Chariot - A Rover Mobility System

• Main Authors: Bevens, Michael Ashford, Bohman, Jacob, Dow, Natalie, Hatz, Samuel, Matthews, Nathan, Owens, Thea, Parker, James Lynn, Perez, Nayeli, Shriki, Kate, Silverman, Logan
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Scholarly Commons 2024
• Subjects: South pole
• Online Access: https://commons.erau.edu/pr-discovery-day/2024/presentations/7

In the past decade, there has been a significant increase in interest in the lunar south pole due to the discovery of significant quantities of water ice and volatiles such as ammonia in lunar craters throughout the region. These resources are of great scientific interest as they could facilitate future, long-term missions, including manned habitation of the Moon for further research. One of the challenges of this year's NASA Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition is the development of a concept rover that can analyze these resources in the extreme cold and dark environment of the lunar south pole. Chariot is designing a maneuverability system for the rover to explore the depths of craters in a primarily shadowed environment. The hope of our capstone team is to enable not only the concept of the systems required to maneuver a rover into a dark crater, but to allow our members to have a hands-on approach to the fabrication of such systems, as well. We believe this design approach will allow a more thorough understanding of challenges that we may face in industry and provide experience utilizing the engineering design process.