13 January 2013

Improved video of Apollo 16's Lunar Roving Vehicle

The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) or lunar rover was a battery-powered four-wheeled rover used on the Moon in the last three missions of the American Apollo program (15, 16, and 17) during 1971 and 1972...

The first cost-plus-incentive-fee contract to Boeing was for $19,000,000... Cost overruns, however, led to a final cost of $38,000,000, which was about the same as NASA's original estimate. Four lunar rovers were built, one each for Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17; and one used for spare parts after the cancellation of further Apollo missions.

Other LRV models were built: a static model to assist with human factors design; an engineering model to design and integrate the subsystems; two one-sixth gravity models for testing the deployment mechanism; a one-gravity trainer to give the astronauts instruction in the operation of the rover and allow them to practice driving it; a mass model to test the effect of the rover on the LM structure, balance, and handling; a vibration test unit to study the LRV's durability and handling of launch stresses; and a qualification test unit to study integration of all LRV subsystems...
The video above was "stabilized using Deshaker v2.5 filter for VirtualDub 1.9.9."

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