Reach For the Moon

The TU Delft GLXP team is proud to announce the acceptance of two abstracts submitted to the DGLR International Symposium: 'To Moon and Beyond' in Bremen (Germany) and the European Planetary Science Congress 2008 in Münster (Germany). Both these conferences will take place in the month September.

In both cases a small number of TU Delft GLXP representatives will attend to present the ideas developed during and after the DSE project. The preparation for attendance of the conferences will continue during the academic summer holidays.

Now that the Design Synthesis Exercise has come to an end, the conceptual design phase has ended. The page 'Lander Design' has been updated with the final conceptual design of the vehicle and the mission outline for the lander. Also added at the ‘Lander Design’ page is a link to the final review of the lander group and the executive summary of the project.

On Thursday June 12th, both teams will present their designs on the DSE Symposium. This symposium is the final activity of the DSE project. During this event, we will explain the major design choices to university staff, students, parents and an international jury. The lander group will be presenting from 11:00 to 11:35 and The rover group from 11:45 to 12:20. Both presentations are held in lecture room A of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, at the Delft University of Technology and are open for anyone interested. Feel free to visit this event and get more familiarized with the designs.

The end of the Design Synthesis Exercise of the Aerospace Engineering Bachelor program is finally nearing. Both teams have come up with a preliminary design for both the journey to and on the Moon. On Monday this week (June 2nd) the Delft University of Technology notified the Dutch press that it is looking for potential partners to possibly continue this project past the DSE.

This week, the rover group finalized the preliminary design of the two rovers that will roam the surface of the Moon. The two crafts with external dimensions of 0.33x0.28x0.35 m (WxLxH) will each travel in the same direction, controlled directly from the earth-based mission control center. This way, the rovers can switch tasks whenever necessary. An artist impression of the latest layout is shown below, again through the help of Robert Korteland. An overview of the development of the rover is found on the 'Rover Design' page.

This image was created as the first artist impression of what the rover could look like. It was drawn by Robert Korteland, student at the faculty of Industrial Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. The detailed subsystem design has now however already imposed several changes to this concept, but typical features like the caterpillar tracks of the vehicle remain. Overall, the image gives a good impression of the craft and the team would like to thank Robert for his efforts.

The Rover Group recently made a trade off for having either one larger rover or two (or more) smaller rovers. The option with two or more smaller rovers proved to be more reliable and cost effective for this particular mission.

Later it showed that having more than two vehicles would again significantly add complexity to the system because of the required level of miniaturization that would have to be applied. Therefore the design is limited to having only two operating rovers.

We will be attending the First official Team Summit in Strasbourg, France on May 20th and 21st. We hope to come in contact with other teams to share ideas and maybe find a partner to form an official GLXP Team.

By the end of the DSE we will have the necessary preliminary designs which can be used as a basis to continue to create a feasible winning design. However, a much larger team will be needed to work out the design in detail and arrange all the necessary logistics and business side of the project.

We look forward to meeting lots of people. See you in Strasbourg!

This site has been launched to provide information on the Design Synthesis Exercise projects from the TU Delft that will create a preliminary design for the Google Lunar X-Prize.

The design has been split into two parts: the getting there mission and the lunar rover. The first project will design the mission from launch until a safe landing on the moon. The second project will design a secondary rover which will complete the necessary requirements set by the X-Prize Foundation.