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Lander Thermal Design and Analysis

Andrew Barton — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:57:48 -0800

The White Label Space engineering team has started the design and analysis of the thermal subsystem for our our Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) lander. Since the lander will operate as a telecommunications relay for the rover, both the lander and the rover must be capable of withstanding the high temperature environment of the lunar day.

Starting from the design outlined in our Mission Concept Summary document, our specialists Martin Lemmens and Michiel Vullings are defining the external surface optical properties needed to maintain the lander's internal equipment within the required operating limits. To analyse the thermal performance of candidate designs, the team is constructing radiative equilibirum models such as as the one shown in the picure below.

This early model includes only the hexagonal body of the lander and a deployable solar array. The lander is offset above a simulated lunar surface.

Following the same approach that was used in NASA's (Lunar) Surveyor missions, the solar array is actuated about one axis. By controlling the roll angle of the lander at the time of touchdown, the rotation axis will point either north or south, and thus it is possible to point the solar array directly at the sun for the complete lunar day.

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Video of Professor Yoshida Seminar at AOES

White Label Space — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:48:02 -0800

Following on from the earlier post, this is a video showing some of professor Yoshida's seminar at the White Label Space HQ in the AOES offices last weekend.

Pictures from Professor Yoshida Visit to AOES

White Label Space — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:39:12 -0800

Saturday 27th February 2010, professor Kazuya Yoshida gave a seminar at the White Label Space Headquarters located at the offices of AOES Group BV in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. In his seminar he explained the technical challenges of lunar rovers and presented the upcoming plans for the White Label Space rover developments currently underway at the Space Robotics Laboratory at Tohoku University in Japan (see recent video post).

Accompanying him on the podium was Dr Andrew Barton, the lead designer for the White Label Space lander, who provided an introduction to latest activities at the White Label Space Headquarters and the team's plans for the rest of 2010 and beyond.

After the presentation, the visitors were treated to a display of mock-ups as well as sample hardware and posters from the team's Partners.

The event was also the first chance to show a prototype of the egress ramp system that enables the Rover to safely drive from the top of the landing platform down onto the surface of the Moon. The egress ramp prototype was built by AOES engineers and was inspired by the ramps used in the successful Lunakhod Moon rover missions by the Soviet Union.

Also on display was hardware from the Wroclaw University of Technology, including a back-up antenna from the ARISS project. Two such antennas were successfully launched in 2008 attached to the Columbus module of the International Space Station (ISS).

Scroll down this post to see some more photos of the event.

A group photo with a Lander mock-up with attached egress ramps and mock-up rover

Professor Yoshida inspects the prototype egress ramps and small rover mock-up

Dr Barton demonstrates a small mock-up rover on the ramps. A motorized egress test using a full-scale rover is planned for later in 2010

New Creative Director - Jessica van den Doel

White Label Space — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:33:46 -0800

Jessica joined the White Label Space team to maximize the marketing opportunities for our sponsors by unleashing the full potential of our Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) mission. In this video, Jessica shares her thoughts about working in the White Label Space team.

As Creative Director she is leading the team's creative efforts to attract sponsors, as well as assisting with the marketing of our no-name brand, White Label Space.

After White Label Space finds its major sponsors Jessica will analyze their communications strategies and develop creative approaches that make optimal use of the White Label Space GLXP mission. She will stimulate and consolidate the creative efforts of the integrated team that includes White Label Space members and customer representatives, putting together a clear and coherent branding approach that presents a common theme across all aspects of the mission, while ensuring that the branding fits the requirements and desired image of the various sponsors.

Visit to Tohoku University Rover Lab

Andrew Barton — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:45:42 -0800

During my recent trip to Japan, I got the chance to drop by Professor Yoshida's Rover Laboratory at Tohoku University, where I recorded these video clips.

Tohoku University is located in the city of Sendai, about 2 hours by bullet train north of Toyko.

How Many Super Bowl Ads Would a Moon Mission Cost?

Andrew Barton — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:51:48 -0800

With the Super Bowl coming up tomorrow White Label Space did a quick check on the price that advertisers are paying this year for a 30 second timeslot during one of the most watched sporting events in the world. According to this CBS news piece, the answer is $3 million. (Note also the interesting discussion about trademark ownership at the end of the news piece.)

Wow! It costs $1 million per 10 seconds of Super Bowl air time.

Now, our team's cost engineers have predicted that our Google Lunar X PRIZE mission will cost around $50 million. That's equal to 500 seconds (8.3 minutes) of Super Bowl ad time, or about 17 standard length ads.

Of course, just like the Super Bowl and other high profile international competitions, our Mooncasts will clearly show the logos of our sponsors on our Rover and Lander as they go about their business on the field of play.

May the best team win!

WLS Presents at University of Tokyo

White Label Space — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:15:56 -0800

Yesterday, in the team's first major event in Japan, two of the technical leaders in the White Label Space team presented their latest plans for the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Professor Kazuya Yoshida, the lead engineer of the Rover and Dr Andrew Barton, lead engineer for the Lander, presented to a crowd of over 50 including many prominent members of Japan's space industry. Also sharing the podium was Misuzu Onuki, CEO of NewSpace Consultants and prolific space 2.0 author explained the benefits and challenges of private space exploration with a particular emphasis on increasing Japan's involvement in this exciting field.

Dr Peter Diamandis from the X PRIZE Foundation also joined the proceedings remotely by sending a video email welcoming Japanese involvement in the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

The event also served as a kick-off meeting for the Japanese branch of White Label Space with enthusiastic brainstorming continuing until the early hours of the morning.

White Label Space aims to harness the advertising budgets of some of the world's biggest brands to achieve its Google Lunar X PRIZE mission and the connection with Japan is very important since that country has many of the world's top technology firms and biggest advertisers. The team is planning to develop a "made in Japan" rover that will provide sponsors with a strong platform to reach out to the general public, sending a message of technological advancement and commercial leadership.

Jon Oxer to Present at linux.conf.au

Andrew Barton — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:24:09 -0800

Jon Oxer, member of our open source partner Lunar Numbat, will present at linux.conf.au, (the Linux Conference of Australasia) on Thursday the 21st of January in Wellington, New Zealand.

In his talk Jon will discuss Lunar Numbat's progress and also some of the technical challenges they are facing in their support of the White Label Space GLXP mission.

Jon Oxer is a member of the Lunar Numbat build team and is currently working on the throttle control system for the White Label Space lunar lander. He has written four books, and along with Hugh Blemings, and the latest called Practical Arduino was just publised. By day Jon works as Technical Director of a web application development company, and by night he's working to connect every part of his house, car, and garden to the Internet using a combination of Arduino and gaffer tape.

The Most-Likely-to-Happen Factor

Andrew Barton — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:10:20 -0800

Similar to the well known KISS principle ("Keep It Simple Stupid"), the Most-Likely-to-Happen factor is a way for engineers to evaluate the feasibility of particular design option. I first heard of the Most-Likely-to-Happen factor about 7 years ago from Mark Blair of the Australian Space Research Institute whilst I was working on the AUSROC 2.5 project. Mark credits the concept to a gentleman by the name of Andrew Cheers (whom I have not met).

When working on aerospace projects it is inevitable for engineers to get carried away with exotic design solutions which, at least in the head of the engineer proposing them, are the most perfect and elegant solution to the problem. Every engineer who I ever worked with is guilty at least once in their career of proposing, and vehemently arguing for, a wacky design solution which for some reason or other completely defies reality. Perhaps it could be a special yet-to-be-designed widget (aka a "silver bullet") in the system block diagram that somehow delivers all the most challenging functions in a neat little box (probably made from the material unobtanium). It could also be a design option that makes use of a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) component that does exactly what is needed but which costs an order of magnitude more than the project team can ever raise. In space projects another very important example is an idea that requires a component falling under technology export control laws.

Engineers use all sorts of 'design factors' to estimate the uncertainty of the physical processes that define the success of failure of a design. Unlike design factors, the Most-Likely-to-Happen factor is not a quantitative value. Rather it is a symbol or metaphor describing the process that should be followed when estimating the impact of those other all-important constraints on the project such as finances, politics, manpower, schedule, expertise, motivation, etc..

The tendency of engineers to propose creative new design solutions is an incredibly valuable thing. It is the engineers equivalent of a painter experimenting with new a brush technique or a sculptor trying a new base material for the first time. But just like in all creative professions, a successful project does not end with the creative idea. Some day the project must actually be realized, and this is where elegant creativity hits cold hard reality.

Since by necessity we engineers work in design teams, no matter how hard it hurts, we all have to be prepared to listen to that irritating fellow engineer who stubbornly keeps on pointing out that uncomfortable little pragmatic detail that makes our lovely little design solution impractical. Only by thoroughly discussing those details in a comprehensive and honest manner can the team ever succeed in identifying the design option that is indeed the "most likely to happen". In fact, I would suggest that those very discussions are where the design team truly adds value to the project.

The Most-Likely-to-Happen factor is an especially valuable concept to keep in mind in volunteer projects or projects that are poorly funded. This applies to any Google Lunar X PRIZE team that doesn't yet have millions of Dollars/Euros/RMB/Yen flowing in from investors to support their early engineering work, and let's face it, that's most of us!

Water on the Moon and the GLXP

White Label Space — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:59:28 -0800

By Mark Bentley - White Label Space Team Scientist

Despite most of us thinking of the Moon as a rather cold and desolate place, the nomenclature of lunar surface features conjures a rather difference image - that of a body awash with seas (Mare) and oceans (Oceani). These dark and relatively homogeneous regions, mainly found on the near side, are of course not water oceans, but volcanic plains. Nevertheless, the search for water in our Solar System continues unabated. Not only is water an essential ingredient for life as we know it, but it is an important resource for future human exploration - providing drinking water, oxygen and fuel components. This is why the detection of water is a bonus prize in the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) competition.

Most of our understanding of the Solar System, and indeed the Universe, comes from remote sensing - from data acquired from afar. And so the Moon is unique in being the only planetary body, apart from the Earth, for which we have samples from known locations (we know their "provenance"). The rock and regolith (soil) samples returned by the Apollo and Luna missions vastly improved our understanding of our closest neighbour, but they still only give us samples from a handful of sites - this is why more in-situ analyses and sample returns are needed to fully answer the key science questions at the Moon.

The returned lunar samples show evidence of a very dry world - without the water-bearing minerals that we see on Earth - but recently we have discovered that this is not the whole story. Radar observations from the Clementine spacecraft were the first to suggest that water ice might exist in the bottom of craters at high latitude. These data showed a highly scattered radar return - often a signature of multiple scattering in ice, but possibly also arising from a rather rough surface. It had for some time been theorised that water ice could exist in permanently shadowed polar craters; close to the poles, the Sun never rises very high, the solar flux on the surface is low, and it is possible for some craters to remain free from sunlight for millions of years. But this evidence was not conclusive.

The next piece of the puzzle came from the neutron spectrometer on-board Lunar Prospector. Although not capable of detecting water directly, it did detect regions of high hydrogen concentration at both poles, within the top ~40 cm of the surface. Again, there are alternative explanations for the results, but the synergy with the radar data was quite compelling.

More direct evidence came from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument on-board the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. This instrument was an imaging visible and near-infrared spectrometer. This means that it recorded sunlight reflected from the lunar surface and tried to determine mineralogy from the way in which this light is modified, leaving its spectral fingerprint behind. In particular, M3 had a spectral range that included the fingerprint of the hydrogen-oxygen bonds found in water. Importantly, M3 obtains data from only the first few millimetres of the surface.

The most recent data supporting the case for lunar water come from the LCROSS mission. This mission consisted of two parts, a modified rocket stage that was designed to crash into the lunar surface, and an instrumented spacecraft following behind that would image the impact site and hopefully fly through any debris kicked up on impact. The LCROSS impact was targeted at a shadowed crater at the south pole and the impact and observations were very successful. Two results (so far!) support the case for water on the Moon - the near-infrared spectrometer produced data that were only matched by the signature of water, and the ultra-violet spectrometer saw an emission from hydroxyl (the same O-H water by-product seen by M3).

The important thing about the LCROSS results is that they imply water in a significant quantity - approximately 100 kg from a 20 m diameter crater. This is not just a thin layer bound to surface rocks, but enough to perhaps extract and utilise.

So how does this discovery affect the GLXP teams aiming for the water detection prize? The rules say:

"The Water Detection Bonus Prize will be awarded to the first team that provides scientifically conclusive proof of the presence of naturally occurring water on the Moon. The detection of water must be made from a vehicle that has landed on the surface of the Moon and must be featured in a peer-reviewed paper to the satisfaction of the Google Lunar X PRIZE Judging Panel."

This presumably means H2O, rather than a hydrated mineral form. The LCROSS impact crater was expected to be around 20 m wide and 4 m deep. We don't know exactly from where the observed water originated, but this at least places some bounds. There are still important questions to be answered, from both a scientific perspective (where did this water come from? how long has it been there?) and a technical one (in what form is it? can it be easily extracted?). But it raises the stakes for the GLXP water prize.

Putting aside the technical difficulties of landing close to, getting inside, and surviving the lack of power and warmth inside such a crater, what are the implications of this discovery to the GLXP teams? In truth, it is hard to say. We still don't know enough about the location and form of the water before the LCROSS spacecraft impacted. Clearly to maximise the chances of success, any lander would need to be able to get below the surface, but the data we have now do not tell us whether we need a mole, deep drill, or simply a scoop.

To conclude, the discovery of significant amounts of water in shadowed polar craters is exciting, but not a game-changer for the GLXP teams. One probably still has to go to a permanently shadowed polar crater, but the chances of success are considerably higher now - the question is, are they high enough to justify the additional effort and risk?