Search My Blog

Friday, June 28, 2013

Hitch Hikers Ride to the Moon - Moon Mission for $300

Hitch Hikers Ride to the Moon. Moon Mission - Arduino to the moon, for $300. Or Send your own Pocket Spacecraft on a Mission to the Moon. Boy, would I like to do this one!:) Check it out...

Don

Send your own Pocket Spacecraft on a Mission to the Moon!

by Pocket Spacecraft

Help kickstart the personal space age by sending your own personalized spacecraft to the moon!

Would you like to send your own spacecraft to the moon?

Have you ever dreamt of exploring the solar system with your own spacecraft?

Well finally you can!

We've developed a very low cost, open source, open access, mass space exploration system that anyone can use, and we need your help to send your very own Pocket Spacecraft, and thousands of others, on a first of its kind expedition to the moon.

We're a global team of scientists, engineers and designers that have worked on this concept at some of the world's leading universities and come together to kick start the personal interplanetary space age and give you the opportunity to become a hands on citizen space explorer. Explorers who back the project can personalise their own spacecraft by adding a picture and customising the message it transmits using just their web browser. More technical explorers can even customise software and hardware.

Upload a profile picture/avatar (left) or school, club or company pennant (middle) to a shared spacecraft, or customise the whole of your Earth or Lunar Scout personal spacecraft! (right)

Smaller than a CD and as thin as a piece of paper, you'll be able to watch online as your Pocket Spacecraft is built in the lab and loaded into an Interplanetary CubeSat Mothership. Having hitched a ride into space on a commercial rocket, some Pocket Spacecraft will be released into space to flutter to the ground to demonstrate landing on a planet with an atmosphere (the Earth). The mothership will set off to the moon where, when it arrives many months later, the rest of the Pocket Spacecraft will be released, photographed and then land on the moon to complete the mission.

Pocket Mission Control will allow you to monitor your spacecraft telemetry (d), onboard apps (e), your training achievements (f), ground station status (g), and where your spacecraft is in space (h)

You'll monitor progress throughout with your own Pocket Mission Control app - track the progress of your spacecraft as it is designed, built and travels through space. See data from your spacecraft's instruments as it arrives, relayed from space by a global ground station network direct to your smartphone. Hold your phone up to the sky and use the augmented reality feature to point out exactly where your spacecraft is!

Never before will private individuals have had such a hands on opportunity to take an active part in interplanetary space exploration - this is your chance to be a true space pioneer!

The Team

Members of our team co-created the first space mission funded on KickStarter (KickSat - due to be launched by NASA later this year), and have created or co-led influential workshops such as the Interplanetary CubeSat Workshop at MIT, and the Keck Institute for Space Studies Small Satellites: A Revolution in Space Science workshop at Caltech.

More than 100 volunteers from twenty countries have inspired, worked on and presented the elements underpinning this project at universities and conferences around the world.

We've created more than twenty open space projects since 2009 building the elements we need for this mission, with contributions from more than a hundred volunteers in twenty countries (and counting) led by our co-ordinators in Europe (Bristol, UK) and America (Pasadena, USA). In short, we're serious.