Some smart folks over at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada, have actually decided to go ahead and reinvent the wheel as part of the Lunar Exploration Light Rover (LELR) project. The aim of the project is to build a lunar rover that’s light and able to navigate difficult terrain easily and their solution is the iRing. The iRing is a wheel made of a chainmail-type fabric, filled with granular particulate matter. This creates a wheel that’s heavy and sturdy enough to avoid bouncing around the moon while still being flexible enough to absorb shocks and overcome obstacles. There’s no promise that this design will eventually end up on the moon, but the final prototype of this is expected to be complete in the spring of 2012.
Filed in . Read more about Space.