Even with such a small size, the rover can still pack a decent amount of sensors on its platform, including two custom-made cameras and a radiation sensor. Its original mission is to stay operational on the Moon and continue to communicate back to the ground stations at TU Delft for ½ a lunar day while it can receive power from sunlight.
Ensuring the little rover can meet its lunar challenge is a difficult task. The team has already tested in situ in some of the most hostile environments on Earth, including lava tubes in Iceland and on the slopes of the Alps. But the space presents even more challenges, including constant radiation and extreme temperature swings, which the team believes the rover can overcome in its current configuration.
In that configuration, the rover can be attached to any nation’s lunar lander, though it does not seem that the student group has picked a specific lander to piggyback on. Nor has they selected a timeline for when that launch might be. But that hasn’t stopped them from planning for the next stage already.That stage would include using one of the advantages of the Lunar Zebro’s small size – it is relatively inexpensive to manufacture.
But in order to move on to that part of the mission, the team first has to get their first lunar mission under their belt. There, the advantages of a student-run team come into focus. They will have a never-ending supply of students willing to work on the project, and the project itself enhances the reputation of TU Delft as a university where students can work on advanced projects like this. However, those students also rotate away after a certain amount of time.