Ok got you so, It's a fairing based mission. Any ideas on how large the lander is compared to the fairing diameter?
The Falcon 9 can't do a TLI?
Quote from: baldusi on 06/27/2011 09:45 pmThe Falcon 9 can't do a TLI?Falcon 9 will do the TLI burn. What it can't do is an LOI burn. Without going into another argument about what "2 restarts" for MVac actually means, the upper stage is dead within a couple of hours after launch, the batteries are dead and LOX probably boiled off.
Violating OSHA rules is what college is all about. "Do not look into laser with remaining eye."It's all fun and games until someone gets their hair caught in the lathe...
Does it involve the playing on and around it while it is suspended by a crane with no blocking to prevent it from crushing someone?
Quote from: ugordan on 02/06/2011 07:53 pmQuote 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. Using radiation-hardened computers with the performance of an intel atom would probably bust their budget.I guess they will try to shield the processor as good as possible, try to make the software fault-tolerant, and hope for the best.
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.
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.
Maybe use also use a watch dog timer and reset the processor if it latches up.The rest of the memory could be ECC which should offer some protection.The Flash drives maybe run something like a raid 5.
Quote from: Patchouli on 06/28/2011 01:47 pmMaybe use also use a watch dog timer and reset the processor if it latches up.The rest of the memory could be ECC which should offer some protection.The Flash drives maybe run something like a raid 5.You make it sound like this isn't standard kit for anyone who does realtime OS's, I am sure they are already doing all of that and much more...
They stae in the Payload Planners Guide that their computer is a BRE440.
Quote from: baldusi on 06/28/2011 03:22 pmThey stae in the Payload Planners Guide that their computer is a BRE440.btw spec sheet: http://www.broadreachengineering.com/products/bre440-radhard-cpu/
The only thing that worried me about their design was the use on a SD card for mass storage that is not radiation hardend. The dram ECC memory they are using is also a rad hard version. GEO Sats use mag disk storage not flash because of their inherent rad tolerant storage medium. The basic difference between the two and the reason Astrobotic went with flash is weight, a few grams to several kilos.
http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/ground/astrobotic.htmlRobotic Explorers May Usher in Lunar 'Water Rush'11.15.12The American space program stands at the cusp of a "water rush" to the moon by several companies developing robotic prospectors for launch in the near future, according to a NASA scientist considering how to acquire and use water ice believed to be at the poles of the moon."This is like the gold rush that led to the settlement of California," said Phil Metzger, a physicist who leads the Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations Lab, part of Kennedy's Surface Systems Office. "This is the water rush."Collecting the water, or at least showing it can be collected, is where the Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology comes in. The small company signed on in April for the third phase of a Small Business Innovative Research deal that continues research work to develop technologies NASA may need to harvest space resources in the future.The company already is far along in its development of a rover that will work on its own. There is a deal in place with SpaceX to launch a lander and rover on a Falcon 9 rocket in October 2015. Astrobotic is competing against several other companies for the Google Lunar X-Prize, an award worth up to $30 million funded by the Internet search engine company."Our intent is to land on the surface of the moon in October 2015 and find water," said John Thornton, president of Astrobotic. <snip>