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Monthly Archives: January 2009
Isolation cones
Components must be mounted inside the rover chassis, but cannot tolerate the oven-like heat of the belly pan. The belly pan faces down onto the illuminated lunar surface. Heat-sensitive components are not mounted directly to the belly pan. They are isolated by mounting on standoff cones that maintain a gap between the components and the hot surface.
Attempts to fabricate these cones from composites failed, due to the tight, complex curves. Fabrication from aluminum succeeded.
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| From AstroboticBlogPhotos |
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Heater
During cruise, thermal concern is primarily keeping propulsion, battery and avionics warm enough for landing. Resistive heaters do the job.
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| From AstroboticBlogPhotos |
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Pyramidal arrays
The pyramidal solar arrays deliver power under all sun incidence angles
without actuation for deployment or actuation for pointing. The
structural shell radiates for cooling and tapers to fit the cone of the launch vehicle fairing.
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| From AstroboticBlogPhotos |
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40 years ago today.
On January 9, 1968, Surveyor 7 made a soft-landing on the moon, marking the end of the American series of unmanned explorations of the lunar surface.
Here is a video of that mission: click here to see video
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Air & Space Magazine on GLXP.
Air & Space’s GLXP profile hit newsstands today. The phenomenal images in the hardcopy version are worth the buy. The teaser on the magazine cover reads “The Next Moon Race – Robot Division”. Text version is online at
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Red–The-Robots.html
First-tier magazines take the story to new audience, and tell the story with depth and quality not possible with most reporting. A lot of backgrounding, writing, photography, editing and production went into this. Thanks and kudos to Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine.
Red.
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