This is absolutely wonderful news, and makes me wonder. This question might need to be it's own thread, unless there is one already.Once Dragon is fitted with it's push LAS and tri-legs for vertical landing, could dragon use it's LAS propellent to handle a moon landing and lift-off? Using the last of it for de-orbit and then a traditional splashdown?Crazy I know, but is it really? I know they won't be standing up for the decent, but with today's nav hard and software, does it matter?Could we squeeze enough fuel to bust back out of LO?
Well, this is certainly going to be interesting. They are planning to use a commercial off the shelf intel atom board. They did some tests indicating that it can survive cryogenic temperatures. But surely the radiation environment on the moon would be a problem.
Quote from: rklaehn on 02/06/2011 07:40 pmWell, this is certainly going to be interesting. They are planning to use a commercial off the shelf intel atom board. They did some tests indicating that it can survive cryogenic temperatures. But surely the radiation environment on the moon would be a problem.Quite. Latchups and other radiation effects could definitely make things "interesting" once in space.
They probably don't have much choice. They need some serious computing power for the realtime image recognition they plan to do.
Quote from: rklaehn on 02/06/2011 08:01 pmThey probably don't have much choice. They need some serious computing power for the realtime image recognition they plan to do. That clip was about temperature-triggered wakeup from hibernation so I'm thinking it's meant for the rover itself, not the descent system terrain tracking.
Quote from: rklaehn on 02/06/2011 08:01 pmThey probably don't have much choice. They need some serious computing power for the realtime image recognition they plan to do. That clip was about temperature-triggered wakeup from hibernation so I'm thinking it's meant for the rover itself, not the descent system terrain tracking.One other thing I'm unclear on. They say they're planning to return HD video from the surface of the moon. How exactly? Where will the bitrate to support that come from? On the other hand, downlinking one frame every N seconds doesn't exactly constitute "video".
I second that they shouldn't be going to 11. Not just because it should be left pristine due its high historical value, but also that site was chosen because it was boring, 15,16 or 17 would seem to be better choices.
Quote from: ugordan on 02/06/2011 08:13 pmQuote from: rklaehn on 02/06/2011 08:01 pmThey probably don't have much choice. They need some serious computing power for the realtime image recognition they plan to do. That clip was about temperature-triggered wakeup from hibernation so I'm thinking it's meant for the rover itself, not the descent system terrain tracking.One other thing I'm unclear on. They say they're planning to return HD video from the surface of the moon. How exactly? Where will the bitrate to support that come from? On the other hand, downlinking one frame every N seconds doesn't exactly constitute "video".Sure it does. Record onboard at high bitrate, transmit at low, playback on earth at high. They didn't say "live" HD video, did they?
Quote from: MikeAtkinson on 02/06/2011 04:16 pmI second that they shouldn't be going to 11. Not just because it should be left pristine due its high historical value, but also that site was chosen because it was boring, 15,16 or 17 would seem to be better choices.How about the sites planned for 18, 19, and 20? Why retread old ground, while at the same time risking permanent damage to historic sites? Unless of course they are just going as a publicity stunt.
$4 million in bonus prizes are available for achieving other specific mission objectives, including operation at night; traveling more than 5km over the lunar surface; detection of water; and precision landing near an Apollo site or other lunar sites of interest (such as landing/crash sites of man-made space hardware).
The rover looks like it has no directional antenna. So either they rent some big receivers for the mission, or they transfer the data to the lander and send it from there using a high-gain directional antenna.
Quote from: rklaehn on 02/06/2011 08:38 pmThe rover looks like it has no directional antenna. So either they rent some big receivers for the mission, or they transfer the data to the lander and send it from there using a high-gain directional antenna.That's kind of my point. Even if video is recorded onboard and then played back to Earth at a snail's pace, the bitrate would still suck unless a directional antenna is used from somewhere on the Moon. The lander, an orbiting relay craft, whatever.
Used a hardware encoding chip set up for;720p (1280x720 progressive)15 frames/sec 32 kBytes/sec bitrate I just encoded one of SpaceX's HD videos to those settings and it's more than adequate.