Department of Aerospace Engineering

AER E Departmental Seminar: Ralph McCartney, Title: "A Response to the Lunar XPrize Competition"

This seminar will be held in Room 1235 Howe Hall at 2:10 PM.

A Response to the Lunar XPrize Competition”

The XPrize Foundation announced on September 25, 2007, a competition to successfully land a payload on the Moon and return it to the earth.  Coupled with this goal is the requirement to incorporate a small rover into the payload and have it perform various excursion duties over the lunar surface. 

As in many previous performance-based aerospace competitions, this activity appears to promote superficial goals that lack genuine substance.  Underlying this endeavor, however, is an attempt to define space activity other than through government sponsorship.  Using commercial enterprise to pursue creative, productive applications of space technologies, it is thought that a closer relationship between system development and the subsequent rendered value could be forged, justifying commercial investment for self-sustaining economic ventures.  
 

In this regard, the Lunar XPrize seeks to develop a reliable, low cost robotic space delivery system with the capacity to soft-land payloads on the lunar surface.  Categories of potential applications include robotic payloads for basic research (extremely long baseline (ELB) radio telescopes, special duty optical telescopes, extended lunar geology, others), commercial uses, and support of forthcoming manned missions. 
 

The successful mission must conclude by December 31, 2012, to be eligible for the $20 million award.  Successful completion of additional tasks, currently under consideration by the XPrize Rules Committee, will earn an additional $5 million.  Sponsorship comes from Google, Inc..
 

The author will present a baseline mission profile to fulfill competition requirements.  His presentation will include competition guidelines with detailed mission goals and a selected mission architecture.  To structure a competitive design approach, the author selected “top-down” systems analysis enabled by a COTS design philosophy integrating decision-tree topologies to minimize development efforts.  The author will present results defining mission hardware with attendant failure mode analysis.
 

An informal discussion is scheduled to follow the presentation where participants may examine potential dissertation topics.  Dialog among University staff, students, invitees, and the author is encouraged.