COLORADO SPRINGS — Astrobotic is partnering with Canadian house software program firm Mission Management on a small rover that may go to the Moon on Astrobotic’s subsequent lander mission.
The 2 firms introduced April 8 that they’ll use Mission Management’s Spacefarer software program to function Astrobotic’s first CubeRover, which is able to go to the moon on Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander scheduled for no sooner than late this yr. The CubeRover can be one in every of a number of secondary payloads on that lander, which may even ship NASA’s VIPER rover.
The shoebox-sized rover will take a look at its maneuverability and communications on this primary mission. It would additionally exhibit the Spacefarer software program’s means to regulate the rover, together with semi-autonomous navigation throughout the floor and evaluation of photos taken by the rover’s cameras.
“We selected to work with Mission Management due to the in depth capabilities that they’ve in Spacefarer and likewise the quite simple interface they constructed,” stated Mike Provenzano, vice chairman of superior growth applications at Astrobotic, throughout a briefing on the thirty ninth Area Symposium.
Spacefarer is a cloud-based mission operations software, stated Ewan Reid, founder and chief govt of Mission Management, offering quick access to telemetry and different information in addition to the power to command a spacecraft via a point-and-click interface. It gives, he stated, “all kinds of various instruments that customers must attempt to make the perfect smartest choices within the shortest period of time.”
The software program will allow distributed management for CubeRover, with mission operations dealt with each at Astrobotic’s Pittsburgh headquarters and Mission Management’s Ottawa headquarters. “It’s really going to be a joint mission with operators at each areas,” stated Provenzano. “That’s actually thrilling and one thing that Spacefarer enabled.”
Mission Management flew a model of Spacefarer on one other lunar lander mission, ispace’s HAKUTO-R M1 lander, however that spacecraft crashed making an attempt to land on the moon in April 2023. Reid stated that the software program would have been capable of obtain and analyze information from that lander however not command it.
Flying Spacefarer on CubeRover, he stated, will assist Mission Management open up new alternatives for his firm, demonstrating that Spacefarer can deal with operations of spacecraft. These clients, he argued, can give attention to their particular applied sciences, “and so they don’t should reinvent the wheel for an operations platform.”
The Canadian Area Company (CSA) stimulated the event of Spacefarer via its Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP), supposed to assist Canadian firms exhibit applied sciences for lunar missions. “The CSA acknowledges that with out that step in our growth timeline, with out having validated one thing that has flown and operated on an actual mission, it’s very onerous for us to promote it all over the world,” Reid stated.
“Industrial firms are on the very starting of making a brand new market and financial system on the moon,” stated CSA President Lisa Campbell. “LEAP was created to offer thias wide selection of alternatives for Canadian science and expertise actions in lunar orbit, on the moon’s floor and past.”
She stated the settlement between Astrobotic and Mission Management is “validating one thing that we imagine in on the company, which is we have to strive issues, we have to be daring. The world desires extra of what Canada has to supply.”
