Penn State Lunar Lion Team

Transcription

Narrator: NASA shows the Lunar Lion Team some tricks of the trade... That's right now, In Motion! Narrator: Penn State has assembled a team of specialized faculty and students to do what many would only dream. At least 'til now. The Penn State Lunar Lion team, in competition with teams from around the country and around the world, will attempt to be the first to launch a spacecraft from earth and land it on the moon. And while the team has brought together some of the smartest and brightest minds in the country to accomplish this task, Penn State sought out the assistance of what probably is the largest knowledgebase in the world on what it takes to accomplish space travel. Bilen SOT: They have a real expertise at rapidly developing mission concepts and showing whether they're viable or not. That's the kind of capability that they've developed over many years, they've proven it out over many different mission concept designs and being able to use them to help us flesh out whether the concepts that we had for the Lunar Lion were going to be viable or not was really really valuable to us. Narrator: So team members piled in a van during springbreak at Penn State and made the four plus hour journey to NASA's Glenn Research Center, located just outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Paul: NASA Glen has expertise in aeronautics, space power systems, space propulsion systems and in full up space mission design. As part of their education outreach efforts, we went there, traveled there... worked side by side with their engineers over the course of a week to come up with the Lunar Lion baseline mission concept. Narrator: The team was taken on tours of the massive facility, but soon got down to business in Research Analysis Center, home of the Compass Lab. Bilen SOT: The Compass Lab is really a rapid mission development lab. There's a rapid interchange of information when you are iterating a design. Say you put on a new communications payload. That might increase the amount of power that you need. So the power engineer needs to keep track of that. and know when you're going to be coming up on a hard limit. In terms of you have increased power there is suddenly more mass that you need. So all of these things are a iteration cycle. And if this is done in separate offices, across the campus there at NASA, or between the NASA facility and here at Penn State, that is going to take a long time to do. But by co-locating people there at the Compass Lab, we can run through that iteration cycle very, very quickly. By the end of the week you can have a viable mission concept like we did with the Lunar Lion. Narrator: The Compass Lab is a state of the art workspace where all the workstations are connected and monitored by a manager. As changes are made all participants can see how those changes effect the outcomes of other work teams. Keegan SOT: With any major project that we are working on like that, especially with a space industry project it is really crucial that you do have everyone in the same room and being able to interact in real time. Because there is always so much "give and take" between the different subsystems. When you are trying to come with a solidified design you need everyone there to do that "give and take". Narrator: And after the week was done, the Lunar Lion Team was able to leave the Glenn Research Center with more than just a general idea of what was to be done. Paul: And so what we were able to do by sending this team of faculty and students to the Compass Lab and leveraging the tools they had there to come up with a mission design, was to take the requirements of the X Prize and make sure that we came up with a system and mission that fit within the box that we've defined for ourselves in terms of overall cost, launch vehicle capability, system capability and time to build it. We came up with a simple design... we came up with a straightforward design that's going to meet the mission requirements to win that grand prize. Narrator: And beyond the invaluable educational assistance outreach provided by NASA, the student team members received an opportunity that not many college students get... the chance to collaborate side by side with a working NASA professional. Keegan SOT: It is encouraging to see the NASA workers with that expertise. Because it gives me confidence that when I get the experience over the years as an engineer that I can be at that point one day and have that amount of expertise. So, I think it is encouraging and humbling in a way to know that even as students we think that we learn so much here in class, but just to see how much more knowledge there really is to learn within the space industry. Narrator: For In Motion I'm Curt Parker.