Wet Bandits| Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Sample!

Project Details

The Challenge | Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Sample!

You are the astronaut/robotic mission lead tasked with bringing valuable specimens from the Moon back to Earth for further study. How will you evaluate lunar samples quickly and effectively before or while still on the mission? How will you differentiate samples of potential scientific value from less interesting material?

MOONDOZER

The MOONDOZER looks for ice on the Moon

Wet Bandits

There are 5400 square miles of permanently shadowed terrain on the north and south poles that could contain ice. The lunar rover will traverse this shadowed terrain in order to save astronauts time and effort.

The ultrasonic sensor sends out a sonic wave in a similar manner as traditional radar and measures the time it takes for the signal to return. The time is used to determine the density of the material and distinguish sand or concrete from sheets of ice or water. The ultrasonic sensor we used is a COTS breakout board designed for use with Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

Currently the MOONDOZER is controlled by a Pixhawk controller running Ardupilot autopilot software. This allows the mission operator to specify various waypoints for the MOONDOZER to travel to. At each waypoint the rover will loiter over the sample and the data collection will begin. If ice is found, a blue LED will light up, the simulated sample collection method will be deployed and the location of the ice is written to a data file. The Pixhawk and the sensor are both connected to an on-board Raspberry Pi which is the integration mechanism between the sensor suite and the guidance software.

Since ultrasonics do not operate in the near vacuum environment of the lunar surface the final design would need to use an electromagnetic based system such as ground penetrating radar. These two systems are functionally the same but RADAR uses electromagnetic waves while the ultrasonic sensor uses acoustic waves. As well, a different non-GPS based guidance software will need to be used. We feel that even with these necessary changes, the overall functionality of the MOONDOZER will stay the same. A spectrometer could be added to help determine different material composition.

The main challenge of the project was calibrating the ultrasonic sensor to detect ice or water. Another challenge was creating a functional hardware project in a short amount of time. We learned about rapidly prototyping a system with many design constraints.

https://github.com/seaan/space-apps-2019

#MOON