AMALIA Mission Lunar Rover—The Conceptual Design of the Team ITALIA Rover, Candidate for the Google Lunar X Prize Challenge

The paper provides an overview of the conceptual design of the Lunar Rover conceived by Team Italia for the AMALIA Mission, candidate for the Google Lunar X Prize Challenge. The name of the mission is an acronym of the Latin language sentence "Ascensio Machinae Ad Lunam Italica Arte".With the Lunar Challenge initiative, the X Prize Foundation intends to promote the involvement of private actors in the access to space, by endowing a prize to the first privately funded lunar mission covering a certain minimum distance on the Moon surface. Additional prizes are available in case of achievement of more challenging goals, like surviving lunar night, travelling for a longer distance, visiting areas of the first Apollo Missions.Although the AMALIA Rover Subsystems are the typical ones of an Exploration Rover, their design is highly influenced by the above depicted mission context. The followed design approach is closer to the one of a commercial mission than to an Institutional Space Exploration Mission one. It has to be noted that, for being compliant with GLXP rules, at least 90% of funds required for competing in the Prize has to come from private or non-governmental sources.The achievement of such challenging goals requires adopting suitable technical and programmatic solutions, having the need to optimize costs and schedule while still maximizing the probability of success. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.