How to keep away from a puncture on the Moon | EUROtoday

Going again to the Moon after half a century, after which to Mars, actually means reinventing the wheel.

After all, Mars is a protracted solution to come again in the event you get a flat.

“One thing you cannot have is a puncture,” says Florent Menegaux, chief government of the French tyre-maker Michelin.

The powerful situations on Mars have been underlined by the expertise of the unmanned Curiosity rover.

Just a 12 months after touchdown in 2012, its six inflexible aluminium tyres have been visibly ripped by with punctures and tears.

As for the Moon, the US Artemis missions goal to return astronauts there, maybe by 2027.

Later Artemis missions plan to make use of a lunar rover to discover the Moon’s south pole beginning with Artemis V, at the moment scheduled for 2030.

The Artemis astronauts might be driving a lot additional than their Apollo forebears, who in six landings between 1969 and 1972 by no means ventured greater than 25 miles (40km) throughout the Moon’s floor.

“The target is to cover 10,000 kilometres in 10 years,” says Sylvain Barthet, who runs Michelin’s lunar airless wheel programme within the central French city of Clermont Ferrand.

“We’re not talking about short, week-long durations, we’re talking about decades of utilisation,” says Dr Santo Padula, who has a PhD in supplies science, and works for Nasa as an engineer on the John Glenn Research Centre in Cleveland, Ohio.

One large problem for anybody growing know-how for the Moon are the massive temperature ranges.

At the lunar poles temperatures can plunge decrease than -230C, that is not far off absolute zero, the place atoms cease transferring.

And that is an issue for tyres.

“Without atom motion you have a hard time having the material be able to deform and return,” says Dr Padula.

The tyres want to have the ability to deform as they go over rocks after which ping again to their unique form.

“If we permanently deform a tyre, it doesn’t roll efficiently, and we have issues with power loss,” says Dr Padula.

The new wheels will even carry a lot greater masses than the light-weight rovers Apollo astronauts cruised round in.

The subsequent house missions might want to drive spherical “bigger science platforms and mobile habitats that get larger and larger”, he says.

And that might be a good heftier downside on Mars, the place gravity is double that on the Moon.

Apollo’s lunar rovers used tyres created from zinc-coated piano wire in a woven mesh, with a variety of round 21 miles.

Since excessive temperatures and cosmic rays break down rubber or flip it to a brittle glass, steel alloys and high-performance plastic are chief contenders for airless house tyres.

“In general, metallic or carbon fibre-based materials are used for these wheels,” says Pietro Baglion, staff chief of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosalind Franklin Mission, which goals to ship its personal rover to Mars by 2028.

One promising materials is nitinol, an alloy of nickel and titanium.

“Fuse these and it makes a rubber-acting metal that can bend all these different ways, and it will always stretch back to its original shape, says Earl Patrick Cole, chief executive of The Smart Tire Company.

He calls nitinol’s flexible properties “one of many craziest issues you’ll ever see”.

Nitinol is a probably “revolutionary” material says Dr Padula, because the alloy also absorbs and releases energy as it changes states. It may even have solutions to heating and refrigeration, he says.

However, Mr Barthet at Michelin thinks that a material closer to a high-performance plastic will be more suitable for tyres that need to cover long distances on the Moon.

Bridgestone has meanwhile taken a bio-mimicry approach, by making a model of the footpads of camels.

Camels have soft, fatty footpads that disperse their weight on to a wider surface area, keeping their feet from sinking into loose sandy soil.

Inspired by that, Bridgestone is using a felt-like material for its tread, while the wheel comprises thin metal spokes that can flex.

The flexing divides the lunar module’s weight into a larger contact area, so it can drive without getting stuck in the fragments of rock and dust on the Moon’s surface.

Michelin and Bridgestone are each part of different consortiums that, along with California’s Venturi Astrolab, are presenting their proposed tyre tech to Nasa at the John Glenn Centre this month (May).

Nasa is expected to make a decision later this year – it might choose one proposal or adopt elements of several of them.

Meanwhile, Michelin is testing its tyres by driving a sample rover around on a volcano near Clermont, whose powdery terrain resembles the Moon’s surface.

Bridgestone is doing the same on western Japan’s Tottori Sand Dunes.

ESA is also exploring the possibility of whether Europe might make a rover on its own for other missions, says Mr Barthet.

The work might have some useful applications here on Earth.

While working on his doctorate at the University of Southern California, Dr Cole joined a Nasa entrepreneurial programme to work on commercialising some of the technology from the Mars super-elastic rover tyre.

An early product this year will be nickel-titanium bicycle tyres.

Priced around $150 (£120) each, the tyres are much more expensive than regular ones, but would be extremely durable.

He also plans to work this year on durable tyres for motorbikes, aimed at areas with rough roads.

For all this, his “dream” remains to play a part in humanity’s return to the Moon.

“So, I can inform my youngsters, lookup there on the Moon,” he says. “Daddy’s tyres are up there.”