To the moon and back: the first Belgian lunar rover
The road ahead is long but if all goes well, a little Belgian robot will be cruising around on the moon by 2028.
Space Applications Services, a company based in Zaventem near Brussels, is testing LUVMI-M, a 20-kilogramme oven-sized marvel on wheels designed to handle the intricacies of our moon’s south pole, where the sand is loose, the craters are deep, the mountains are high and the sun hangs low on the horizon, casting deep shadows that can make distances hard to judge.
The little rover is being tested at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Cologne, Germany, where the conditions of the moon have been recreated to prepare astronauts – and evidently astrobots – for their upcoming lunar missions. Once it’s refined and blasted off, LUVMI-M will become the first Belgian lunar rover to grace the surface of the moon.
That’s a lot of weight to carry, isn’t it? In addition, it can handle a load of up to 20 kilogrammes of all kinds of scientific measuring instruments and be controlled safely from Planet Earth, more specifically from Zaventem.
We love us some lunar exploration! We’re excited to see what comes out of the research LUVMI-M will help bring to completion.