If the Artemis program achieves NASA’s goal of returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17, the people making the trip will eventually be joined by a new lunar rover. Astronauts would be the only ones taking the machine for a spin. NASA contractor Lunar Outpost revealed that its Lunar Terrain Vehicle will be capable of real-time teleoperations from its mission control here on Earth. However, the teleoperated rovers will likely be empty because crews found riding in them to be “scary” during simulations.
The Lunar Outpost LTV, named Eagle, is already undergoing testing as it vies to be selected by NASA as the Artemis rover against two other finalists. The vehicle is being developed in collaboration with General Motors and Goodyear. GM produced the Apollo-era moon buggy alongside Boeing. The LTV features three modes of operation: In-person astronaut driving, fully autonomous driving and teleoperations. A remote operator will be driving Eagle around at 15 mph while sitting in the company’s mission control in Arvada, Colorado, just outside Denver. The rover could go even faster across the lunar surface. Lunar Outpost CEO Justin Cyrus told Space.com:
“It can go up to 25 miles per hour. You don’t want to go faster than that. When you hit a rock at that speed, you can get a pretty dramatic response.”
Teleoperations could be derailed by severe latency
The biggest obstacle to remote vehicle operations is physics. Communications can’t happen faster than the speed of light. There’s a signal delay for inputs to reach the vehicle and for the camera feed to return to the operator. The latency over thousands of miles here on Earth typically isn’t an insurmountable issue, whether it be a Waymo employee who needs to assist a stuck robotaxi or a U.S. Air Force pilot taking the controls of a drone.
Latency becomes a more prominent issue in space where the distances involved are exponentially further, in the realm of hundreds of thousands of miles. For instance, NASA’s exploration rover on Mars isn’t controlled in real-time. With a roughly 13-minute delay to the Curiosity rover, commands are sent bundled together in meticulously planned sequences.
NASA ran simulations for lunar operations with a teleoperated rover in 2023. The sim was conducted with a variable round-trip delay between six and eight seconds. The agency’s findings weren’t encouraging when it came to latency. The astronauts described riding in the teleoperated rover as “scary, uncomfortable, and disconcerting.” The key conclusion was that there were very few use cases for remote operations, like transporting an incapacitated crew member or repositioning an empty rover. Occupied or not, the selected LTV will see its debut during Artemis V, scheduled for 2030 if there are no further program delays.
