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 kit. The Dinky model is satisfyingly chunky, and features four wheels steerable from a central control column. It is completely metal apart from the tyres, control column cap, and the two removable astronauts.

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.

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.