While exploring the moon is anything but child’s play, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, looked to a famous toy company for its lunar mission.
The New Yorker details the team-up between JAXA and Takara Tomy — which Hasbro worked with to create the Transformers toy line that later spawned a billion-dollar movie franchise — to create a unique moon rover called the SORA-Q.
“The idea of making a design with the smallest number of motors, in reducing the number of components to the bare minimum — as a toy company, this is something we have been doing for a long time,” said Takara Tomy engineer Yōsuke Yoneda.
The little Wiffle ball-looking probe is currently on its way to the moon, having hitched a ride on a rocket from Elon Musk‘s SpaceX company on December 11. It joins the world’s first commercial lunar lander, ispace’s Hakuto-R M1.
The plan is for the SORA-Q probe and others to land first. If they survive the impact, the engineers say the SORA-Q will transform and roll out, to quote Optimus Prime: The ball shape will split in two, exposing both a pair of Sony-designed cameras and wheels.
The probes will not only putter around the moon’s surface, but JAXA hopes SORA-Q will capture the history-making moment when the Hakuto-R M1 touches down.
The collabo between the toy company and the space agency started in 2015, with JAXA first envisioning a bug-like rover. While Tomy built — and set a mark recognized by the Guinness World Records for — the smallest mass-produced humanoid robot, dubbed the i-SOBOT, the idea of giving a probe potentially breakable legs was scrapped.
“After exploring many options, we realized that a ball represented the smallest possible shape,” Yoneda explains.