Toyota off to the moon
One small step for man, one giant leap for the Japanese corporation as it prepares for 2029 launchToyota has confirmed it is readying a manned, pressurised lunar rover for its inaugural mission to the moon in 2029.
The news Toyota will launch a lunar mission follows an announcement earlier this year that it was teaming up with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to explore the creation of a next-generation lunar rover.
The car-making giant says it will have the first prototypes ready for testing in 2022 with the finished rover ready for the 2029 mission.
Instead of starting from scratch, Toyota says it will begin with adapted vehicles based on existing production cars.
Created to explore regions of the moon that have so far not been visited, the purpose of the 2029 mission will be to discover if the moon has enough natural resources like frozen water to sustain future missions.
Powered by a fuel-cell powertrain, the 6.0-metres long lunar rover has been designed to have a range of more than 10,000km.
Measuring 5.0 metres wide and standing 4.0 metres tall, the Toyota rover will be almost twice as wide and almost five times the height of the Moon Buggy used on the original Apollo 15 mission.
On board, the Toyota designed and developed rover will have to comfortably accommodate two astronauts and house up to four in an emergency.
Powering onboard tech like the communications and navigation gear the next-gen rover gets retractable solar panels.
Punctures, meanwhile, will not be a problem as the Toyota sports airless tyres.
As well as featuring hydrogen fuel cell technology it's thought the prototypes due in 2022 might also employ Toyota's latest solid state batteries that are said to be safer, more compact, with far higher energy density, plus being much quicker to charge than existing lithium-ion cells.
It's not just Toyota that wants to enter the space race.
Aside from Tesla blasting its roadster into space, Audi has experimented with a concept of a smaller fully autonomous lunar rover that could chart the moon's surface alone using its four cameras that could take both 3D and 360-degree pictures.
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