Our team gave a presentation for Introduction to Space Exploration. There were several requests to post the presentation online, so here it is in three wonderful formats:

• Presentation for Intro to Space PPTX - 113MB (original format)
• Presentation for Intro to Space PPT - 114MB (converted to PPT format)
• Presentation for Intro to Space (Online Version/HTML)

We finally have photos from CalPoly and the lab edited and uploaded.

Andrew’s photos from CalPoly are at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/afdn/sets/72157608407844087/

You can also see all of Andrew’s NERDS/LASER 2.0 related photos at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/afdn/collections/72157608426218481/

Photos from everyone else are availible at:
http://csmnerds.com/pictures/

It’s said that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Today, we found our weak link.

LunOrediggers was the 10th pick over all to compete, however we ended up going 4th since there were less then 10 ten with entries that were competing.

We passed inspection, weighing in at just over 68kg¹. We received our briefing on our allotted five minutes of setup time and then went to work. Like a well oiled machine, we were ready and testing with lots of time to spare.

The judges counted down to power on: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…power on.

Now this is the interesting part. The initialization sequence takes some time to complete. So even after power is applied, there isn’t any movement for a few seconds. However, the seconds soon changed into minutes. The judges reported that we were drawing no current, which was not a good sign.

After five minutes, we finally called it. Testing confirmed that the proper power was present at the connector. The judges reconnected the power cable to rover and powered it back on just to make sure. A few seconds later, things starting moving.

In somewhat of a confused panic, the judges quickly cut power. The issue had been that while we had inserted the plug into our connector, we hadn’t twisted it to lock it. This was simply because we weren’t familiar with the plug, which was a competition defined and provided part.

A temporary reprieve was issued as the judges went off to discus things.

Sometime later, they came back and decided they owned some of the responsibility between the mating of our technology and theirs. Thus, we were allowed to restart and run!

Round two began well enough. The rover powered up and began it’s initialization cycle. The sensor turret on the top moved around and then, nothing. Well not actually nothing, the sensor turret just kept performing its sweep. But the rover didn’t move. After a few minutes, we called it quits again; this time for real.

And that brings us back to the weakest link. What went wrong? Well, we haven’t had a formal diagnostic session, but it seems to be a programming issue. The rover was positioned in a corner of the sandbox, with its front facing the corner. The IR sensors were close enough to the wall that they were being triggered before the rover even moved. Due to the way our error handling algorithm works, this caused the rover to continuously skip to the next command in the sequence, which left us standing still.

There is some good news though. Tomorrow, we’ll be testing again in a demonstration program. This will allow us to vet some of our other systems. There will be no rules for this demo, so we should be able to perform a complete cycle.

We’ll have some more updates and pictures tomorrow. However, more sleep is needed at this particular moment in time.

¹ The maximum weight allowed was 70kg

The day we’ve been waiting so long for has finally arrived. Our rover is as finished as it’s ever going to be. Take a look and enjoy the fruits of our labor of love.

We’re sitting and watching the competition right now. We’ll be up in a few hours.

We went to the CalPoly campus and checked out the sandbox we’ll be racing in tomorrow; it looks to be a very formidable challenge.

We’re still working on getting the LunOredigger ready for competition tomorrow.

Only a few hours left though…

We have made our way to San Luis Obispo to California Polytechnic State University. We are currently performing some checkout procedures with the rover before the competition begins tomorrow.

Keep checking back here for updates later tonight and all through the weekend about the competition!

Media: Please direct all inquires to Ryan Dubisher who can be reached at 303-912-5270.

Before we all left for the summer, NERDS had a change to take some photos and meet with Colorado School of Mines President Bill Scoggins:

Here’s what we’re bringing to the competition…well, what’s under the sheet actually.

The NERDS are entered into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Regolith Excavation Centennial Challenge as the LunOrediggers. Following our schools tradition (CSM Orediggers) we are pushing the limits of mining technology to the frontiers of space, specifically In-Situ Resource Utilization of the Lunar surface. Watch as our clock counts us down to the competition where we will unveil LASER 2.0 for the first time.