Destination Moon and beyond for the Microrover Nanokhod

The Nanokhod Rover is a small mobile scientific platform, designed to transport a package of scientific instruments and to carry out in-situ measurements of rocks and small craters in the vicinity of the landing point. The Microrover has a volume of 160 x 65 x 250mm³, it weighs 3,2kg including a payload mass of 1kg and it has a peak power of 5W. The Nanokhod is a tethered system, that uses the Lander as its power supply and as its data relay to Earth. The Nanokhod has recently been designed to withstand the demanding requirements of a flight model on a mission to Mercury. Based on this design, an engineering-level hardware model was built which is suitable for environmental testing, preparing the Rover design for a variety of probable future missions. This paper describes the design and the manufactured model.