Gadgetory

welcome to Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University home of Astrobotic one of the teams competing for the 20 million dollar Google Lunar XPrize and the last time we saw Astrobotic we were in the middle of the Mojave Desert where they were testing out their landing systems in preparation for landing on the moon today we're gonna check out what happens next see if they can actually broadcast high-definition video from the lunar surface all the way back here to us on earth for the testing we're going to leave the lab and go out in the field to an active quarry that means safety gear most definitely required partner so we're at the Lafarge test site we're testing the image system on the rover we're looking at the quality of the images that come off the cameras and then we're transmitting those over a link that's similar to what we'll use on the moon from the earth to the moon we have a signal propagation delay of 2.5 seconds so when we send a command from Earth it takes 2.5 seconds to reach the moon and from the moon the image feedback that gives the result of that action would be another 2.5 seconds so we press a button to make the robot do something then we see it 5 seconds later so we have to plan for that in our driving strategy we need to prove that the resolution of the images are good enough to drive that the compression that's required to get all that data down doesn't destroy the images and that we can take nice high color HD images of the beautiful things we're gonna see on them yeah so right now we're looking at the user interface for our prototype moon rover on it we can see the images that are fed to it those are used to control the rover and the higher definition images are screened back to earth for the viewing of the public the two cameras give a stereo video on the moon the Sun lights very bright very grey it's very flat and so it's hard to tell distances we use the stare cameras to be able to tell distance to things like rocks and craters so we don't get stuck one of the key requirements of the Google Lunar XPrize is to prove that we traveled 500 meters on the moon and this screen actually updates our distance estimate in real time so we know how far we've traveled and we're also able to see the exact number of rotations for each wheel because that's that along with computer vision techniques are the two key data points for our distance verification the rover has a suspension that allows it to drive at low speeds very capably it's a single pivot suspension one pivot upfront and then all of the rest of the suspension is fixed at this point the big thing they have to do is really just test hey my name is Jay Kurtz one of the judges and they're scheduled with the next couple weeks that really start going through the like I say the thermal the vacuum the shotgun bike testing and really the shock and vibe the critical part is to survive the launch I don't think they're gonna have a lot of risk there I think we've got very strong strong umbrellas so that this Lander looks very different from the one that we tested in Mojave but the engines are the same the propulsion fuel system is very similar the computing and landing systems are identical so what we need to do now is integrate all of those components fly a system that's got the got the similar architecture and then we'll launch it them space and land on the moon this is Tim Steve who's covering the Google Lunar XPrize for CNN