So a few days ago I mentioned on here that me and a few friends are working on some space related things, and that I'd post something about it. I didn't mention exactly what though, so that's what I'm going to do now.

At the start of this year at the Chaos Communication Congress, one of the Lunar XPrize teams (Part-Time Scientists) held a talk about the current state of their project (link to said talk). During this talk they revealed one very exciting possibility: that they have some structural elements (drop containers) on their rovers which they need to drop on the lunar surface and that they would like to fill with useful or interesting things - roughly 20 kg in total. In order to figure out what to fill them with they asked the public for ideas, with a deadline of the 30th of April 2015.

This reveal was quite exciting to me and a bunch of other space nerds in our local hackerspace. With 2015 just having started we knew we'd have about three months to work out a decent proposal. Add to that basically none of us having any formal training with designing things for space. Long story short: we had to spend considerable time reading up on probe design and the lunar environment and we considered lots ideas, many of which we quickly figured were unfeasible. In the end the most doable seemed to be to try and keep some COTS secondary batteries alive during the lunar night, run a radio and maybe a few cameras.

During all this I also went and held a talk about this project at Revision, the largest demoparty these days, held in Saarbrücken around easter each year. I've linked the talk as uploaded to YouTube below (alternate WebM link on our server):

Most important part not mentioned in the talk? Simulation. Incredibly useful to answer all kinds of questions, especially around things like thermal design which is tricky to test.

I could write lots more here, but I think this is enough for now. I will mention that we have a rudimentary website set up at scube.se, including a blog.

Thanks for your attention. Now I'm going to follow New Horizons' Pluto approach via NASA's Eyes!