Life after SpaceFest VI

Photo courtesy of Jeremy Ditelberg  

Finally caught up on things after SpaceFest VI and my presentation at Anoka Tech this past week. What a great time! First lets start by saying Anoka Tech gave me an 'A' on the project and also an 'A' on the 36 page report I turned in for the project. So that's pretty awesome! I feel like my remaining semester and a half will just be coasting after all of this.

SpaceFest was great! We had our table set up with a little sand box with some obstacles and an IPad showing slides of how this project came to be. We also had a large poster off to the side showing all of the highlights for Inspiration.

We had a visit by a film crew who was going around interviewing people about their displays. That video should be posted fairly soon I suppose. Probably a lot of editing and post production work for them to do yet. But after we finished with them, Rick Tumlinson from Deep Space Industries came over and took a lot of interest in the project and how much time, consideration, and self teaching I put into building Inspiration. I had a lot of fun showing him everything this little rover could do and some of the challenges I over came with some simple coding. I highly recommend checking out DSI and another organization he and many other private space advocates are involved in, spacefrontier.org/

 Our little sandbox had a hump to display the suspension and some rocks for effect. The rocks were later used for SCIENCE! by a wonderful little guy named Steven who him and his Dad, Jeremy, spent a considerable about of time with us testing out things like the metal detector's range and what it could detect. We had a lot of fun and I really appreciated being able to test these things since I never actually had time to test them before the trip to Pasadena for SpaceFest.

Here's a quick video from outside SpaceFest to see how Inspiration handles in real dirt and sunlight. I actually found out that the internal temperature was reading up to 95 degrees F. So the gold foil really didn't help keep the sun's heat out like I had hoped. Also, it doesn't handle as well as I wanted so I think this summer I might make the corner wheels steerable and also give it some more ground clearance.

A quick pick of Bobak Ferdowsi (Mohawk Guy) and I after the Curiosity panel at SpaceFest. 

Photo courtesy of Jeremy Ditelberg

And here we ran into Steven and his Dad, Jeremy, while we were out "on tour" with Inspiration while the laptop batteries were charging. I'm very excited to see what cool things they'll be up to after spending so much time around all of these inspiring people!

 We also got to take Inspiration to NASA JPL where we met with the senior systems engineer for the Sojourner rover, Andrew Mishkin. (who's book, Sojourner, you might recall me using in an earlier post. :-/ ) He was really nice and sat with us in the court yard answering all of our questions on Mars, rovers, project management, and future plans. Him and his wife even stopped by our table to see how the presentation was going! I really can't thank him enough for spending so much time with us. 

  After our visit with Mr. Mishkin, we got to take part in a JPL tour set up by our friend Jay Gallentine, who writes books on space exploration. We saw where they build their spacecraft, test them, and even where they operate them from! Really exciting stuff!

The little rover that inspired this whole thing

The assembly room

Testing lab

Inside the control room

"Lucky Peanuts" for luck during events

Another author which we met was Frank O'Brien who wrote, The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation, which I am very excited to read since the Apollo add-on for Orbiter Space Flight Simulator uses this computer system pretty extensively. I might even recommend it to my electronics professors for its sections on digital logic. Frank was really nice and very interested in what Inspiration is going to bring for Cristin and I in the future. 

 Next up for me and Inspiration will be a math class this summer, work in the evenings, and designing a steerable suspension for Inspiration. Plus (finally) testing outside and getting the autonomous part coded and working. Then hopefully I can work on the lander part over the winter. I'm still debating on whether I should make a rocket and lander or just a rocket powered lander to take Inspiration out to its eventual landing site. Anything's possible I guess!