The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) is a battery-powered four-wheeled rover used on the Moon in the last three missions of the American Apollo program during 1971 and 1972. It is popularly called the Moon buggy, a play on the term "dune buggy".
Geoffrey Alan Landis is an American aerospace engineer and author, working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on planetary exploration, interstellar propulsion, solar power and photovoltaics. He holds nine patents, primarily in the field of improvements to solar cells and photovoltaic devices and has given presentations and commentary on the possibilities for interstellar travel and construction of bases on the Moon, Mars, and Venus.
Oregon State University (OSU) is a public land-grant research university based in Corvallis, Oregon. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate-degree programs along with a variety of graduate and doctoral degrees. It has the seventh-largest engineering college in the nation for 2023. Undergraduate enrollment for all colleges combined averages over 32,000 while an additional 5,000 students are engaged in post-graduate coursework through the university. In 2023, over 37,000 students were enrolled at OSU – making it the largest university in the state. Out-of-state students typically make up over one-quarter of the student body. Since its founding, over 272,000 students have graduated from OSU. The university is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as an "R1: Doctoral University," with "Very high research activity."
A Mars rover is a remote-controlled motor vehicle designed to travel on the surface of Mars. Rovers have several advantages over stationary landers: they examine more territory, they can be directed to interesting features, they can place themselves in sunny positions to weather winter months, and they can advance the knowledge of how to perform very remote robotic vehicle control. They serve a different purpose than orbital spacecraft like Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. A more recent development is the Mars helicopter.
The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is the largest and longest-running Mars surface research facility and is one of two simulated Mars analog habitats owned and operated by the Mars Society.
Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a robotic space probe mission to Mars launched by NASA on November 26, 2011, which successfully landed Curiosity, a Mars rover, in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. The overall objectives include investigating Mars' habitability, studying its climate and geology, and collecting data for a human mission to Mars. The rover carries a variety of scientific instruments designed by an international team.
Oregon State University's College of Engineering is the engineering college of Oregon State University, a public research university in Corvallis, Oregon. U.S. News & World Report ranks OSU's engineering college 69th in the nation for 2024. The ranking makes the college one of the top two in the Northwest, while the college's nuclear engineering school ranks 12th nationally.
The rocker-bogie system is the suspension arrangement developed in 1988 for use in NASA's Mars rover Sojourner, and which has since become NASA's favored design for rovers. It has been used in the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover mission robots Spirit and Opportunity, on the 2012 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission's rover Curiosity, the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance and ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 rover Pragyan in 2023.
Durham University Solar Car, formerly Durham University Electric Motorsport, is a student-run team in the United Kingdom that designs and constructs solar powered cars to compete in international competitions. It is the longest running solar car team in the UK and is financed entirely by third party donations and sponsorship.
NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies is a group of teams which perform an annual series of field trials seeking to demonstrate and test candidate technologies and systems for human exploration of the surface of the Moon, Mars, or other rocky bodies.
The University Rover Challenge (URC) by the Mars Society is a robotics competition for university level students that challenges teams to design and build a rover that would be of use to early explorers on Mars. The competition is held annually at the Mars Desert Research Station, outside Hanksville, Utah in the United States. The site was selected by the Mars Society for its geographic similarity to Mars: In addition to being a largely barren desert area, the soil in the area has a chemical composition similar to Martian soil. The competition has also expanded internationally to include the European Rover Challenge, Canadian International Rover Challenge, and the Indian Rover Challenge as part of the Rover Challenge Series.
A Mars aircraft is a vehicle capable of sustaining powered flight in the atmosphere of Mars. So far, the Mars helicopter Ingenuity is the only aircraft ever to fly on Mars, completing 67 successful flights covering 15.499 km (9.631 mi) in 2 hour, 1 minutes and 4 seconds of flight time.
Curiosity is a car-sized Mars rover exploring Gale crater and Mount Sharp on Mars as part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral (CCAFS) on November 26, 2011, at 15:02:00 UTC and landed on Aeolis Palus inside Gale crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, 05:17:57 UTC. The Bradbury Landing site was less than 2.4 km (1.5 mi) from the center of the rover's touchdown target after a 560 million km (350 million mi) journey.
Sojourner is a robotic Mars rover that landed in the Ares Vallis channel in the Chryse Planitia region of the Oxia Palus quadrangle on July 4, 1997. Sojourner was operational on Mars for 92 sols. It was the first wheeled vehicle to rove on a planet other than Earth and formed part of the Mars Pathfinder mission.
MELOS is a Japanese rover mission concept under study for an engineering demonstration of precision landing, and to look for possible biosignatures on Mars using a rover. JAXA has not published updates since 2015.
The Faculty of Engineering at Monash University is one of the largest engineering faculties in Australia, with over 6,700 students in 2015.
Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, is a Ghanaian robotics engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the chief engineer and technical group leader for the mobility and manipulation group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory He has been associated with various NASA Mars missions, notably the Mars Rover and InSight projects.
Oregon State University's College of Liberal Arts is a liberal arts college at Oregon State University, a public research university. Based in Corvallis, Oregon, on the OSU campus, the college of liberal arts is the second largest of the 12 colleges at the university and offers 66 academic programs. The college awarded just over a thousand undergraduate degrees in 2023, the second most of all OSU colleges.
European Rover Challenge is an annual international Martian robot competition that has been organized since 2014 in Poland.
PrOP-M were two Soviet Mars rovers that were launched on the unsuccessful Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions in 1971. PrOP-M were the first rovers to be launched to Mars, 26 years before the first successful rover mission of NASA's Sojourner in 1997. Because the Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions failed, the existence of the rovers was kept secret for nearly 20 years.
