How to avoid a puncture on the moon

Go back to the moon after half a century, and then on Mars, literally re -establish the wheel.

After all, Mars has to go a long way to return if you get a flat.

“One thing that you cannot have may not be a puncture,” says Florent Menegucks, Chief Executive Officer of French Tyre-Mekar Michelin.

Unmanned curiosity is underlined by the experience of the rover.

Exactly one year after landing in 2012, its six rigid aluminum tires were blindly ripped with puncture and tears.

For Moon, American Artemis Mission Target to return astronauts therePerhaps by 2027.

The later Artemis Mission has planned to use a lunar rover to detect the south pole of the moon starting with Artemis V, which is currently scheduled to 2030.

Artemis astronauts will driving much more than their Apollo Purvals, who never extended over 25 miles (40 km) on the surface of the moon in six landings between 1969 and 1972.

“The target is to cover 10,000 kilometers in 10 years,” Silvan Barthet says, which runs the Michelin’s Chandra Airless Wheel program in the Central French city of Clarmont Pharand.

“We are not talking about small, week -long periods, we are talking about decades of use,” Dr. Santo Padula says, who has a PhD in material science, and works for NASA as an engineer at John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

A major challenge for anyone developing technology for the Moon is huge temperature limitations.

The temperature in lunar poles may be lower than -230c, it is not completely zero, where the atoms stop moving forward.

And this is a problem for tires.

Dr. “You have a difficult time without a nuclear motion, which is able to distort and return the material,” says Padula.

Tires are required to be able to distort to go up the rocks and then ping back into its original shape.

“If we permanently distort a tire, it does not roll efficiently, and we have issues with electricity loss,” Dr. Padula says.

The new wheels will also carry a much larger load compared to light rovers Apollo astronauts.

They say that the next space missions will require to round for “large science platforms and mobile houses grow big and big”.

And this will be another problem on Mars, where gravity is doubled on the moon.

The lunar rovers of Apollo used a tires made of zinc-coated piano wire in a woven mesh, with a distance of about 21 miles.

Since excessive temperature and cosmic rays break the rubber or turn it into a brittle glass, the metal alloy and high-demonstrations are the main contenders for plastic airless space tires.

“In general, metal or carbon fiber-based materials are used for these wheels,” says Pielian, team leader of the European Space Agency (ESA) Rosalind Franklin Mission.

A promising material is an alloy of Nitinol, Nickel and Titanium.

Earl Patrick Cole, Chief Executive Officer of Smart Tire Company, says, “It makes them fuse and makes a rubber-acting metal that can bend in all these different ways, and it will always return to its original shape.

He calls the flexible qualities of Nitinol “one of the most insanity things you will ever see”.

Knightinol is a potential “revolutionary” material which Dr. Padula says, because the alloy also absorbs and releases energy because it explains. Even it can solve heating and refrigeration, they say.

However, Michelin’s Mr. Barthet feels that a high-demonstrated plastic material would be more suitable for tires that need to cover long distances on the moon.

Bridhstone, meanwhile, has taken a bio-mimicry approach, by creating a model of camels footpads.

Camels contain soft, fatty footpads that spread their weight into a broad surface area, preventing their legs from drowning in loose sandy soil.

Inspired by this, Bridhstone is using a felt material for its walk, while the wheel contains thin metal spokes that can flex.

Flexing divides the weight of the lunar module into a large contact area, so it can drive without getting stuck in rocks and dust pieces on the surface of the moon.

Michelin and Bridhstone are each part of separate consortiums, which are with the Venturi Astrolb, California, presenting their proposed tire technology at NASA at John Glenn Center this month (May).

NASA is expected to decide at the end of this year – it can choose a proposal or adopt elements of many of them.

Meanwhile, Michelin is testing its tires by driving a sample rover on a volcano near Clramont, whose powder region resembles the surface of the moon.

Bridhstone is doing the same on the Totory Sand Tibba in western Japan.

ESA is also discovering the possibility whether Europe can create a rover on its own for other missions, Sri Barthet says.

Work may have some useful applications on Earth.

Working on his doctorate at the University of Southern California, Dr. NASA attended the program to work on commercialization of some technology from Cole Mangal Mangal Super-Lochded Rover tire.

This year an initial product will be nickel-titanium bicycle tires.

Around $ 150 (£ 120) each, tires are much more expensive than regular people, but will be extremely durable.

He plans to work on a durable tire for motorbikes this year, aimed at rough roads areas.

For all this, his “dream” remains to play a role in the return of humanity on the moon.

“So, I can tell my children, see there on the moon,” they say. “Daddy’s tires are there.”