// NASA BREAKING NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
NASA Challenge Tests Wheel Designs for Moon Base Mobility
As NASA prepares to establish the Moon Base, advancing surface mobility will be key to helping crews and robotic systems travel farther across the lunar surface.
To help advance that capability, the Rock and Roll with NASA Challenge invited public innovators to design and build next-generation lunar rover wheels.
Five teams from 128 submissions and 49 countries advanced to the final phase of the competition, where they tested their prototypes on July 31 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The challenge sought lightweight, durable, and scalable wheels that could support longer-duration lunar surface operations. The designs also needed to be compliant enough to absorb impacts, maintain traction at higher speeds, and withstand the harsh lunar environment.
“Every additional kilometer a rover can reliably travel will expand how far we can explore, what science we can achieve, and what infrastructure we can build,” said Ed Herrera, robotics engineer at Johnson and co-leader of the challenge project.
NASA Johnson uses ground prototypes to test mobility technologies, while lunar terrain vehicles will be delivered to the lunar surface through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. For the challenge, the wheels were fitted to MicroChariot, a 45-kilogram test rover, and put through a series of courses at Johnson’s Rock Yard to evaluate their performance across different types of terrain.
“Crowdsourcing gives us an opportunity to look beyond traditional approaches for lunar wheel design,” Herrera said. “The more wheel technologies we can develop and understand, the more options we have to meet the needs of different vehicles, terrains, and missions on the Moon and Mars.”
Those ideas were reflected in five distinctly different designs.
The HTR Variable Flex Lunar Wheel created by Hellenic Technology of Robotics SA uses an internal system designed to vary the wheel’s stiffness depending on terrain and vehicle needs. The team adapted technology it had been developing for terrestrial wheels for about a decade.
The Hiper Wheel created by Hyperbola uses tensioned cables and a corigated structure that provides spring-like behavior, allowing the wheel to flex without relying on traditional radial spokes.