Monday, April 10, 2006

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter secondary payload

Nasa announced the winner of LRO secondary payload downselect today. I was kind of hopeing it would be the GFSC/Raytheon lunar lander/hopper, but they selected the ARC Impactor instead.
oh well

I have the model of the raytheon hopper(also known as the "Lunar Penguin") 90% complete, It will be a future add-on. Its pretty cool, its made up of parts from the missile defense EKV interceptors and the tomahawk cruise missile(puts military equipment to good use) It uses a star-20 solid upper stage as a crasher stage( like the soviet LK lunar lander and the block-D) then it has 700-800m/s to land and hop around the crater. since its not going with the LRO, I'll probbly use Athena or Taurus to launch it as a dedicated mission, should work, it pretty small 1m tall and 1m wide, and 105KG without the star-20

The mission that was selected sounds pretty good, it uses the centuar or Delta 4 upper stage as a impactor(over 2000KG, deep impact was 350KG) The EELVs payload ring is converted into sattelite that follows the impactor relaying video and scientific data back

The ARC impactor might be a future project. but as it stands.
My current projects for orbiter are
-Walrus and Mystic- almost complete
-Tarqeq/Lunette + Angara 1.2- Tarqeq/Lunette are finished but Angara needs textures and configs made
-CanX and Wasp nanosat Launcher- models are complete, needs textures and configs
-Lunar Penguin-model about 90% complete, needs textures, configs, and maybe a launch vehicle

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