Yeah! Rani's home!

So after a long flight and epic battles with french crowds in CDG airport and train ride through the country french country side at 300km/hr, Rani has come home to Strasbourg..I think she was pretty tired, the first thing she decided to do is to put a basket on her head...

She kinda looks like she came from the savana.

Or Maybe she was just happy to have some new wheels.  

New post...scroll down

Monday, September 8, 2008 is where it's at. I wrote it but never posted it. Now that I am back from Vancouver, I think it's time.

http://raniandaxel.blogspot.com/2008/09/things-i-will-miss-most-from-canada.html

Space Pigeon

What a week!

On Monday our assigment was to design a small low cost satellite that would take detailed images of the moon for the Lunar X prize competitors to help them decide where to land their rovers. By Friday afternoon we were to have all engineering configurations sort out, have the orbital mechanics calculated, mission architecture, budget, legal considerations and schedule all packaged in a report, a presentation and a mock up to show how the satellite works! Lucky for me I ended up with a crack team of engineers and astrophysists so all I had to do is chair our meetings and sort out scheduling, and budget. ..it was a little weird as I didn't really have an assigned task and just floated around to help out. Turns out we were all up until the wee hours and were sorting out details minutes before our presentation. Somehow we managed to pull it off without too much of a hitch. We ended up calling our sat the "Spacepigeon" inspired by the first cameras attached to a pigeon see below:

James Mason came up with a cool video of our trajectory check it out:

And this is what our SpacePigeon-1 by our other James Barth:

Pretty cool looking eh? The interesting issuewith putting a sat around the moon is one there's no atmosphere so you can fly pretty low to the ground so long as you're going fast enough. Our Spacepigeon flew at 100km off the surface and would come down for a 25km fly by once in a while. Don't want to go much lower as the mountains on the moon go up to 9km high! Way higher than anything on earth. But what really affects the design is the added complexity of the moon rotating around the Earth, so we had to put our antenna on a gimble so that we can maximiz communication time with our ground station. The same was done with the solar panel so that it maximizes time in the sun. So all in we figured that the entire thing would cost $50M..any takers? Personnally I would rather spend $30M and spend six days on the ISS and do micro gravity experiments.

ax