Lunar Numbat

linux.conf.au (LCA) is one of the premier Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conferences anywhere in the world, and this year build team member Jon Oxer will be presenting a talk on Lunar Numbat.

Jon's talk will follow the arc described in the recently released GLXP Mission Concept Summary by White Label Space, and how Lunar Numbat's efforts as a partner, and Open Source technology will help make it happen.

The talk will be streamed live at 14:30 UTC+13 (01:30 UTC) tomorrow, the 21st of January 2010, so you can watch without even attending the conference!

As always we're certain Jon's talk will be great! We should be able to provide the talk notes and video after the event.

Andrew Barton of White Label Space was a great host in receiving me today, and we spent the whole day exchanging views and knowledge on issues related to Lunar Numbat, White Label Space, and the GLXP mission.

After collecting us at Leiden train station, Andrew didn't delay in taking us on a tour of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC). Here are many of the facilities that WLS will likely be using in preparation of the GLXP mission. ESTEC includes facilities such as the Large Space Simulator (LSS), acoustic and electromagnetic testing bays, multi-axis vibration tables and the ESA Propulsion Laboratory (EPL).

Following the tour we moved on to the White Label Space headquarters at AOES and settled down to some detailed discussions.

Later in the evening, I attended a WLS team meeting where the throttle control avionics, radar altimeter and HD Video and Stills compression and transmission that Lunar Numbat are developing for the WLS GLXP mission were poured over and examined.

It was really valuable to finally meet Andrew and many of the WLS team members face to face, and Lunar Numbat's commitment to exploit the goodness of Open Source technologies to assist WLS in our GLXP mission was well assisted by the get together.

Andy Gelme of the Lunar Numbat build team has prepared this post of his recent endeavours:

Continuing on from the initial launches of a Class C rocket, the Lunar Numbat build team has been making steady progress towards launching more sophisticated avionics, along with an audio/video feed, as part of a Class G rocket.

A crucial part of the journey has been, not just creating the hardware and software, but bringing more capability and experience to the effort, in the form of organization, equipment and most importantly ... people with specialist skills.

For a long time, we've been contemplating the need for a shared space or workshop, expensive electronics equipment and mechanical manufacturing capabilities beyond that which individuals can typically justify or afford. These sorts of facilities are available in universities and specific types of government or commercial organizations, but they are much less accessible to smaller communities of individual developers.

At the end of March 2009, a Wired magazine article propelled the concept of HackerSpaces into the popular zeitgeist. So, it was an natural step to create the first HackerSpace in Melbourne, Australia, aka the "Connected Community".

The Connected Community HackerSpace was formed and operates independently of Lunar Numbat. A HackerSpace is much broader in scope than even a space technology project, to the point of hacking any object in any domain in any conceivable fashion is fair game. Fortunately, there is significant overlap in the types of people involved in both groups, the skills and equipment required and the artifacts created.

An advantage of the HackerSpace is that it attracts a larger community of hobbyists and professionals. These people may not be as focused or as passionate about the research and development of space technology as the Lunar Numbat team. Although, sometimes they are even more passionate. However, their skills can directly or indirectly contribute to the Lunar Numbat effort, due to the deeply embedded culture of sharing. This collaboration is enhanced by both groups utilizing commodity, open-source hardware and software. The power of open-source hardware and software communities is evident in the growing number of developers using the Arduino platform or BeagleBoard for increasingly sophisticated projects.

Since it's inception, the HackerSpace has been meeting regularly and working on a variety of projects. Many of the projects have been founded by HackerSpace members, often initiated prior to the HackerSpace and operating independently. In addition, the HackerSpace is introducing new members to those projects and bringing them up-to-speed with fundamental skills, such as PCB design and manufacture. New members also bring additional skills such as amateur radio experience, CNC milling machine design, construction using composite materials or hard-core hardware and software engineering ... and, even rocketry

Lunar Numbat will benefit from this infusion of new blood into HackerSpace and the Class G rocket development has been one of the projects around which HackerSpace members can gravitate and apply their skills.

Project progress and technical discussions have been captured on the Connected Community HackerSpace web-site and project artifacts placed in social coding repositories, such as the popular GitHub, as follows ...

• Class G rocket project


• Class G rocket hardware design


• Aiko: Modular event-driven software framework

A key outcome will be to deliver re-usable hardware and software components. In part, this is driving us to create general purpose frameworks, like Aiko, which provide a modular, event-driven abstraction on top of specific hardware / software platforms, like the Arduino. This is so that we can produce high-quality embedded applications and software components that encapsulate a given set of hardware devices.

In the longer term, this collaboration between the Connected Community HackerSpace and Lunar Numbat, along with the resulting re-usable hardware and software artifacts, provides a strong foundation for undertaking the next phases of Lunar Numbat beyond the current Class G rocket launch milestone.

White Label Space have been publicly announced as a Google Lunar X PRIZE Team, drawing congratulations and delight from Lunar Numbatters.

It's with pride that Lunar Numbat acknowledges it's partnership with Team White Label Space, as well as the Australian flag on their patch, the only one of any GLXP Team.

White Label Space sees this as the beginning of an adventure that has far reaching consequences for all of humanity. For them the GLXP is the starting point of the next wave of space exploration where the common person can become a contributor and not just a spectator.

Lunar Numbat is keen to do it's side of the bargain and provide Team White Label Space with key technologies in an open and accessible way, to help bring about this next wave of space exploration.

Jon Oxer has been very busy as a recent post on his blog attests. The fruit of his work? An Arduino-based rocket flight recorder no less!

The image and quote are from Jon's post:

The bottom board is an Arduino Pro Mini 5V/16MHz from Sparkfun. Sitting on top of it is a 433MHz transmitter module from Jaycar, and the circular PCB to the right is a Lilypad 3-axis accelerometer breakout board. To give some sense of scale the entire assembly is about the same dimensions as a 9V battery, so it's very small and light. You're looking at it lying on its "back": the plan is that it will mount vertically in the nosecone of the class-C rocket that Marco provided so that we can log accelerometer data from a launch. When fitted into the rocket the round accelerometer board sits flat in the bottom of the nosecone so the Z-axis reading will align perfectly with the direction of flight.

According to Twitter posts Jon's also taken delivery of a 5Hz GPS module, and after experiencing some difficulties with the Locosys GPS module, it seems to be behaving.

With the two joined together hopes are to get the system transmitting x/y/z force plus lat/lon/altitude every 200ms. If everything works out well we may even get a nice flight track from the location points. Sweet!

Recently a fellow from ASRI, the Australian Space Research Institute and the Lunar Numbat build team enjoyed a productive conference call discussing the Ausroc 2.5 launch vehicle, and how we might assist.

Ausroc 2.5 is an Australian designed and built liquid fuelled rocket, propelling a 10kg payload to an altitude of 20km on a ballistic trajectory, to be recovered intact after flight. Lunar Numbat agreed to collaborate with valve control avionics, and are delighted to be working with ASRI.

This is an exciting step along the road of providing our partner, White Label Space, with the technologies they need to get to the moon, while helping the already fine work of ASRI.

Thanks to the fine work of Artist Gavin Jacobi, Lunar Numbat now has an official patch to represent us.

While the arrangement and execution of this patch pays honour to a previous historic lunar mission, it's unmistakeably fresh with New Zealand and Australia faithful represented.

Prominent in the centre is our intrepid Numbat mascot, poised both as having just arrived, and ready to boldly explore.

Faithful to the values of the Lunar Numbat endeavour, Gavin Jacobi has released the image under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike.

The master image in SVG format is available on the mail list.

Alan Kay said "the best way to predict the future is to invent it", which is precisely what White Label Space is doing.

The Google Lunar X-Prize inspired the formation of White Label Space, a group that includes talented space engineers, scientists and technologists from within and outside of the traditional space industry.

What sets White Label Space apart is their vision of low cost ambitious Space Science missions enabled by innovative use of contemporary technologies which are now significantly more accessible, flexible and affordable.

This combined with the innovation of their missions as a vehicle also for marketing, so that sponsors with the "right stuff" can create a profound and enduring legacy by becoming the first private companies to land on the moon.

Lunar Numbat is proud to work with White Label Space, providing them with some of the technologies needed to make this Google Lunar X-Prize mission not only successful, but a precedent that can be followed. First stop, the Moon.

White Label Space are a genuinely International team with people from many nationalities, including Australians. They're geographically based in Europe.

While the Lunar Numbat Blog has a short RSS feed from White Label Space, you can follow their developments directly from their Blog, Twitter feed and Facebook group.

Andy Gelme and Jon Oxer of the Lunar Numbat build team have been preparing a modest avionics package to go into a class G hobby rocket for some high velocity fun and testing.

The rocket to be used for the launches has already made a name for itself due to some stunning video taken with it's onboard inflight video camera, linked via a 2.4GHz Microwave signal.

The Lunar Numbat Build team are keen to get our avionics under development into launch vehicles, so as to test our work and improve on it.

We're looking forward to the test results and video footage of course!

An ingenious 'tethered marsupial rover' that would spend most of its time attached to a larger vehicle until it is needed is being investigated by NASA.

From Space.com:

The Axel rover prototype is built like a yo-yo; its tether is wrapped around its central axle. The other end of the tether would be attached to a larger, conventional rover robot, like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars. The Axel rover solves a problem that bedevils these conventional robots. When Spirit, for example, encounters a crater, it cannot descend and explore.

According to Pablo Abad-Manterola, one of the contributing CalTech students:

"Right now, it's really risky for astronauts or robots, for example, like Spirit an Opportunity to go into craters. The ground is too loose and the slopes are too steep. So it's too risky for those robots to get into those craters and perform any interesting science. So this robot would be very useful for those types of scenarios, where you can really dive into those craters, pick up some samples, and really analyze them and tell us something really new and interesting about Mars or the moon, for example."

Small, nippy and smart is all the rage. Go Lunar Numbat!

Spirit and Opportunity, the wildly successful Martian rovers have an Australian contribution.

Both are driven by 39 DC micromotors supplied by Maxon Motor Australia.

Each rover is equipped with 39 DC motors from Swiss drive specialists, Maxon motor Australia. The precision drives are used for driving the robotic arms, rock drilling, operating the cameras, the steering mechanism, and for the 6 wheels that drive the heavy vehicles (each weighing nearly 180kg) over the planet’s surface.

The motors are standard products with diameters of 20 and 25mm that deliver more than 90% efficiency. Minor modifications were required to enable rovers to cope with the harsh conditions. The equipment has to be able to withstand temperature changes on the surface of Mars, which can range from around -120°C to +25°C, vibrations and the special atmosphere.

Worthy of investigation.

All work done for Lunar Numbat is on a volunteer basis, including assembling our online infrastructure, which a step at a time is coming together.

One quite important piece is the Lunar Numbat Wiki, now available and ready to use thanks to Jon, who broke the ice with his page on Reference Material. Thanks Jon!

The Reference Material page was gathered from posts to the Lunar Numbat Mail List, which already has some interesting posts in it.

My thanks to all those helping bring this necessary collection of resources together. From here on we power ahead