Monthly Archives: February 2010

The Astrobotic rover will carry a battery pack (273 WHr) to ensure power during the high-activity landing and also for the brief periods during roving when the solar panels won’t be fully oriented toward the Sun. The team is fabricating a battery pack that straps the lithium ion cells to a main I-beam, which connects… {read more}

The Astrobotic team has initiated testing of an experimental inertial measurement unit (IMU) loaned from Intel Labs. (IMUs measure a spacecraft’s velocity, orientation and gravitational forces.) The tiny device provides six degree of freedom orientation data, utilizing a bluetooth wireless connection to a host computer. It contains three accelerometers, three gyroscopes, three magnetometers, and a… {read more}

For the Astrobotic rover to survive hibernation during the lunar night’s cryogenic cold, the team must find commercial components that perform to extremes far beyond their published spec sheets. This week an Asus netbook entered the cryo-freezer to see if its Intel Atom processor would bounce back from the ordeal. (See photos below) The team… {read more}

The Astrobotic team won “best in show” at the the Society of Women Engineers’ Showcase Feb. 15 at Carnegie Mellon’s University Center, distributing custom red-cyan glasses to that visitors could enjoy stereo images from the Apollo program — demonstrating the vivid imagery that will be returned by the Astrobotic lunar rover expedition.

The ground floor of the new Gates-Hillman Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon is devoted to the 5,000 square foot Planetary Robotics Lab. The PRL includes a 3,000 square foot high bay with computer controlled crane for engineering and experimentation, along with workrooms for fabrication of robots and their components. While the Gates-Hillman building… {read more}