Welcome to the eighth Fan Friday.

Here comes the eighth Fan Friday. You ask and we reply. If you want to take a look at the previous questions go to our blog.

This week we chose five questions with focus on our next public outreach events.

Social "Which events are you attending in 2011 next?"

• March 20th
  Michael Mussler
  @ Chemnitzer LinuxTage (Presentation on building a rover prototype)
• March 24th
  Michael Mussler
  @ Dorkbot Munich (Presentation on building a rover prototype)
• April 4th till 6th
  Michael Mussler
  @ International Hannover Messe; along with our partners NVidia, 3DConnexion and Solidline (Various Presentations)
• April 7th
  Michael Mussler & Robert Boehme
  @ Nerdnite Berlin (Presentation on PTS and how far we've come/where we're going)
• May 14th
  Robert Boehme & Arne Reiners
  @LinuxTage Berlin (Presentation on using realtime QNX for embedded hardware)
• May 18th till 22nd
  Wesley Faler
  @ ISDC Huntsville (Presentation and GLXP Panel. And how about controlling a moon rover with your Droid?)
• June 16th
  Karsten Becker
  @ Open House Technische Universitaet Hamburg-Harburg (Our rover development team presents itself and his there for questions the entire day)

Now that's all the time we have till the summer. We try to do additional outreach work in the fall. Stay tuned to our blog, facebook and twitter for announcements.

Social "Where are your Members coming from?"

In the beginning we had a GoogleMaps with all our team members location highlighted. That map sadly has taken a backseat all this time. Since our numbers increased sevenfold since the last iteration we are in for a major map update. We'll try to make it happen. No promises!

Social “Are you planning to create a new homepage?”

If you are a long time fan you probably noticed that our website has gone through constant updates since it's inception. On the technical side, we are planning to make the move from wordpress over to drupal. And if you know your way around and pitch in on that project feel free to give us a tweet. We can always use more hamsters in our running wheels. Feature wise the website has grown a lot too. On that front we are open for new ideas as well. We love talking to our community and giving them what they want.

Tech "How does the communication from the rover to earth work?"

There multiple systems at work here to provide the needed redundancy. However the main communication channel is our invention of the integrated solar panel phased array antenna as already featured on several occasions like the ILA 2010 (link) and the 27C3. But what better way to explain this then numbers?
Let's throw in some numbers up in here:

The GLXP says that you should have at least have a live feed of 320x240 with 15 fps in color. Now after some compression you end up with about a data stream of 2 Mbps of data from the lunar surface back to Earth.

2 Megs does not sound like much in times of 22 Mbps UMTS on the go an 50 Megs home VDSL lines with IPTV. However, as always in regards of communication to get higher bandwidth and better reception one can only either increase the antenna size or the power throughput of the transmitting antenna. Both are quite unfeasible options for a rover or lander on the lunar surface as both power and space are vastly limited resources. High bandwidth communication is not just some, "it would be nice to have some pictures" part of your mission. It's one of the most mission critical aspects. Depending on the level of onboard intelligence an Earth bound operator always needs to able to accurately navigate and control the rover and even the lander on it's mission. It even is an important foundation for each teams business plan.

Tech "What kind of Compression Algorithm do you use for your Videos?"

JPEG2000 with some custom tweaks. We need to avoid some difficulties presented by the H264 codec. Because of video compression the fragmentation of the pictures the rover will send to ground control may make that huge slope of doom look like schmutz on the lense. To avoid uncontrolled one way trips down a crater a lot of work is going into this. Add to that the 3D and demands on live transmission and you get a grasp on the importance of this. You need to be able to see in space in at least one spectrum. Bats would have a hard time on the moon.

That's it for FanFriday this week. If you have a question for us and want them answered from a genuine Part-Time Scientists send us your questions to q@part-time-scientists.com

If we caught your attention, follow us on , or our Team Blog!

Image Credits:

• "LED world map via photoshop" © by Chris Dlugosz - cc-by/2.0