LunaCorp

LunaCorp was a company designed around a privately-funded mission, using Russian technology, to put a rover on the Moon. The aim for the company was to fund the mission by the entertainment value of having customers drive the rover. The company was disbanded in 2003.

The mission included a rover designed by Dr. Red Whittaker, chief scientist of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Its original goal was to visit Apollo landing sites; later variants of the original design would explore near the Moon's poles, where orbiting satellites found indications that valuable ice deposits may lurk in permanently shadowed polar impact craters.

The details of the mission evolved with time. Because the Moon is hotter than boiling water at noon and colder than liquid nitrogen at night, in the final version of the design the robot would avoid those extremes by circumnavigating the Moon every 29.5 days (the length of a lunar day) to stay in sunlight, a strategy [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989smf..confQ..10L originally proposed] by Geoffrey Landis. "Our robot, by driving completely around the Moon at a high latitude at only a few kilometers per hour, will enjoy lunar morning temperatures all the time by staying in sync with the sun," said the mission's controller.

External links

* [http://www.lunacorp.com/ LunaCorp web site]
* [http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/Moon/PressReleases/20000615lunacorp.html LunaCorp press release (2000) from Space Frontiers.org]