On May 30th, at ISDC 2009, Team Omega Envoy hosted the first Lunar Lander Eggs Prize, a competition for high school students to design "lunar landers" to safely land an egg from a high drop. The competition was better than anyone had hoped for and the students really seemed to have fun. Here is a video of the event: congratulations to The Lunarian Team, from Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando, Fl. for first place, the whole team was awarded VIP passes to an upcoming Space Shuttle Launch.

CAN-Do! is a micro-controller widget which is designed to be an interface between the various modules (main computer, instruments, sensors, actuators) and the avionics bus. The avionics bus in this case is based on the CAN-bus (Controller-area network), which is already widely used in the automotive industry for connecting the increasing number of ECUs found in cars.

The CAN-Do! interface widget has been developed by AMSAT Deutschland e.V. and AMSAT North America and it will be used in future amateur radio satellites that are currently under development. Both the hardware and firmware are open sourced and freely available on the CAN-Do! website.

Earlier this year we started a project with the objective of evaluating the CAN-bus and the AMSAT CAN-Do! interface widget with respect to using it on-board our spacecrafts – the lunar bus and the lunar lander. A few prototype units have been manufactured and are now ready to be tested in simulated environments.

This is already a great example of how on open source space project can benefit from another open source space project!

From CAN-Do!

With only about 45 minutes until the planned impact of the KAGUYA spacecraft onto the surface of the Moon, I hope our friends in Asia have clear skies to observe the event. In Denmark, the Moon will not be visible until several hours after the impact.

In the mean time we can enjoy these amazing videos taken at 15 and 20 km above the lunar surface (if I understand the Japanese text correctly ;-)
I guess these are the first high definition videos taken so close to the lunar surface. Thank you JAXA for sharing all your fantastic high definition videos via YouTube!

The team will be unveiling our educational lander mockup and performing demo flights of the MIT TALARIS hopper this week at the MIT "Giant Leaps" sypmosium ( http://apollo40.mit.edu/ )which is a celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Here are a few shots of the team setting up displays.

Race to the Moon

A profile of our team and its progress appear in the June edition of
IEEE Spectrum. Prachi Patel wrote the article, and the great
photographs are by Bill Cramer of Wonderful Machine. This is a
moon/mars/space edition with articles covering Owen and Richard
Garriott, The desire for lunar return, India and the moon, and even a blurb on lunar mining.