Surveyor Lunar Roving Vehicle (Bendix)

[Graham1973]

NASAs pre-Apollo program underwent a number of changes as the need to reach the moon before the Russians came to dominate the program.

One concept, that was studied and not proceeded with was mounting a small (100lb) rover to a modified Surveyor. It was to be fitted with small scientific package including a television camera (also used for navigation) and a penetrometer. Power was to come from an RTG.

It was intended to survey a potential Apollo landing site and one option considered was to fit it with a means of marking the landing point.

See:

1. Surveyor Lunar Roving Vehicle, Final Report, Vol. 1, Summary Report

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660015678_1966015678.pdf


2. Surveyor Lunar Roving Vehicle, Final Report, Vol. 2, Mission and System Studies

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660014483_1966014483.pdf


3. Surveyor Lunar Roving Vehicle, Final Report, Vol. 3, Preliminary System Description, Book 1, System Description

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660004186_1966004186.pdf


4. Surveyor Lunar Roving Vehicle, Final Report, Vol. 3, Preliminary System Description, Book 2, Validation of Preliminary Design

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660006194_1966006194.pdf


5. Surveyor Lunar Roving Vehicle, Final Report, Vol. 4, Reliability

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660006188_1966006188.pdf

6. Surveyor Lunar Roving Vehicle, Final Report, Vol. 5, System Evaluation

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660004162_1966004162.pdf

7. Interim Study for a Surveyor Lunar Roving Vehicle, Final Technical Report

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660008345_1966008345.pdf

 

[bigvlada]

Charles Conrad and Surveyor III meet on the Moon.

 

[Graham1973]

Charles Conrad and Surveyor III meet on the Moon.

Pity it wasn't a rover in that image...

 

[OM]

...Graham, none of those links worked for me. Also, when I went to NTRS and searched for the specific titles, the search turned up nothing for each.


ITAR in action, perhaps?


:OM:

 

[Graham1973]

Forgive the necroposting. I've just checked the links in the OP and all the files are back online.

 

[Grey Havoc]

General Motors was also involved (advance to 6.43):

 

[Grey Havoc]

I dug through my files and found the Surveyor document. My memory was half-right.

What I have is a November 1964 proposal for what is called "Surveyor II." That is after the other documents that you posted--the A21 study, the Block II study (March 1964) and the Bendix rover study (April 1964). Without digging through it right now, it seems to be essentially a more formal proposal that was based upon those earlier works. So they took the ideas both for a Block II Surveyor with more science instruments and longer duration, and the rover idea, and rolled that into a proposal for a new round of Surveyor II spacecraft.

Unfortunately, there was very little chance of this getting funded at the time, because Apollo was eating up a lot of money and there was a good argument to say that NASA didn't really need to do more robotic spacecraft if they were about to land a bunch of men on the Moon who could gather a lot of data.

That said, I wonder if anybody tried to revive this idea after Apollo? It would have made sense to use this proven Surveyor design to go to unexplored parts of the Moon.

I'll see about scanning and posting the document. Unfortunately, this site doesn't allow very big files, so I'm expecting to run into problems doing that.

 

[Grey Havoc]

Here are some schematics from the Surveyor report that I mentioned.

I scanned the document in several pieces, but they are all about 1.7 to 2.2 megs, and therefore are too big to post here.

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/attachments/surveyoriidrawings-pdf.152069/