Dear supporters of WARR Exploration,
Hopefully, you all have started the new year well and healthy. For us, the year began with fantastic news: We are pleased to welcome Orbit Recycling as our second industrial partner. Orbit Recycling is a small company, founded and lead by Frank Koch, that tries to clean up our orbit by transporting aluminum to the moon and recycling it there with Fresnel lenses. By following this approach, he expects to save ESA a lot of money and make building lunar habitats more attractive to decision-makers. To melt and sinter aluminum Orbit Recycling is developing a structure with a Fresnel lens, which is very similar to our payload. Due to the ongoing lockdown, our production and testing activities are limited to those that we can do in our homes. In the event that the lockdown continues into the beginning of March, we could experience troubles manufacturing all mechanical components in our WARRkstatt on time. Therefore, we are currently looking for production partners to outsource some production steps and to be able to meet the deadlines set by IGLUNA.
Recent Works
For the past few months, the subteam EPS has been working on a PCB to observe and control the whole operation of the electronic power system. The Covid situation did not make it easier to order and manufacture this monitoring module. Currently, the students of EPS are working on testing the PCB and writing the software for the chosen STM32 microcontroller. The picture on the right side shows the layout of this PCB, which was designed with the suite EAGLE.
Having passed the internal review of the Propulsion and Chassis (PC) and Payload (PL) teams, their students are currently evaluating ways to lower the total mass and to further optimize the mechanical parts. This process includes FEM analyses as well as topology studies. The picture on the left shows a FEM analysis of our suspension.
As part of the Software for IGLUNA, we developed our own Graphical User Interface for controlling the Rover. As of yet, this consists of data visualization, steering the Rover as a whole and controlling individual motors. With a focus on customizability and comprehensive feedback, this tool will allow us to closely observe the Rover during Operations.