Japan launched its lunar lander last week, and on board is a little transforming robot called LEV-2. Short for Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2, the robot is designed to shapeshift its way across the Moon, gathering up-close-and-personal information about the lunar surface.
When it’s idle, LEV-2 is roughly the size and shape of a baseball. This enables it to fit snugly aboard vehicles like JAXA’s lander. Once activated, the two halves that make up LEV-2’s spherical shape separate, revealing a pair of cameras and a stabilizer encased in yellow plastic. The wedge of metal that previously covered the middle of LEV-2 drags behind the robot, keeping it stable as LEV-2 rolls around. Meanwhile, the trapezoidal cutouts in LEV-2’s metal body enable the robot to “grip” the Moon’s sandy regolith as they rotate, propelling the probe forward.
If LEV-2 looks a bit like a children’s toy, that’s because it sort of is one. JAXA hired Tomy Company, a Japanese toy company, to help design the probe. The partnership was initially born from a desire to spark scientific interest in children. But it had a secondary benefit: By modeling LEV-2 like a toy, engineers reduced its component quantity, making it more reliable than it otherwise might have been.
Another recognizable Japanese brand assisted with the technology inside the robot’s shape-changing structure. Sony developed the small, energy-efficient control board and camera duo responsible for directing LEV-2’s movements and capturing images of the Moon’s landscape. The video below shows LEV-2’s components coming together to create an adorably small yet capable lunar probe. (Note that the video is entirely in Japanese and that the smartphone controls displayed are only for demonstration purposes.)
JAXA’s SLIM—short for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon—will release LEV-2 immediately upon touching down in early 2024. From there, LEV-2’s two-hour battery life will allow it to roam about SLIM’s landing site, taking close-up photos of the lunar surface. LEV-2 will send those photos back to Earth via LEV-1, a separate probe that also hitched a ride to the Moon via SLIM.
Hirano Daichi, associate senior researcher at JAXA’s Space Exploration Innovation Hub Center, thinks LEV-2 will inspire an interest in aerospace or robotics among children. In a JAXA statement, he said: "I hope children will get interested in science generally, not limited to space science, by seeing the baseball-sized vehicle running while swinging left and right on the Moon.”
