3913 Wheel Drive Experiment on Dry Sand in Low-Gravity Environment by Aircraft
Details
This report describes effects of gravity on traveling performance of wheeled rovers for future lunar exploration. A series of wheel travel tests on flatten dry sand were conducted under several gravity conditions in an aircraft with parabolic flight. In addition to the flight experiments, the same tests were performed on the ground with the same wheel vertical load as the aircraft experiments enabled by counterweights. Those experiments showed that traveling performance of the wheel becomes low for less gravity. On the other hand, low wheel vertical load improves the traveling performance under the same gravity condition.
