Gadgetory

welcome to the middle of the Mojave Desert more specifically the Mojave Air and Space Port this is where ten years ago skills to pathes won the Ansari XPrize with its spaceship won and if all goes according to plan this week this is where Astrobotic the team from pittsburgh retaking its next step toward winning the Google Lunar XPrize this is a very important historic place for XPrize in 2008 I believe it was Masten Space Systems where we are today was the winner of the Northrop Grumman lunar lander challenge which was in fact the same the very same vehicle you see behind me which is going to be used by biased robotic for this test we've been preparing for this test for the last four years about this is the culmination of a lot of hard work I did the visual navigation but we use a camera on board the lander and it takes pictures and I take the images and match them to a map each pixel in that map or each square in the map corresponds to some value in the real world so latitude longitude I can use the image data match up to the map and then figure out where we are in 3d space using that data so we can figure out where the lander is just using a single camera image and a map now our standing on the place where the test itself should end hopefully successfully the land is going to take off about 300 meters in that direction go straight up and then glide in at about a 25 degree angle as it comes in the Landers gonna be using laser scanners to point straight down and figure out where the best place for it to touchdown is there are three concrete paths behind me the lander itself will determine which of those is the best for you to use you'll see the sandbags scattered around those are basically simulating boulders on the lunar surface obviously doesn't want to touch down to any of those it's gonna avoid those pick the right concrete pad and touch down gently it could be quite difficult they really haven't done it before commercially they've done some prior tests to this so they have some pretty good confidence but in general commercial companies don't normally do this it's the R&D realm we're landing near the lockets mortis pit on the moon it's much rougher terrain than where Apollo landed or any of the older Mars landings we want to guarantee that we're gonna be safe when we touchdown this test is just one component of Astrobotic overall lander development and mission development the other sorts of things which the team is going to have to do before it can launch and land on the moon is complete the development of the other subsystems of its lander that is propulsion subsystems the structural subsystem communications and things like that so the judging panel is looking at those kinds of things as well and eventually as your body despite a series of setbacks the google lunar xprize judges were able to evaluate the team Astrobotic landing system with masted here in the desert and ultimately we're still waiting to hear exactly whether or not that's enough to win them the milestone prize it was a big step forward their alternate plans planning past robotics is actually going to fly other teams to the surface of the Moon so there's no other team that is actually going to do that for the other teams so that's interesting approach so they're taking other payloads with them as well as their own me personally I'd really like to see my software be useful for pinpoint landing that's really exciting I'm Tim Stevens covering google lunar xprize foreseen