Author Archives: jan

Welcome to the third Fan Friday.

Hello and Welcome back to our third Fan Friday. You ask and we reply, while also giving away some sneak a peek at what we are doing.

We got some new questions from you and selected five out of them this time with the focus on technology.

Tech "If you gonna land at the equator why don't you drive down to the pole?"

There are two main resons why you not want to drive there:

• It's far too far. The moon has a mean radius of roughly 1737 km. That is a perimeter of ~10.914 km and that's four times the length from the equator to one of the poles. So traveling 2.728 km all the way down it will take us 2,59 years (that's 948 earth-days or 33 lunar-days) if we drive nonstop day and night assuming we make 2m/min (that's 0,12 km/h or 2,88 km/d). If we can go 30m/min (that's 1,8km/h or 43,2km/d) it will still take us 63 earth-days (that's 2,25 lunar-days). But we haven't considered yet that we can't drive in a strait line and have to slow down if there are obstacles in our way.
• The terrain down there is not as well explored as the Apollo landing sites and it's surroundings. What we know is, that down there are much more cracks, gaps and other obstackles except for polar bears along the way.

Stats “How much is the rover?”

One R2 Prototype costs roughly €30.000 - €40.000 including all the mechanical parts, the electronics and most of the other subsystems. What is not included in the calculations are certain unbelieveably expensive parts like the solar panel antenna and man-hour.

Tech "Can Regolith go through the skin?"

Regolith is a material like sand except it also has particles as small as 1µm to 20µm. Such small particles are also found on earth, they are called Particulates or particulate matter (PM) and are produced eg. when you burn something (wood, gas, coal). Particles smaller than 10µm are classified as the thoracic fraction cause you can inhale them into your lungs, particles smaller than 1µm are classified as the respirable fraction cause they can pass through the alveoli in your lungs. So the answer is, we know that the small particles of regolith can get into your lungs but we don't know a current medical study that states regolith can pass through the skin.

Social "What do you do with the prize money?"

We have no plans what to do with the money and we haven't calculated it in our businessplan. However one part might be distributed to the members of the team. Whatever we will do after the GLXP, we will always make sure that we can enjoy such a beautiful view during business negotiations.

Tech "Were there massive setbacks in the development of the rover, or did always go to plan?"

One massive setback we had was the rover's suspension system. We modeled it with SolidWorks and did all the calculations just to discover that after the production and assembly something went wrong: the rover sagged - completely. The problem was, we calculated the springs of the suspension system for the lunar gravity which is just 1/6 of earth's gravitation and so they were absolutely too weak. We had to redesign the suspension system to accomodate for both earth's and lunar gravity this was a setback of 3 weeks.

Image Credits:

• Panorama with Lander: NASA
• Astronaut with rake: NASA

Welcome to the second Fan Friday.

Today is YOUR day!

You ask and we reply, while also giving away some sneak a peek at what we are doing.

From all submissions we chose 5 questions from three different categories this time.

Stats "How many Moons will pass till you get there?"

30 full moons and 31 new moons.

Tech "Do you use any gears transmissions in your drive system?"

We use Planetary Gears for Steering and Drive Motors. It's in a construction Kit from Maxxon Motor. The difficulty with space however is, that you need to take special care of certain things which don't matter on earth. For example some lubricants will vaporize almost immediately in space, another is that the missing oxygen can lead to cold welding. So designing the right motor for space is challenging, but fun. Read more here

Social "How do you keep in touch with your team?"

As our team is working across 5 continents and 10 countries, we utilize any means possible to stay in touch. Depending on the sub-team in question there are multiple favorits for example instant messengers or voice-over-ip (internet telephony) clients. For real-time voice communication we use the open source cross platform solution Mumble. Just recently our developers managed to cross-compile a stable release for our teams iPhone users. For video communication we're sticking to Skype and Microsoft LYNC.

Instant communication is handled by old school mailing lists and state of the Art Apps like WhatsApp.

Social "Will you be taking a mini figure to the moon?"

As of now we haven't put much thought into this. The official GLXP team guidelines, the so called Master-Team-Agreement (MTA), requires each team to take a roughly defined *secret* payload to the Moon. We can only guess it is going to be Larry Page and Sergey Bring action figures

Mike Doornbos from Evadot.com suggested that we should have some "Robert" and "Sebastian" Action Figures amongst other cool stuff in his last Podcast. Of course these would be awesome candidates as something to go to the moon as "minor payload fluctuations".

Tech "Will you be using recycled or especially eco-friendly materials?"

We have to admit that our current design doesn't aim to be especially eco-friendly. They're designed to withstand the harsh environment of the moon while being as light as possible to cut down the overall mission costs. However we greatly appreciate the work of companys like SpaceX who try to combine both efforts on building cost effective and eco-friend launch vehicles:

SpaceX: "... Falcon 9 will be the world’s first launch vehicles where all stages are designed for reuse. The Falcon 1 has a reusable first stage, but an expendable upper stage"

NASA Spaceflight: "SpaceX aims towards a fully re-usable Falcon 9"

As promised last FF...

we have counted the exact number of parts for our rovers. The R1 has 380 parts and the R2 1667 parts.

One more thing ...

We got the first submission for our Facebook Design contest!

WE INTRODUCE: OUR 1# FACEBOOK DESIGN CONTEST!

The brief: create a new "outfit" for our rover asimov and win one of our "Hell Yeah..." shirts! Just post your ideas on our facebook wall. In one week the most liked design wins. as an extra win, in near future we will imprint the winning design on one of our test-rovers! At the following link you can download our logo, a picture of asimov and for sure "Hell yeah, it's rocket science!". Much fun and good luck!

Cheers!

Image Credits:

• Moon with airplane in front: NASA
• SpaceX Capsule: SpaceX.com/Mike Altenhofen

Welcome to the very first Fan Friday.

Today is YOUR day!

You ask and we reply, while also giving away some sneak a peek at what we are doing. From all submissions we chose 5 questions from three different categories this time.

Tech "Where is the antenna? I can't see it?"

The antenna is integrated in the solar panel and will be a phased-array antenna. This has some advantages like being able to use a fancy technology named beam forming. Additionally we don't have the disadvantages of a parabolic antenna that needs to be unfolded on the moon. To learn more about phased-array antennas see Wikipedia.

Social "How do you guys think your chances are to make it to the moon first? Who do you consider as your biggest rival?"

Because most competitors are not very open, it is hard to keep track with their progress from within our team. Luckily Evadot is in contact with most teams and keeps their scorecard up to date. Oftentimes we are in the leading field. In other words, we're quite happy with our progress and consider our chances fairly high. For our biggest rivals, just check the top 5 :-)

Stats "How many pizzas are consumed per month?"

It depends on the month chosen, calendar months where we assemble new prototypes got a high frequence of pizza deliveries. Judging by our billings the construction of the first Asimov R2(A) Rover cost the life of 23 delicious pizzas and 3 healthy salads, in June 2010.

Social "Why did you choose to participate in the Google Lunar X- Prize?"

Reply by Robert Boehme, Team Leader: Because I like to take on this unique opportunity and the extraordinary challenge this competition present. I am confident that everything we are doing is shaping the future of space exploration. However the real key to success is not technology but the people behind it. These people may it be the members of my or other teams will change the way we look at space forever.

Stats "How many parts does the rover have?"

The first rover prototype the Asimov Jr. R1A consisted of roughly 100 parts including wheels and screws. The second generation rover prototype, Asimov Jr. R2A originally consisted of roughly 1000 parts not including screws. Just for personal interest, we will give you an update on the count of screws by next week :-)

One more thing ...

The Clip of our 27C3 talk on our team, rovers, landers and a lot of Rocket Science!

Cheers!