Science Forums 2

[TheBigDog]

I like the idea of having the lander act as a command center for the rovers. The rovers are basically stupid remote control cars run by the lander PC. The lander has solar panels and acts as a recharger for the rovers. They go out and return on a single charge. Very simple little devices. There are virtually no moving parts on the lander. It acts as a base station for the rovers and does all the communication with Earth. The computers use all solid state memory. Again, no moving parts.

I like Turtle's idea of not putting all of our eggs in one basket. What if we keep the lander/rover packet small enough that we send two. We then double out chances for a successful touch down. I envision that the stuff we are landing is going to be one of the least expensive parts of the mission. Off the shelf electronics, simple engineering.

I think my favorite idea is for a constant motion lander. Get this... we have a lander that when in the sunlight can maintain 8-10 k/h. That is fast enough to perpetually stay in the sunlight. If it lasts for 28 days it would circumnavigate the moon. Imagine how cool that would be!

Another idea I had was to have the lander use a mortor type launcher to send rovers or other landers to places on the moon several hundred kilometers away. If we want to take pictures of the existing Apollo equipment that might be the way to do it.

Lots of ideas.

Great list, Pyro. I would actually like to trim it down into about half a dozen with the details as requirements of separate teams. We will need to come up with some guiding principles to help guide our decision making. I like redundancy in every place we can afford it. The initial launch might be the only place we can't do that.

Bill