Category:Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV)

The NASA Apollo Mission's Lunar Rover (officially the "Lunar Roving Vehicle", or "LRV", sometimes referred to informally as the "Moon Buggy") is an ultra-lightweight metal-framed electric car, reminiscent of a "dune buggy", designed to be stowed in an unused section of the Apollo Lunar Lander.

Deployment

The Lunar Roving Vehicles were deployed on Apollo 15, 16 and 17. There are therefore three working Lunar Roving Vehicles currently parked on the Moon.

These were the last three, "J" missions to the Moon, concentrating on general science (Apollo 11 having been the first mission to reach the Moon, Apollo 12 having planted Surveyor 3 on the Moon's surface, and Apollo 13 having failed to reach the Moon due to an oxygen tank explosion en route).

Colours

Since the Rover was essentially a "disposable" vehicle, and didn't have to put up with weather, the main body was simple silver metal. The wheelguards were high-contrast drab orange, presumably to reveal how much lunar dust was being thrown up onto the vehicle and equipment.

Configuration

The LRV was equipped with a quarter-horsepower electric motor per wheel, run off a pair of battery packs (one needed, and one as an emergency backup).

The entire vehicle was designed to fold up and stow in one of the four storage bays built into the base of the Lunar Lander, and to unfold and configure itself with minimal intervention from the astronauts.

A notable feature was the use of am ultra-lightweight torus of titanium mesh for each of the "tyres", although this feature tended not to appear in photographs taken on Earth, as the mesh tyres were designed for "one-sixth gee" lunar gravity, and couldn't take the weight of the Rover and its occupants on Earth. When the Rovers were being tested or driven on Earth, they were fitted with more conventional (and much heavier) rubber tyres, and these are what show up in Earth pictures of the Rovers.

Equipment

The Rover's storage contains a TV camera and transmitter, and an unfolding umbrella-shaped dish aerial for transmitting video pictures directly to Earth. These could be set up while the Rover was parked, and stowed again before driving. Since the antenna needed to be pointed directly at Earth to transmit, it was sensible to stow the equipment before moving the Rover, especially since it partly blocked the forward view, and because it was designed to be as light as possible, and might have been prone to suffer damage when set up on a lurching Moon Buggy driving cross-country.

As a result we seem to be deprived of video of the (bumpy) view from the Rover when driving.

Images

There also aren't as many still images of the Lunar Rover in action as one might expect.

This is partly because while driving there wouldn't normally be anyone else around to take pictures (!), and because when parked and used as a glorified video photography tripod, the pictures would be taken //from// the buggy, which therefore wouldn't be in the background in any of the scenes. It also doesn't help that the Rovers weren't deployed until Apollo 15, and therefore missed out on some of the earlier main rush of publicity.

Commercial models of the Moon Buggy

While there are some quite expensive and detailed models of the LRV, our favourite is still the comparatively affordable mass-produced 1:32-scale Dinky Toys model, which was made available both as a standard diecast metal toy, and as a self-assembly paint-it-yourself metal kit. The Dinky model has good play value, being robust and satisfyingly chunky, and features four wheels steerable from a single central control column. It is completely metal apart from the tyres, control column cap, and the two removable astronauts. The 1:32 scale allows it to be parked next to the 1:32 Revell kit: All we need now is for someone to produce a 1:32 lunar lander model!

Since this was a toy, meant to be played with and "driven", it doesn't include the video camera or antenna, but some enterprising modellers have chosen to add these parts themselves.

The Dinky model is actually wrong, in the sense that it includes a central spine (which makes sense from an engineering point of view, but which didn't exist on the actual lunar rover), but it captures the feel of the thing nicely.

Customising the Dinky model

The Dinky model lends itself to customisation, as it comes apart with just two screws.

Wierdly, the retail version of the model is metallic blue, as Dinky's attitude to the time was that white ad silver spaceships were boring, and would look better in metallic blue or green (see, eg, the Dinky UFO Interceptor, which is green rather than white). The kit version, however, was supplied in silver, with a pot of orange paint for the wheelguards, and the blue retail version could be disassembled, stripped and repainted.

As a result of the availability of a paintable kit, the wrong colour of the retail model, and the paucity of decent colour photos of the actual rovers while on the Moon, eBay shows a variety of customised colour schemes, from the correct silver-and-orange, to silver-and-gold, white (there was a "TiOxide" promotional special edition in white with a "Tioxide" logo), silver with gold wheelguards, white and gold, and so on.

Modelling the Lunar Rover

One of the frustrations in modelling the Rover is that every decent picture of it seems to be different. Most of the standard pictures are of test vehicles and prototypes that don't have the proper wheels, and have features that are different or non-existent on the actual Rovers sent to the Moon. The Rovers sent to the moon weren't paraded about for pictures before being safely packed away, and never came back, and while they were in use, the illumination made photographs difficult to "read" ... and of course, the astronauts were tasked with taking photos of the Moon, not pictures of their car! For instance, "studio" photos might show the instrumentation panel to be pale, whereas the actual lunar models had black panels with luminous paint, for high contrast. Additionally, since the Rovers were basically flat trays with wheels and seats bolted on, with most of the central superstructure being movable equipment payloads, the apparent shapes kept changing and would have been different on the different missions.

On the plus side, as long as you get the basic details and look right, nobody is likely to complain about small errors. Existing models show so many variations that nobody is likely to be too judgemental about a scratchbuilt model ... given that most of the minor details are probably undocmented (and made up by the builders as they went along), and almost nobody knows what the real Rovers that went to the Moon actually looked like. The Haynes manual is a good source for details of things like wheel mountings.

The basic concept of a minimalist skeletal frame with four wheels probably lends itself very well to implementation in white or silver Meccano, in a range of scales, and it's easy to throw together a rough impressionistic model in Lego.