Meet the Audi lunar quattro soon to land on the moon
Audi isn’t shying away from bold statements, that literally put them at the very top of automotive engineering on Earth. They believe in themselves and call their efforts a ‘force of nature’.
Now they can show what their philosophy of ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ which means ‘progress through technology’ is worth after all. They continue moving along the path they’ve chosen and will most likely find out what all the marketing talk can do for them off-planet — as a dedicated team of scientists will send an Audi rover to the moon in late 2017.
Yes, that’s correct, the team called Part Time Scientists is now competing to win Google’s Lunar X Prize against 16 other teams. If they are first to put a privately-funded and autonomous vehicle on the moon they’ll score some $20 million.
As of now, the Part Time Scientists might be ahead of the competition after signing a deal with Spaceflight Industries to get their rover on a rocket and onto the moon by late 2017. An international team called Synergy Moon, Space IL from Israel and US based Moon Express are the other teams currently featuring a launch plan.
By agreement the cooperation with Spaceflight Industries will get two Audi rovers on top of the moon heading for a site near the original Apollo 17 mission.
The hard part though, will be to successfully maneuver the rover a distance of at least 500 meters (a drive of about a third of a mile) and having it take and send pictures in high-definition along the way.
Doing it next to the landing spot of an Apollo mission will surely show the world, where and if our astronauts really landed back in the days, maybe putting an end to the ongoing discussions and theories… However, NASA doesn’t want the Germans or any other team to get any closer than two kilometers from the Apollo site to snap a pic.
Audi’s futuristic moon-car also features an Autonomous Landing and Navigation Module called ALINA, able to transport a good 100kg payload on each flight. So after all, it will be interesting to see what this will do for engineering back on Earth.
This article was originally published on pionic.
