Artist conception of the Next Giant Leap lunar lander competing for the Google Lunar X-Prize.
Credit: Next Giant Leap Team
Hand in hand with its 40th-anniversary Apollo barbecue, Draper Laboratory in
Cambridge, MA, demonstrated a hazard-detection
system for future lunar vehicles and showed off a mock-up of its
collaborative project with MIT that will help land a small robotic vehicle on
the moon.
Over 100 Apollo alumni attended the July 20th event, in addition to hundreds
more current Draper employees. Those who spoke at the celebration shared
stories of the technical challenges of Apollo and even brought along some
toys–blocks of rope memory from the Apollo computer that would fit on a tiny
microchip today. “Apollo was the highlight of my career,” said
engineer John Miller. Many in the crowd–even those who were in their 20s in
the Apollo heyday and who worked on several more projects–agreed.
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Enthusiasm is something Séamus Tuohy, director of space systems at Draper,
wants to cultivate in today’s young engineers. That’s why he’s excited about
working with MIT’s Space Systems Laboratory on the prototype test bed for a
lunar hopper. The hopper is a competitor in the Google
Lunar X Prize challenge, a robotic race to the moon with a $30 million prize
purse. The robots must be privately funded, traverse at least 500 meters, and
send a specific set of video images and data back to earth. The challenge
demonstrates the potential for commercial lunar exploration (and earns $20
million for the winning team). MIT and Draper are involved in the project as
part of Michael Joyce’s Next Giant Leap team, which was founded in 2007 and also
includes commercial partners. A mock-up of the team’s lunar hopper was on
display at Draper’s celebration, reminding attendees that there is more to the
moon than past achievements.
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“The thinking was that young people weren’t interested in space
anymore,” says Tuohy. “But it turned out that what they were
interested in was a challenge.” So MIT professors Jeffrey Hoffman and
David Miller developed the Talaris project for graduate students. Students
designed and built a vehicle that recreates lunar gravity by using
downward-pointing fans to counter five-sixths of the vehicle’s weight. With
that, they can test guidance, navigation, and control programs for the lunar
lander here on Earth.
The concept of using a hopper, rather than a rover, for exploration solves
some tricky problems, Tuohy explains. First, the design is small and
inexpensive, while most planetary-landing projects ring in at over a billion
dollars. And the hopper could dive into craters that are as deep as Mt. Everest
is tall, which a rover wouldn’t be able to do. If it could get into those deep
craters on the moon, Tuohy says, the hopper could touch ice that might be there
and potentially prove once and for all that there is water on the moon. That in
turn could help future explorers live off the land.
That’s all far in the future, and the prototype test bed is still in design
and test phases, but it gets the young engineers going. The hope is that they
won’t have to say, 40 years from now, that the coolest project they worked on
was when they were in their 20s.
Go for liftoff: The Talaris vehicle is being tested at 50%, 65%, and 75% throttle, hovering at each level before increasing to the next thrust threshold. The test vehicle will be able to simulate the moon’s gravity by removing 5/6 of its own weight, which will help develop guidance, navigation and control algorithms for the Next Giant Leap team’s lunar hopper.
Credit: Draper Laboratory