Japanese space exploration company ispace has a vision for a permanent habitat on the Moon—and it has just the rover to start making that idea a reality.

The ispace concept lunar rover. (Image courtesy of ispace.)

The rover, which looks like a cross between a bug and a toy tank, weighs just over eight pounds. It has a carbon-fiber body and would navigate the lunar surface on wheels that resemble water mills. The rover is equipped with four high-definition cameras that together provide a 360-degree view of the machine’s surroundings, while another camera serves as a navigator that identifies hazards and steers the rover away from them.

Teams of networked rovers would deploy from a compact lander to locate water on the Moon’s surface and extract it.

Studies estimate that there are 6 billion tons of water on or near the lunar surface. In particular, the Moon contains deeply shadowed craters where light never reaches—areas that researchers believe contain pockets of ice. The ispace rover offers a unique capability to explore these challenging landscapes by tethering a smaller two-wheeled rover to the main four-wheeled rover. One rover would collect sunlight for power, while the other would search for water in the Moon’s craters. Once the rovers have located ice, ispace will develop rovers that can dig and drill to extract the water.

ispace plans to send rovers to explore and develop the Moon.

The company’s objective is to create a system of fuel stations on the lunar surface that could safely supply water-based energy for human exploration and development. Such an energy supply on the Moon would help reduce the amount of fuel rockets that have to be carried—they would be able to refuel on the Moon for their return trip home.

Carrying less fuel would allow the payload size to be increased dramatically. Furthermore, by decreasing the size and mass of the rover, ispace would be able to further reduce the space needed on board and the fuel needed to transport payloads to the Moon.

ispace's rover is based on the development of the world’s smallest rover, a contestant for the Google Lunar XPRIZE by the HAKUTO group that includes ispace. At one point in its development, that rover had to be rescued from a lab at Tohoku University in Japan during the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Ultimately, ispace hopes that its miniature rover will take the first steps toward creating its concept of Moon Valley—a permanent lunar settlement that would be connected economically and socially to the Earth.

Read more about developments in lunar exploration at Solar Reactor Makes Water and Oxygen from Moon Rocks.