NASA ARC Roverscape

NASA/Don Richey. Public domain (NASA / US government work).

The Roverscape is a two-acre outdoor lunar analogue terrain field at NASA ARC, used for rover mobility, navigation and telerobotic operations. Its free surface is pea gravel rather than a regolith simulant, laid out with boulder distributions and an average surface albedo of 8 percent chosen to resemble lunar regolith [1][2]. It is the terrain the Intelligent Robotics Group drives on, and it is where the K10 planetary rover was operated from the International Space Station in 2013.

The Arc Jet Complex shares the center but nothing else, and has its own page: it is run by a different branch, in different buildings, for a different purpose.

Laboratory data

Parameter	Value
Operator	NASA ARC, Intelligent Robotics Group [1]
Location	Moffett Field, California, United States
Commissioned	Not published; in use for Surface Telerobotics in summer 2013
Type	Outdoor analogue terrain field [1][2]
Floor area	Two acres, approximately 8,100 m2 [2]
Capabilities	Terrain field
Simulant or terrain	Pea gravel free surface, boulder distributions, 8 percent albedo
Instrumentation	Not published as installed capability; users bring their own metrology
Ground truth	Site imagery at 0.75 m/pixel and a 1.5 m/post elevation model [1]
Fidelity limits	1 g, Earth atmosphere, ambient daylight, pea gravel not simulant [2]
Access	Not published; no external user route, lead time or fee schedule located
Cited by	VIPER through the Moon Gravity Representative Unit [1]

Orbital-resolution imagery of the site at 0.75 m/pixel and a digital elevation map at 1.5 m/post were produced for mission planning, both deliberately degraded to match what is available for the Moon, which gives the site a ground truth layer that is independent of any rover driving on it: surface-level survey data can be compared against what orbital resolution would have shown [1]. Campaign metrology is otherwise brought by the user, for example the multi-dot laser projector and camera mounted on the leading edge of K-REX2 for the virtual bumper work [2].

Capabilities

Terrain field

Parameter	Value
Working volume	Two acres, approximately 8,100 m2; no layout plan published [2]
Test article limits	Full-scale rovers K10, K-REX2 and VIPER MGRU run here [1][2]
Vacuum	Not applicable; outdoors at Earth ambient pressure
Temperature	Not controlled; Moffett Field outdoor conditions
Illumination	Ambient; night running used for directional lighting cases
Simulant or terrain	Pea gravel, boulder distributions, 8 percent average albedo
Slope	Not published; no slope inventory or settable slope rig described
Gravity offload	Not applicable; weight-equivalent test platforms used instead

Everything published about the field’s physical construction fits in two sentences of a computer vision paper: it is a two-acre outdoor planetary analog terrain with boulder distributions and an average surface albedo of 8 percent similar to lunar regolith, whose free surface is covered in a layer of pea gravel and not a regolith simulant, for reasons of practicality [1][2]. Obstacle test cases have been designed to mirror the geometric possibilities likely in craters at the lunar poles. No tonnage, grain size distribution, bearing capacity or preparation procedure between tests is published [1][2].

Illumination is not an engineered capability but it is used as a variable. Day and night tests have been run to recreate direct and indirect illumination conditions, the two chosen so that total incident illumination and dominant directionality were similar, which is how a structured-light hazard detector was evaluated on the site. There is no solar simulator and no settable solar elevation angle [1][2].

Lunar weight is approximated by building a weight-equivalent test platform rather than by offloading. The VIPER Moon Gravity Representative Unit is such a platform: its mass gives Earth-gravity wheel loads matching the flight rover’s lunar wheel loads.

Instrumentation

The site has no published installed metrology. What exists as facility infrastructure is the prior survey: satellite imagery of the site degraded to 0.75 m/pixel and a 1.5 m/post digital elevation model, both chosen to match the orbital data resolution available for the Moon, plus a control shelter from which operations are run [1]. Everything measured about a test article is brought by the campaign.

What it does not reproduce

Gravity and atmosphere. The field is at 1 g under Earth atmosphere and ambient daylight, and there is no offload rig [1]. Lunar weight is approximated by building a weight-equivalent test platform, the approach taken for the VIPER Moon Gravity Representative Unit [1].

Regolith. The surface is pea gravel, an explicit practicality substitution by the operators [2], so nothing about dust, sinkage, cohesion or tribology transfers. The Roverscape tests navigation, perception and operations, not terramechanics.

Repeatability of the terrain. No preparation procedure between tests is published, and the field is outdoors, so surface state is a condition of the day rather than a set variable [1][2].

Campaigns run there

Surface Telerobotics, summer 2013. Three astronauts of ISS Expedition 36 remotely operated the K10 planetary rover on the Roverscape from orbit, simulating a mission in which an astronaut in lunar orbit deploys a radio telescope on the lunar far side [1]. Each session gave 40 minutes of onboard just-in-time crew training on the robot user interface followed by two hours of mission operations, over Ku-band, using a combination of supervisory control by command sequencing and manual discrete commanding, for 11 hours of operation in total. Session 1 on 17 June 2013 surveyed the site and began deployment of a simulated telescope array; the surface-level survey data assessed terrain obstacles, slopes and undulations that were below the resolution of the orbital imagery or ambiguous because of its nadir pointing [1]. Session 2 on 26 July deployed all three arms of the array and ran ahead of schedule into the inspection phase. Session 3 on 20 August started midway through deployment and performed remote visual inspection [1]. Distances driven were 221.43 m, 170.14 m and 200.15 m in the three sessions [1].

Structured-light hazard detection, published 2017. A multi-dot laser projector and camera mounted on the leading edge of the K-REX2 rover were evaluated on the field against obstacle cases designed to mirror the geometry likely in lunar polar craters, in day and night runs chosen so that total incident illumination and dominant directionality matched [2].

VIPER mobility and navigation. The Moon Gravity Representative Unit, a weight-equivalent mobility and navigation test platform for VIPER, has been driven on the field to develop and validate the rover’s mobility and navigation techniques [1].