Thanks to Vodafone, the Taurus-Littrow Valley on the Moon will get its first mobile phone base station next year.
Thanks to Vodafone, the Taurus-Littrow Valley will get its first mobile phone base station next year.
It hasn’t needed one up to now, as the last visitors drove through in 1972, the year before the mobile phone was invented.
Next year, though, it will get the very latest in 4G LTE coverage, when it receives a visit from two very special self-driving vehicles.
Taurus-Littrow is the landing site of Apollo 17, where humans last walked on the moon. Next year, an international group based in Berlin plans to send a mission carrying two lunar rovers to explore the site.
The group, Part Time Scientists, has been working on the project for longer than eight years and already has sponsorship and support from auto manufacturer Audi to develop the rovers.
Karsten Becker of Part Time Scientists shows off a lunar rover like the ones the organization will send to the moon in 2018.
Its mission will spend about 10.5 days on the moon’s surface, where temperatures during the lunar day (which lasts about two earth weeks) can hit 120 C, while during the lunar night they can plunge to minus 180 C.
„That’s quite a challenge for the electronics, so there is a chance it will not survive the first lunar night,“ said Karsten Becker, head of the PTS embedded electronics development team.
NASA has asked private space missions to touch down at least 2 kilometers from Apollo sites so that they are not covered by dust kicked up during the landing.
That distance presents a challenge for PTS because it will not have line-of-site communications between its landing module and the Apollo 17 site in the bottom of the valley.
To help deal with that, PTS has found a new sponsor, mobile network operator Vodafone.
At the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, Vodafone executives described the communications systems the PTS rovers will use to communicate with the landing module and with one another.
