MAPP

Lunar Outpost.

Overview

MAPP, the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, is a small four-wheeled lunar rover built by Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colorado, sold as a mobility service rather than as a vehicle: customers buy payload bays, power and data on a flight [10].

A MAPP flew to the lunar surface as Lunar Voyage 1 on the Intuitive Machines IM-2 Nova-C lander, launched 26 February 2025 [1]. The lander came to rest on its side about 250 m from its intended site, inside a crater at Mons Mouton, and MAPP was never deployed [13].

No full paper describing the MAPP bus has been published: bus mass, payload mass budget, stowed envelope, payload bay count and volumes, payload power and design drive range are all unpublished, and the figures that do exist are Lunar Outpost’s own [10], [9], [11].

Specifications

Parameter	Value
Vehicle mass, flight article	10 kg
Top speed	10 cm/s
Locomotion	four driven wheels

Manufacturer figures, from [11].

Mission profile

These describe the lander mission rather than the vehicle.

Parameter	Value	Source
Lander	Intuitive Machines Nova-C, IM-2	[1], [9]
Launch	26 February 2025	[1]
Landing	6 March 2025, about 10:30 MT	[9]
Landing site	Mons Mouton, lunar south pole, 250 m from target	[13]
Planned surface duration	up to 14 days, one lunar daylight period	[1]
Lunar transit operations	132.2 hours	[9]
Lunar orbit operations	77.1 hours
Surface operations in shadow	2.7 hours
Outcome	lander on its side, rover never deployed	[9], [13]
Total downlink allocation from lander	6 Mb for transit and surface combined	[9]

Nova-C came to rest on its side in a crater with the MAPP garage wedged upside down beneath the lander, which prevented deployment [9]. Intuitive Machines did not expect the lander to recharge, given the sun direction, the solar panel orientation and crater temperatures, and declared the mission concluded on 7 March 2025 [13]. The manufacturer states that the returned MAPP data shows the rover survived the landing and would have driven. During the mission Lunar Outpost received 57,574 telemetry data points, downlinked multiple images and sent 268 commands, inside a total lander-provided downlink allocation of 6 Mb [13].

The planned network demonstration required the rover to operate as a mobile subscriber at two ranges from the lander, short range of order 200 to 300 m and long range up to 2 km, specifically to characterize link performance over varying terrain [1].

Mobility

Four driven wheels, top speed 10 cm/s [11]. No terramechanics data, slope limit, obstacle height, suspension geometry or design drive range has been published in a full paper, and no traverse was driven, so no measured mobility performance exists.

Power and energy

Solar generation with battery storage. Neither array power, battery capacity nor the payload power allocation is published in a full paper. The vehicle flown on Lunar Voyage 1 was a single lunar day design and was not built to survive the lunar night [10].

Thermal

The vehicle carries an Autonomous Thermal Control System, which the manufacturer reports held rover and payload temperatures inside design ranges through in-space transit and on the lunar surface, and which it assesses as having reached TRL 9 on this flight [9]. A thermal switch developed by Lunar Outpost EU under European Space Agency and Luxembourg Space Agency sponsorship was integrated on the same vehicle. No temperature limits, radiator area or heater power figures are published.

The MIT AstroAnt payload existed to instrument this subsystem: it carries a thermopile on its underside for contactless temperature measurement and was to drive on the rover’s top surface monitoring radiator thermal performance [13].

Compute and avionics

Two computers. The Fault Tolerant Flight Computer is a Lunar Outpost design containing FPGA, processor, memory and motor controllers, and performed all vehicle management on Lunar Voyage 1, including a transit through the Van Allen belts and operations in a shadowed region of the lunar surface [9]. A separate high-performance navigation and payload computer with its own memory handled navigation and payload work under coordination with the flight computer. Part numbers, radiation tolerance figures and memory sizes are not published.

The Talon rover hold-down and deployment system restrained the rover through launch and landing impact and is patent pending [9]; it held through a landing that left the lander on its side [13].

Autonomy

No full paper describes the onboard autonomy, and none of it was exercised on the surface. What the flight did establish, on the manufacturer’s own account, is the software that manages vehicle states, data relay, communications, payload applications and robotic functions, and stereo navigation camera imaging with onboard compression sized to the narrow downlink allocation [9].

Communications

The rover has no direct-to-Earth link of its own on this configuration; it communicates through the lander, and the total downlink allocation for the whole mission was 6 Mb [9].

The flight carried the Nokia Bell Labs Lunar Surface Communications System, a 4G/LTE network funded through the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate Tipping Point program and awarded in October 2020 [1]. The network splits into three elements: a Network in a Box on the Nova-C lander carrying dual-redundant base transceiver station and evolved packet core functions with custom RF antennas; a custom LTE modem optimized for extended coverage, integrated on MAPP with its own antenna set, making the rover the mobile user; and an operations and maintenance software suite written for a long-latency, low-rate, lossy direct-to-Earth backhaul. The stated objective was high-definition video streaming plus command, control and telemetry for the rover over the cellular link. Deployment mechanisms for the Nokia antennas were built into the rover [9]. The Micro-Nova hopper on the same lander carried a second device module so that its data could reach the lander from inside a shadowed crater.

Payload and instruments

Lunar Voyage 1 carried the following on or in MAPP [9]:

Payload	Provider	Function
4G/LTE device module and antennas	Nokia Bell Labs	mobile node of the lunar cellular network [1]
Azure Kinect time-of-flight depth camera	NASA Ames and MIT	depth imaging of the lunar surface [9]
AstroAnt	MIT Media Lab	miniature magnetic-wheeled robot monitoring radiator temperature [13]
Regolith collection mechanism	Lunar Outpost	sample acquisition under a NASA space resources contract [9]
Neutron spectrometer	not stated	hydrogen signature prospecting [9]
HUMANS message wafer, digital message payload	MIT and partners	non-technical [9]

AstroAnt is a miniature robot that moves on magnetic wheels across the rover’s top surface, carries a thermopile for contactless temperature measurement, and exchanges data with a central station over Bluetooth Low Energy [13]. A garage for it was built into MAPP, as was a dust mitigation lens cover mechanism [9].

Modes of operation

No mode set is published. The states exercised on Lunar Voyage 1 were transit operations, lunar orbit operations, and surface operations while stowed in the garage [9]. Deployment from the garage by the Talon mechanism would have been the transition to surface driving, and the geometry of the landed lander made that transition impossible [13].

Ground operations

Operations run from Lunar Outpost’s own mission control on the Stargate mission control software [10], [9]. The manufacturer reports 99.998 percent Stargate uptime across the mission, covering cloud infrastructure, the ZEBCHAT segmented and unsegmented telemetry protocol, file loads, task manager and vehicle commanding, and states that this exceeds the requirement level for human-rated Class A programs. Command and telemetry volumes for the mission were 268 commands and 57,574 data points [9].

Technologies developed

The manufacturer claims TRL 9 from Lunar Voyage 1 for the Fault Tolerant Flight Computer, the navigation and payload computer, the Autonomous Thermal Control System, the stereo navigation cameras with onboard compression, the Stargate ground software, and key rover subsystems generally, and describes MAPP as the first US teleoperated rover operated in cislunar space and on the lunar surface [9]. These are manufacturer assessments; no independent verification has been published, and the rover never drove.

Separately from the bus, the flight qualified the Nokia LSCS hardware line that is now being adapted for Artemis III, where a modified Network in a Box and device modules moving to 3GPP Band 7 are to be integrated into Axiom AxEMU suits and the Human Landing System [1].