If you haven’t been following Robonaut 2 on Twitter, we suggest you do. He has been talking about his packing for the upcoming space trip.
Here is a short time lapse video of Robonaut 2 being packed for space travel. follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/AstroRobonaut.
Tags: Robonaut 2
NASA has come up with another challenge. It wants you to design a rover that doesn’t weigh any more, but works at night as well as during the day thanks to solar panels or other means.
The Challenge would be to demonstrate a portable energy collection and storage system through several cycles of daylight and darkness. During the daylight period, systems can collect photons or thermal energy from the sun. During darkness, the stored energy would be used to move the entire mobile system toward a destination. The competitors may collect, store, and extract the solar energy in any form that they desire
Tags: NASA
A report recently approved by the Japanese government sets its sights on going to the moon. At first they thought they wanted a human robot on the moon, but now aim to have a rover on the moon in five years. Why not send Wall-e? He is friendly, well mannered, is wheeled like a rover and has plenty of space travel experience.
The Japanese also hope to establish a moon base by 2020.
The team also envisions building the world’s first station on the south pole of the moon in 2020, to be staffed by advanced wheeled robots.
It initially considered sending a two-legged humanoid but judged a “rover type” robot more practical due to the bumpy surface.
NASA is working on creating a new mars rover to be launched in October 2011 called Curiosity or Mars Science Laboratory rover. Overall, Curiosity is about the size of a small SUV. Curiosity, will carry many different instruments such as cameras, spectrometers, radiation detectors and other instruments.
Using a radioisotope power system, Curiosity will be able to travel at an average of 98 feet per hour and is expected to last 687 Earth days while on Mars.
NASA also states Curiosity will have a new unique landing.
The rover will rely on new technological innovations, especially for landing. The spacecraft will descend on a parachute and then, during the final seconds prior to landing, lower the upright rover on a tether to the surface, much like a sky crane.
NASA and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) are also allowing people to send in their name to be included on a microchip on Curiosity. You can send you name here. Curiosity was named by a 6th grader named Clara Ma who won a contest. See Clara’s winning essay here.
So, will you send your name to Mars aboard Curiosity?
Lunokhod 1 was a robot type of rover that the Soviets landed on the moon in 197o thanks to the Luna 17 lander.
Using solar panels during the day and a radioisotope powered heater at night, the rover was able to explore the moon for 322 Earth days. From NASA:
This first successful Soviet rover operated for 11 lunar days, the equivalent of 322 Earth days. It traveled more than 10 km across the lunar surface, during which it transmitted more than 20,000 TV images and 206 high-resolution panoramas, performed 25 soil analyses with its spectrometer, and used a penetrometer to test the soil’s mechanical characteristics at more than 500 locations.
After losing contact with the rover, the project was terminated on October 4, 1971.
A team of researchers from the UCSD (University of California at San Diego) have been using reflective space junk left on the moon to show deviations in Einstein’s theory of relativity. This is accomplished by measuring the shape of the lunar orbit using light pulses, distance and time. The team leader is Tom Murphy, associate professor of physics at UCSD and they have been searching for Lunokhod 1 for many years.
Tom states:
We quickly verified the signal to be real and found it to be surprisingly bright: at least five times brighter than the other Soviet reflector, on the Lunokhod 2 rover, to which we routinely send laser pulses, Murphy said. The best signal we’ve seen from Lunokhod 2 in several years of effort is 750 return photons, but we got about 2,000 photons from Lunokhod 1 on our first try. It’s got a lot to say after almost 40 years of silence.
Link via (The Register)
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