A multifaceted decahedral black ceramic bezel and sandwich-style three-piece case – a redesign of Bremont’s signature Trip-Tick construction – houses a chronometer-rated automatic chronograph movement made by Sellita, with a 62-hour power reserve.
The watch will be from a passenger aboard the FLIP rover launching as part of Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1), which is expected to land at the lunar south pole sometime in the second half of this year.
It’s a one-way mission: The rover will remain permanently on the lunar surface, with a clock ticking as it moves across the landscape. FLIP’s objectives include reaching high altitudes on lunar terrain, collecting data on lunar dust accumulation, testing dust-mitigation coatings, and surviving a two-week lunar night in hibernation (which would be a first for an American rover).
In terms of serious timekeeping data for Bremont, the mission is clearly symbolic. The watch will be housed vertically within FLIP’s chassis, in a specially designed housing between its front wheels. Consisting only of the watch head, which weighs 107 grams, glued together using a specialist composite, its face is visible to FLIP’s HD cameras. But the hibernation period would mean that the watch (whose mechanical movement is driven by the movement of the wearer’s arm under normal circumstances) would stop running after its 62-hour power reserve was exhausted.
When the FLIP is in motion again, its motion should theoretically jolt the mechanism into action once again. Despite the gravitational pull which is one-sixth that of Earth, the rover’s acceleration, pitch and inclination must swing the rotating rotor, if at all, with less torque and efficiency than on Earth.
“My guess is that the clock will work from time to time, but for short periods,” Cerrato says. “We’ll learn along the way. But it’s exciting – it introduces us to a thinking process that’s completely outside the box. Just the fact of putting it out there is inspiring.” However, there is no doubt that Bremont, like other brands with any connection to the universe, will present its new space connection for all it is worth.
FLIP, which weighs just 1,058 pounds and carries a mix of commercial and government payloads, four HD cameras and a deployable solar array, is essentially a technology demonstrator for Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX), Astrolabe’s much larger SUV-sized rover set to support NASA’s Artemis program. The firm developed FLIP from scratch after VIPER, NASA’s equivalent vehicle for which the Griffin-1 mission was contracted, was retired in 2024. This left Astrobotic looking for a stand-in for a short time. Astrolabe, which signed the contract within a month of hearing about the opportunity in the fall of 2024, took FLIP from blank sheet to finished rover in about a year.
Its distinguishing feature are its ultra-deformable wheels, which are micro-structured from silicone, composite and stainless steel, creating a soft, increased contact surface with the terrain. “It’s like if you’re off-roading in a Jeep or Land Rover, where you let some air out of the tires so that the load softens and spreads over a larger area,” explains Jarrett Matthews, founder of Astrolab. While nighttime temperatures on the Moon are -200 degrees Celsius (about -328 Fahrenheit), which would cause conventional rubber tires to become glassy and shatter, Astrolabe’s solution aims to keep the rover from sinking into the unconsolidated lunar dust – or regolith – that covers the environment.
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