NASA and other private companies,
guided by the experience they will
acquire from learning to manage
their own space program. If they win
the $20 million grand prize, program
director Michael Paul stated that he
would like to put this money towards
the building of infrastructure that
would allow for future University-led
space exploration missions out of
Pennsylvania State University.
The major obstacle the team faces
is the lack of funding. To remedy this,
the Penn State Lunar Lion Team has
been actively using internet crowd
funding through a website called
RocketHub. In February 2014, they
campaign round, raising a total of
$133,768 of their $406,536 goal. The
money earned in this round is going
towards the construction of a working
prototype which will be used for
testing in the Mojave Desert later this
year.
Beginning in 2015, the team will
vehicle to be processed for launch,
while the team sets up a functioning
mission control center in State
College.
Another hurdle to be cleared is
the development of the spacecraft’s
avionics and control subsystems.
Which Paul states as “being built
from the ground up as with all
spacecraft”. This particular subsystem
helps to orient the Lunar Lion while
in space and during it’s descent
to the surface of the Moon. To
accomplish this, the team has taken
a novel approach by constructing a
remote control quadcopter coupled
receiving the same commands as if it
were the Lunar Lion spacecraft.
Autonomous
control
of
a
spacecraft is absolutely imperative
because commands to the Lunar Lion
will take approximately 1.3 seconds
to be received and executed.
Late last year, the Lunar Lion
team put a $100,000 deposit down
on a commercial launch vehicle
through a former Google Lunar X
Prize competitor, Team Phoenicia
LLC, which now focuses its assets on
securing room on commercial launch
vehicles as secondary payloads
in an attempt to maximize cost
effectiveness. Simply procuring the
ride to space aboard a rocket has
been the reason most teams have
dropped out of the competition and
it is because Penn State has made
it this far that they are considered a
viable candidate to win the prize.
“The hardest part of the mission is
the two minutes between when we
and when we touch down.” Paul
said. “It all comes down to that.”
The team’s intended landing spot
is The Sea of Tranquility, located just
30 km north of the site where Apollo
11’s lunar lander, “Eagle”, touched
down on July 20th, 1969. With the
landing site so close to this landmark,
the Lunar Lion team hopes to take
images of the landing site in order
to acquire some of the additional
$4 million that exists for teams going
above and beyond the requirements.
To learn more about the Penn
State Lunar Lion Team and how you
can help them land on the Moon, visit
www.lunarlion.psu.edu.
Credit: PSU Lunar Lion Team
www.RocketSTEM .org
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