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Introduction to Team Plan B

Team "Plan B" is a Vancouver based Canadian joint venture bringing together enthusiasts inspired by challenges presented by Google Lunar XPRIZE. In our view this competition is an unprecedented event in the history of space exploration. This engagement is taking place when advances in technology, electronics, telecommunications and science are stretched to their limits. Furthermore expansion and technological slump is readily at everyone's disposal. It’s a time of planting new grass. Seeds will adsorb everything available in current soil of innovation, grow strong on existing high-tech's compost, compete unpredictably with each other, and at the end of the day fertilize new ground for the next metamorphoses of technical knowledge. Team "Plan B" hopes that our feasible supplements will help make that next technological stride possible. For our mission we choose to utilize handy solutions in software, microprocessors, communication, guidance and robotic systems to produce a light weight vehicle capable of wandering 500+0.5 m around the landing site; with coordinate’s 2ºS 15ºW on the Lunar surface. The light weight vehicle must be able to transmit a mooncast. The vehicle will be delivered to the Moon by a probe/craft with fixed impulse engines. Target weight on low-earth orbit for a probe+craft is 100-150 kg, which places it into a category of amateur satellite. Flight scheme will include two orbit correction impulses, one main and one brake impulse with direct arrival to the Moon surface with air-bags providing the soft landing. Designed and manufactured vehicle/craft must pass thermal, mechanical, and vacuum's ground tests prior to making launch arrangements. Two launches are planned to increase chances to succeed. Success on first launch is desired, but is not expected, mistakes in design, errors in calculation, bugs in software on first mission will provide valuable input for the second (Plan B) vehicle/craft/probe re-design. Second launch is planed for 9 month after the first mission. While in flight, the probe's orientation will be performed via inertia momentum created by the rotation of three masses. As a Canadian team, we choose those 3 masses to be three hockey pucks, not because hockey pucks are heavy, but because the touch down will be simultaneously the first face-off on the Moon, in the history of Mankind. All project's development is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This allows everybody to share (to copy, distribute and transmit) and to remix (to adapt) anything related to designs and development done by team "Plan B".
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