Toyota gets along the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

MANILA: “Manned, pressurized rovers will be an important element supporting human lunar exploration, which we envision will take place in the 2030s”, said Koichi Wakata, JAXA Vice President. "We aim at launching such a rover into space in 2029". Does this get you excited? It for sure gets us, though.

It was 1969 when a man walked on the moon for the last time, and now, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is aiming to get down some of its astronauts on the surface of the moon in 2030. The most interesting part is that Toyota, one of the biggest Japanese automaker has joined hands with JAXA and is working on a manned, pressurised, and self-driving fuel cell vehicles for Moon exploration.

It is to be noted that JAXA has already landed its Hayabusa2 probe on an asteroid named Ryugu. And now with the collaboration with Toyota, JAXA wants to "give rise to intellectual properties" which in turn will be of great assistance in exploring the space. An FCV is, however,

very different from conventional electric vehicles as it uses a fuel cell of oxygen and compressed hydrogen instead of lithium-ion batteries. The chemical elements then react with each other to produce electricity that is used to power the electric motor. Toyota Mirai is an example of a fuel cell vehicle.

“Fuel cells, which use clean power-generation methods, emit only water, and, because of their high energy density, they can provide a lot of energy, making them especially ideal for the project being discussed with JAXA", said Shigeki Terashi, Executive Vice President at Toyota.

JAXA and Toyota also mentioned that while the pressurised vehicle will carry a limited amount of fuel, the rover will carry around 10,000-km of lunar-surface cruising. Toyota collaborated with space projects in the past as well when it co-developed the Kirobo robot that was then sent to the ISS (International Space Station) in 2013.

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