Google Lunar X PRIZE Roundup #12 March 23, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : Google Lunar X Prize, Google Lunar X Prize Roundup, property rights, Thomas Gangale , 1 comment so farIt’s time for this week’s roundup of all the latest goodies from around the Google Lunar X PRIZE…
- The official GLXP site has a new poll: Should lunar property rights be allowed on the Moon? (I commented on the poll, noting what I gathered from reading Thomas Gangale’s “The Development of Outer Space: Sovereignty and Property Rights in International Space Law“–namely that property rights on land aren’t allowed under the Outer Space Treaty, but you do own anything you can collect or mine from the commons).
- Team ARCA‘s daily video blogs keep on rolling in! Most impressive :)
- ‘Team Astrobotic announced they’ll now have room for 240 pounds of third party payloads, increased from the original 12 pounds! Astrobotic also updated the progress of their battery pack on their blog.
- The official GLXP blog, The Launch Pad, reposted a SmartBlogs.com blogger’s perspective on the GLXP SxSW panel.
- Team Synergy Moon noted that their launch provider, Interorbital Systems, is now also going to carry a payload for fellow GLXP team Euroluna! Good to see some cross-team props :)
- Team Selenokhod added a new partner: management consulting company, Project PRACTICE!
- Team c-base Open Moon also added a sponsor: TresCom Technology!
- Team Euroluna posted a video on their productive (and fun) trip to France :) They also posted an interesting video demonstration, using a run in Copehagen to illustrate the benefits of a detour (as their landing rover plans to make en route to the Moon).
- Team Part Time Scientists launched a neat contest on their Facebook page (March 15th): post an idea for their firs taction on the Moon onto their wall, and whoever’s idea gets the most /likes wins a shirt :)
- Team SELENE posted a video of an outdoor hybrid rover test!
- Team White Label Space‘s rover got front-page attention in a major Spanish-language paper, via an article on their partner, Emxys.
- Team FREDNET‘s Picorover team also got a lot of Spanish media coverage, video and otherwise. Muy bien!
- White Label Space also posted a neat look at lander thermal design and analysis.
- FREDNET also got mentioned in a National Geographic blog post on real science you can do from home.
NASA Images Lunokhod 2 Rover March 19, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter, Roscosmos, rover, Russia , add a comment
NASA’s busy Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has solved a longstanding mystery: it has found the final resting place of the russian Lunokhod 2 rover.
The Lunokhod 2′s 37-kilometer journey ended after a trek through a small crater ended up covering its arrays with soil. Canadian professor Phil Stooke has noted this image as a discovery of the final resting place, though apparently there is some Russian dissension on the idea it was ever lost at all. Regardless, it’s exciting to have such great images of important historical artifacts on the lunar surface :)
Besides the Lunokhod, the LRO has imaged many of the Russian craft left on the Moon—and not to mention, the Apollo 11 lander and other significant American sites (bye bye, hoax theories?).
There’s tons of goodies to be had in the LRO image library, of all spectrums, so check it out :) Towards the end of the mission, or perhaps sooner, I’ll be recapping some of the best highlights of the LRO’s findings right here.
Updates on China: Rock Lab; International Lunar Network Still Rolling? March 16, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : Chang'e, China, International Lunar Network (ILN) , add a comment
Space.com has an article up about Chinese plans for a lunar rock receiving lab, as well as general updates on the Chinese program.
Presenting at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), Chinese experts noted plans for their processing center, which sounds roughly equivalent to NASA’s famed Lunar Receiving Laboratory. China currently plans to have the Chang’e-3 lander down in 2013, with the Chang’e-4 rock hauler touching down in 2017 and the Chang’e-2 luanr orbiter launching later this year.
There’s an almost aside quote towards the end of the article that caught my attention:
“”In addition they have started participating in discussions for the International Lunar Network (ILN) mission…” – Ray Arvidson, Washington University Professor
Details on that ILN have been slim so far, but to see a current mention after NASA’s cancellation of Constellation is interesting. A NASA site says about the project:
“NASA will undertake landed lunar missions and is architecting a conceptual “global lunar network” as a backbone of its envisioned robotic surface activities. This concept, called the International Lunar Net-work (ILN), aims to provide an organizing theme for all landed science missions in the 2010s by involving each landed station as a node in a geophysical network.” -NASA Science Mission Site, ILN
Clearly, with NASA taking a step back, someone else would likely step in to ‘architect’ the continuation of the network…and from that quote about the recent Chinese “discussions” about it, it sounds like someone is. Guess international lunar development will roll on, with or without NASA, at just the same pace :)
Google Lunar X PRIZE Roundup #11 March 12, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : Google Lunar X Prize, Google Lunar X Prize Roundup , add a comment- The official GLXP Launch Pad blog looked at the lessons from NASA’s centennial challenges, and also gave a good look at how the changes for NASA’s 2011 budget proposal affect prizes.
- The GLXP has a panel+booth at this year’s South By Southwest!
- The GLXP welcomes a new Education Manager: Chanda Gonzales!
- Team ARCA is now posting daily (!) video journal entries! Most impressive :)
- Team Odyssey Moon has released a foxy fact sheet on their “M-1′ lander!
- Team Euroluna posted an artist’s concept of their testing spacecraft, double cube sat mini-romit-I (which will test imaging and other technology)!
- Team Astrobotic posted a look at their anti-lunar heat technology taking shape, as well as a photo-riffic look at the development of the battery pack, a look at a test inertial measurement unit, motorizing a prototype, and more on lunar night survival tech–great stuff :)
- Micro-Space‘s Richard Speck posted a nice, detailed blog on the challenges of re-entry systems.
- Micro-Space also posted about a rocket race in Oklahoma and that state’s developing aerospace industry, and another detailed effort on lowest mass lunar systems.
- Team White Label Space team member Kazuya Yoshida conducted a seminar at their HQ on the technical challenges of lunar rovers. Check out the video, as well as video of his university’s rover lab.
- Team Part Time Scientists team member Robert Boehme did a video on the GLXP for Ignite Berlin!
- Team SELENE posted a video of obstacle avoidance and ignition testing for its hybrid rover, and also posted a video of a space microscope test.
- Team FREDNET posted a video of a counterweight system for their PicoRover.
- A C-Base Open Moon team member reported back from the 3rd International Symposium on Nano Structures (OZ-10).
- The GLXP got a great write-up from the United Arab Emirates’s mag The National.
- Team Astrobotic’s third rover prototype is getting it’s fashion model mode on.
- In a related note, Team Selenokhod did an internet radio talk on space+fashion.
- X PRIZE guy Will Pomerantz got his own LEGO moon landing depiction. :D
- And last but not least, the Bacon Prize is gaining steam…
Check back next Friday for Roundup #12! :)
Tons Of Water Ice Found at Lunar North Pole! March 1, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : Chandrayaan, Chandrayaan-1, NASA, Odyssey Moon, Polar ice, water , 1 comment so far
NASA’s Mini-RF instrument on India’s Chandryaan-1 orbiter has revealed, like the LCROSS ‘moon bombing’ and NASA’s other Chandrayaan probe (the M3) before it, evidence of water on the moon.
This time, it’s at least 600 million metric tons (!!) of ice deposits in craters at the lunar north pole—an enormous number! By comparison, the LCROSS impact turned up about 100kg of water (~22 gallons). Essentially this means that like Cabeus in the South, the ‘40 or more‘ permanently-shadowed craters investigated at the lunar north pole harbor that kind of ice.
“The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.”- Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (and chief lunar scientist of Google Lunar X PRIZE team Odyssey Moon); “Tons of Water Ice Found on the Moon’s North Pole”, Space.com
This should mean that the North Pole—and any permanently-shadowed crater—should have any lunar prospectors (human, robotic, or otherwise) salivating.
Santa (as reported by Apollo 8) better like company… :)
