days on the Moon before going into the night and basically freezing forever.” The rover is expected to land near the region known as the Sea of Serenity. Astronaut Tim, who is not involved in the Spacebit project, added: “We will set up permanent habitat modules on the Moon and we will probably start them up on the South Pole because it’s a great location for solar panels. “There’s also water ice there for fuel and drinking water.” The service module for the 2024 mission to the Moon could possibly be built in the UK.