With revived interest in travel to the Moon — as the Artemis II mission demonstrated — the Driving Safety Research Institute is exploring vehicles that would allow lunar driving.
“The gravity on the Moon is only one-sixth of the gravity on Earth, so it has a few effects that make it drive differently,” Chris Schwarz, DSRI director of engineering and modeling research, told Radio Iowa. “Of course, the vehicle is going to feel a lot lighter and more bouncy. When it leaves the surface of the Moon, it gets slippery, so the handling gets really squirrelly.”
The DSRI team — with help from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Leeds — presented to NASA about simulation capabilities, digital twins, and their experience turning the National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS-1) into a moon rover simulation.
They simulated the look and feel of driving across the surface of the Moon during the “Lunar Autonomy Mobility” workshop for the South Pole Pathfinder/Rover project. This was held at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, last May.