What's the lastest TFX news?

[scasey]

We had a mission team telecon this morning and reviewed launch options and assumed masses for the lander and lunar bus concepts. Good progress to date but more work is required.

A senior management team meeting is scheduled for early January 2010 in Mojave. Most people are making the trip. We hope to see some of the local sights while we are there.

Development is progressing on the lander mock-up. More engineering help is required for this subsystem. Send me a PM if you are interested.

Our University partners are making good progress on their designs. A number of undergraduate students are using the projects as components of their senior thesis. I'm glad to see that students are excited and involved in our return to the Moon.

SC

[tristancho]

Hi all,
Yesterday we had a Lego Mindstorm, web based, remote Lunar Rover control demo. Was very funny. Real ground operation is not far from this:


My best,
Joshua

[scasey]

The lander group is busy building the Mark I proto-type lander. The requirements page for this is here:

http://wiki.teamfrednet.org/index.php/M ... Proto-type

Associated with the lander, the student run Team Cheese from Queens University in Canada is preparing a final poster of their design for the lander legs next week. We expect to get the update on their design on the lander portal before the holidays.

http://wiki.teamfrednet.org/index.php/P ... nar_Lander

Plans are developing for the Senior Management Review to be held this January in Mojave.

More to follow...

SC

[scasey]

Work is continuing on the Mark I vehicle. People are outlining the technologies we are expecting to incorporate in the first flights.

http://wiki.teamfrednet.org/index.php/M ... _Prototype

Please feel free to donate to the TFX program (see the donate button on our team web page) to offset the costs of technology purchases.

http://tinyurl.com/yhs9j5j

We are expecting the development leads to provide additional task descriptions so new forum members know where they can contribute their technology expertise.

The Mark I machine shop is now on-line 24/7 at:

http://livestream.com/teamprometheus

NB: a brief livestream commercial precedes Monroe's webcam video feed. Stop by and chat with the developers.

If you are interested in contributing or participating in this effort drop us an e-mail at signup(at)teamfrednet.org.

SC

[scasey]

We are getting ready for the Senior Management Review in Palmdale, CA this January.

Expected topic to cover include:

a) Overview of Program
b) Summary of Mission Plan
c) Updates on rover and lander proto-type
d) Tours of Mojave facilities
e) Systems engineering approaches
f) Community growth
g) Project recruitment

Should be a great meeting for everyone to compare notes and expectations.

SC

[scasey]

Just got back from our Senior management review in Palmdale. Thanks for Chris Curione for making many of the meeting arrangements. We had a great hotel and a great meeting room. We conducted a portion of the meeting using skype which worked really well once we switched from the wifi connection to a direct RJ45 hardwire.

We covered all of the topics noted previously. In addition Jonathan Card, an MBA student from the Univ. of Arizona gave a presentation on Clayton Christensen's ideas on disruptive technologies. The questions are - what is the nature of disruptive technologies, what do they look like, how do they function? We also talked about how open source technologies disrupt the supply chain.

For the mission plan, we are continuing to press forward. Much of this has to be squared away over the next couple of months. What's needed? We need leaders. We've had good success with various student groups contributing to the program and various mission elements - but student groups need well defined tasks in most cases. Many tasks can be found on the wiki. However, many more tasks remained poorly defined (if at all). We've got to improve upon this situation.

This lead us into the community management tasks - which breaks up in public relations and human resources (PR & HR). Jeremy Glassenberg gave up a great update on the community management effort. The PR front is covered with our blogs, youtube postings, tweets, website, etc. The HR front is really an issue for our mission leadership team. We get lots of people showing up into the forum. Getting people plugged into projects is the issue. Again, this falls into - how do people know what needs to get done?

An example of this is a recent animation that done by Dan Jenkins. This started as a task that was posted over a year ago by Tobias Krieger:

http://wiki.teamfrednet.org/index.php/T ... sembarking

Dan picked up this task and created a story board:

http://wiki.teamfrednet.org/index.php/A ... and_Rovers

Boone Adkins also did some preliminary work on this which I believe we sent to Dan too.

From this task, Dan created the following video:

http://wiki.teamfrednet.org/index.php/Mission_Animation

Everyone should check-out this video.

Not only was this tasks created and executed, but Fred provided additional input to Dan about the layout and concept. We used the WRV(created by Joerg Schnyder) as the proto-type vehicle. The lander itself is the design by Ryan Weed and the lander team.

All of this is pretty impressive and a great demonstration of the real power of the open source model.

In general, we need more people participating and we need more help in managing the community. We've got tremendous potential. A key book we discussed during the meeting is the "Art of Community" by Juno Bacon. (A PDF version of the book is available here.) As discussed in another forum post, this should be required reading for the mission and the open source effort.

Anyway - we had a great meeting and I think everyone enjoyed our side trip to Mojave.

SC

p.s. If people have any questions concerning the meeting (or anything else) - drop me a PM using the forum messaging system.

[tristancho]

Oh yes,
It was a very nice meeting. We enjoy the meeting and the people involved.
My best,
Joshua

[scasey]

FYI - this seems to be the most popular topic on the open nasa web site:

http://opennasa.ideascale.com/a/dtd/19694-7044

"I think one of the things that people seem to be missing is that on
small projects there are thousands of space fans that would love to
brainstorm or even help design things for NASA for free. When the
light knob was stuck between the window and the dash I was reading
message boards to look at ideas people had. I wish I was able to give
more details and information but we are restricted by ITAR.

When we sent out drawings for review we got very few if any technical
comments because everyone was so busy doing their own work. I would
love to send the drawings out to the public for their review. First,
they can see what they are paying for. Second, there are plenty of
people that want to prove they are smarter than a NASA engineer that
can catch our mistakes. I know it will be difficult to allow us to do
this because the tendency is to always think people are trying to
steal our technology. But if this is going to be an international
effort why not release all of the information to the public. They are
paying for it."

People should weigh in and point to an existing open source TFN effort.

SC

p.s. I still need to post the engineering notes from the GLXP team meeting at JPL.

[scasey]

My cryptic notes from the GLXP team meeting. I believe the slides from this meeting should be posted somewhere.


Notes from the X-Prize meeting 2010-02-01

The Deep Space Network may be available in some fashion through JPL.

News from HQ may be indicative of a major shift (c.o. John Olson)
- New Opportunities
- Focus upon sustainable and affordable
- International focus
- Perhaps a change in international teaming agreements
- Creativity & Innovation
- Bold yet affordable

Google (Tiffany M.)
- Embracing education and exploration
- What is your story
- Work on telling your story


X-Prize (Peter D.)
- This has to be won
- Marketing & education
- Help on creating visibility
- closing the business case
- Possible help from NASA/ESA/JAXA
- Embracing risk and driving innovation
- Effort is potentially world changing/epic/culture change
- Apple/Bell/Cisco of the future
- Radical and entrepreneurial

- Education
- Chandra Gonzales chandra.gonzales@xprize.org

Isle of Man
- Chris Stot of ISU
- GLXP event in 2010
- tim.craine@gov.im

LMMP - Lunar Mapping and Modeling Project
- ILIADS - beta-release
- NASA vetted access process
- 3D imaging from ARC (stero pairs)
- Constellation sites - lots of homework done on these locations
- send e-mail for access


JPL - Board of experts
- Moonrise mission
- New Frontier mission $650M
- Lunette - seismic measurement mission

- Lessons learned
- Thermal modeling is very important
- MIL spec parts do not cover the temperature extremes for solar system missions
- Good to design things for keep operating range of ~ -20/-30 C

- Astrobotic is the only mission anticipating to survive the night
- Question about regolith reflectivity in radar
- Shorter frequencies have less penetration
- Think about separating altimetry from velocimetry
- Imaging for horizontal velocity estimates
- With good recon (LRO data) can use imaging for altimetry
- LRO ~ 50 cm imaging

- Budget
- Keep 1/3 in reserve (TFN to keep some other fraction)
- Know what documents need to be produced
- Q/A issues are very hard to handle
- Issues of team building
- Good to start without prejudices (wash your bowl)
- Good to 'test the crap' out of everything
- Aspire to 'ship and shoot'
- Avoid testing on the pad
- Thermal vac testing is essential
- Do not short cut the thermal vac and environmental testing
- Focus on mission assurance
- Push for the minimal requirements
- Of course - scope = $$'s
- Need a very good architecture
- Be very hard nose about the design
- due diligence and lessons learned
- Team could be ~ 50 people
- Need to scrub the WBS
- What are the important boxes
- Good to have a second set of eyes on these areas
- Double checking whenever possible
- Testing can be very stressful
- System level testing is more important
- Balance of component vs. system level testing
- Multiple people involved

[scasey]

Another month is upon us and the core team is making progress.

A major issue is reworking the concetpual missions design. Working together, a group expects to present findings at the May 2010 ISDC meeting in Chicago. From the conceptual mission design, we expect to revisit the mission requirements with the expectation for new student projects in Sept. 2010.

Various MOUs are in the works.

Again - I put in another plug for our LEGO software effort. This frame work should be very helpful in the remote operations of the rover.

Someone needs to point out why the NXT software set is not all that's required for a rover on the Moon.

We did some additional information about delay tolerant networks:

http://cwe.ccsds.org/cesg/docs/Forms/Al ... FB39C70%7d

If people are interested in working on this problem, drop me an e-mail.

SC (sean (DOT) casey (AT) teamfrednet (DOT) org)

[scasey]

Again - I wanted to provide an update as to what's been happening.

Conceptual Mission Plan:

The conceptual mission plan is still under development . We are reworking out paper for the ISDC conference and have a good core team of participants to shape up this effort. When the final version of the paper is ready we'lll provide a link to the actual document.

The study focuses on a baseline mission using the SpaceX Falcon 1e from the K-Atoll and discusses one and two stage solutions to the problem.

The Mark Lander:

Monroe is awaiting funding to purchase the J-99 engines for this prototype vehicle.

The basic design is here:

http://wiki.frednet.org/index.php/MarkI ... Proto-type

To support this effort, we are continuing to raise funds.

http://teamprometheus1.chipin.com/team- ... ander-fund

The Lego Rover:

We are in the process of signing up our first users for the alpha-release of the rover software. This has been an interesting project as an actual demonstration of what it takes to develop open source software. Our meeting notes from the past 9 months are here:

http://wiki.frednet.org/index.php/Porta ... orms/notes

The development guidelines (i.e. requirements) are here:

http://wiki.frednet.org/index.php/Porta ... Guidelines

It's relatively simple but it has taken about 9 months to get out using the open source model. We started with the definition of requirements and only now to we have something for our initial customers.

What this points to is how very, very long it takes the open source approach to develop an actual application - even for a very simple application. Congratulations to everyone who helped this along and a big hurrah for Marc Brackels who really pushed through the actual alpha-release. As a result of actually have a product in hand, we've really been able to get some traction with the community on this topic. Currently, we are working two to three new MOUs (partnership agreements) based upon this work.

If you want to try out the software, you can download from here:

http://wiki.frednet.org/index.php/Porta ... ms/install

All comments and recommendations are welcome.

Cheers,

SC

[tristancho]

How I can donate in the The Mark Lander prject?
Best,
Joshua

[scasey]

How I can donate in the The Mark Lander prject?
Best,
Joshua

The Team Prometheus donation page is:

http://teamprometheus1.chipin.com/team- ... ander-fund

Also - for those inquiring minds:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus

Aren't we intending to bring 'fire' to the Gods?

SC

[scasey]

It's been nearly a month since the last update. Many of the above topics topics are still in play.

Conceptual Mission Design:

Still working on capturing the design parameters. ISDC meeting is next month. Our slide deck should be available to everyone when complete.

Mark-I lander:

Monroe has got his chip-in site working and is still working the purchase order for the engines.

Elphel Camera lens:

Eric is working lens selection with the vendor:

http://wiki.teamfrednet.org/index.php/T ... ns_Package

Lego Rover:

Still working the Linux port. We should have a demo running in the next couple of months.

On a personal note:

Just came back from the CalPoly cubesat workshop. Great turnout, lots of student involvement, lots of interesting flight opportunties. Check out the web site:

http://www.cubesat.org/

All the meeting presentations should be available at some point in the future.

SC

[scasey]

More updates:

We are working on the ISDC presentation for the end of May. The PDF of the final presentation should be available next week.

The baseline mission is using the Falcon 1e from K-atoll with various mass allocations for the needed subsystems.

The Elphel camera lens was selected. We can now purchase this lens for video demonstrations.

A Linux version of the rover controller should be out shortly.

That's all for now.

SC

[alexc]

Scotts Valley, CA (July 19, 2010) – Team FREDNET (TF), a Google Lunar X Prize contender headquartered in Huntsville, AL, has announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Air and Space Education Consortium (ASEC), an alumni group of Broward College with a focus on the development of payloads for orbital and suborbital space missions. The MOU was signed by Fred J. Bourgeois, III for Team FREDNET and Prof. Rolando Branly of ASEC. This MOU allows the two parties to consult on mutually beneficial projects.

Read the full press release on our team blog: http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/ ... d-college-

[scasey]

We have been invited to submit our technology and business plans to the NASA broad agency announcement for "INNOVATIVE LUNAR DEMONSTRATIONS DATA":

http://prod.nais.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eps/s ... qid=142102

One can expect that many GLXP entrants are participating. Proposals are due Sept 15, 2010.

SC