We hope that you are all healthy and not too bad affected by the “Lockdown light”. Due to this lockdown, only two members of WARR Exploration are allowed at the same time in our workshop. Fortunately, we had finished most of the manufacturing by the time the lockdown started. Currently, only the electronic and the payload team need to manufacture parts, so we are still confident about meeting our deadlines and have a competitive rover for the IGLUNA field campaign.
Recent Works
We are proud to announce that we have completed the first iteration of our student documentation for IGLUNA. The student documentation is a comprehensive report that describes all aspects of our project, from the technical description of the rover itself to all project management issues. We look forward to the defense presentation (the Preliminary Design Review) associated with the documentation, which we will deliver this Tuesday in front of experts from the Swiss Space Center.
Approaching the main design phase of the IGLUNA project, the Payload team and Propulsion and Chassis team have been working closely together to find out how to integrate the sintering apparatus onto the rover. This design allows the printing axes to be independent of the movement of the solar tracking axes. Therefore, the solar tracking system can function automatically while the printing is controlled by the user using G-Code. With these insights, the payload team can begin their detailed mechanical design.
In the meantime, Payload is also experimenting with different mixtures of sand to use for demonstrating the functionality of our rover. Here you can see the latest one, which consists of 90% quartz sand and 10% soda. Currently, the main difficulty is finding a sunny day for testing, as we are reliant on strong sunshine for sintering.