Yesterday the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) unveiled the prototype for their new lunar rover that they want to help in future missions. Together with the Canadian Space Agency, NASA is teaming on a project called RESOLVE which stands for Regolith and Environmental Science and Oxygen and Lunar Extraction.

The hopes is that the new rover will be able to mine the resources and gather oxygen to be used for human consumption and for fuel. The Lunar rover will hopefully go to the North Pole of the moon. It will then take some of the Lunar soil and heat it up to 900 degrees Celsius. They will then take hydrogen that it takes with it and flow it over the superheated soil to create water. That water can then be used to create oxygen or can be used for human consumption, or to make rocket fuel.

Daniel Lefevbre of the Canadien Space Agency said that the next stop for the rover is for it to be shipped off to Hawaii to be tested on the slopes of the Big Island’s volcanoes. The hopes are that the tests can help ring out some of the problems so it will be space ready when someone is ready to launch it into space.

The rover is worth about 300 million dollars and is controlled by what looks like a Logitech gamepad for PC. Kind of a cool job.

Video and photo courtesy of Florida Today.