KSP Community CubeSat

[henryrasia]

Ooooohhhh... Shiny. But does he do logos and such? Nicholander, I'll go ahead and send him a message explaining our project and requesting his assistance.

About the experiment, I just realized: What is the point of observing growth of moss that has been genetically engineered to respond to gravity? I heard the "threshold" of gravity or if the relationship between Gs and growth is logarithmic or linear or what have you.

[LvL]

Copying some stuff for the moss from wikipedia:

Physcomitrella patens is an early colonist of exposed mud and earth around the edges of pools of water.^[2][3] P. patens has a disjunct distributionin temperate parts of the world, with the exception of South America.^[4] The standard laboratory strain is the 'Gransden' isolate, collected by H. Whitehouse from Gransden Wood, in Cambridgeshire.

[LvL]

Found a website devoted to it

http://www.cosmoss.org/

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finding it pretty hard to find any to buy

[Mazon Del]

Ooooohhhh... Shiny. But does he do logos and such? Nicholander, I'll go ahead and send him a message explaining our project and requesting his assistance.

About the experiment, I just realized: What is the point of observing growth of moss that has been genetically engineered to respond to gravity? I heard the "threshold" of gravity or if the relationship between Gs and growth is logarithmic or linear or what have you.

The plants are not genetically engineered, they will be bred to have a higher gravitometric response. What this means is that they will try to grow toward, perpendicularly, or away from the direction of acceleration (IE: They can be bred to grow up, sideways, or down). The point of this is that right now the mechanisms that cause this behavior to happen are not well understood. We obviously have data for how well plants grow in 1+ Gs, and some for 0Gs. But there really isn't too much on 0G<?<1G. An example is that currently science is unaware of at just what level of G force are plants able to detect and thus grow accordingly. Plants tend not to grow well in zero G if they have root structures and the like partly because of how the 0G effects water on the root structures, but also weird growth issues. But if it turns out they only need to be spun to 0.05Gs or something similar, that is quite doable and is much less of a challenge for an Earth->Mars transit ship to do than if they required 0.8+ Gs to grow properly.

Additionally, we might get surprised and find out that plants grow ten times better under 0.4Gs than in 1G or some such thing.

Fun fact: E. Coli has been succesfully cultured in ultracentrifuges that exposed the bactera to over 400,000Gs (!) during the entirety of the growth period.

[henryrasia]

Alright then, so the experiment will be to

1) Discover the relationship between gravitational pull and moss growth, more specifically:

a) The mathematical relationship between pull and growth rate, growth direction, and growth strucutre (if we have a microscope)

Specific points in that relationship for:

i) Gravity "threshold" (minimum gravity at which moss realizes where "down" is)

ii) Optimum growth gravity (just in case it's between 0 and 1 g, as it would help in planning long-term space missions. Also, determining WHAT causes it to grow so well would be important, again only if we have a microscope, as it might be "fake growth" or something like that, don't ask me I'm a rocket scientist not a biologist!)

So now the mission would be starting out slow, see what happens, speed up, see what happens, repeat. This is nice for data collection (moar data!!!) and structural integrity safety (we'll stop if things seem like they're going to breaking down, ok K^2? ). One issue I do see, though, is that the moss will be growing at 0.3 gs or whatever after a time of growing at 0.2 g and 0.1 g, so how will results be reliable and useful? Also, just how fast will the moss grow? Because if it takes too long we may lose the cubesat before the mission is complete (~3 weeks with COTS hardware? In LEO?). Unless we're willing to revamp mission time and/or hardware (stretch goals? ).

PS. Sent message to Rareden, didn't replied yet.

[Nicholander]

So not just 0.16 and 0.38 G, great idea! So I guess the area for each of the Moss's will shrink, because if the whole dish started growing at once, through the mission we'd be changing how much gravity it would have, not so as you can imagine, it will get us lots of data about how Moss reacts when suddenly put into another gravity, not what we really want. So, we have maybe, 6 or 8 Moss compartments/areas in the dish, and the first compartment/area starts growing when it first starts spinning at one gravity (I don't mean 1G). After about 2.625-3.5 days (That's assuming if we have 3 weeks, divided by 6, 7 and 8, so that's why it is a "X-Y" thing) we change to another gravity and make the next compartment/area start to grow, and that cycle for 6-8 times until we've done all the compartments/areas. Also, Mazon Del, after one Moss compartment/area is done growing and we switch to another gravity and compartment/area, should we kill the original moss (Maybe it will interfere with the next Moss?), or see how it reacts when it is in this new gravity after being in the previous one?

Edited November 11, 2014 by Nicholander

[deljr15]

On the topic of centripetal force I put together a google sheet with some useful formulas for this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centripetal_force

For sake of example if our samples each had a mass of 100g. We could spin the satellite at 82.4 RPM. A sample mounted 19mm from center of mass will experience lunar gravity and a sample mounted 50mm from the center of mass will experience martian gravity.

Now that is alot of r's. If we up that to 200g it drops to 58.2 RPM.

The sheet is kinda fun to play with for limits.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1huWv5sDUiwWktL7ODQgGe7kLOABjteoATiC-mcr30sI/edit?usp=sharing

Please check my math on this

[K^2]

You are doing this wrong. Mass doesn't play a role in it. Also, we won't have anything more than 50mm from center.

Edited November 11, 2014 by K^2

[dharak1]

Do you mean 5cm? Because 5mm is insanely small.

[NERVAfan]

Found a website devoted to it

http://www.cosmoss.org/

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finding it pretty hard to find any to buy

You can buy them from here (http://www.moss-stock-center.org/) but they are really expensive...

I think we should save buying the "real thing" for the actual experiment (cubesat and Earthside control). I believe Mazon Del said he might be able to get some free though.

Any "pre-work" we should probably do with other mosses.

[K^2]

Do you mean 5cm? Because 5mm is insanely small.

It was supposed to be 50mm. I really need to proof-read even short posts.

You can buy them from here (http://www.moss-stock-center.org/) but they are really expensive...

10E/plant isn't that bad, even for some basic experimentation. I'm assuming that someone who knows what they are doing wouldn't need more than one to get going. (Ah, +30E/order. Well, that's still reasonable.)

And 90E/plant for the actual selected species is cheap.

Scientific equipment/supplies tend to be absurdly expensive. So yeah, that's a good find. We just need someone who wouldn't need to go through 20 of these before figuring out how to keep them alive. (That totally excludes me, by the way.)

Edited November 11, 2014 by K^2

[Mazon Del]

For the plants, Luis can basically hook us up for free using his research budget once we get a mock growth chamber to begin initial testing.

Incidentally Nicholander, we cannot operate with multiple mosses that start growing at different times. While you can manage that sort of things at labs on the ground, or even the ISS, we won't have the equipment on board to keep one bit of moss from growing while another does. Strictly speaking the moss will be growing from the time we seal up the cube sat at the location, until the atmosphere runs out or the sat burns up. What we will be doing is measuring how it grows during the initial part of its existence in a low gravity for several days, then up the gravity "quickly" then see how it continues to grow for the next few days. We might get little wonky transition edges in the growth patterns, but that is fine and useful data in its own right (how do plants grow in changing gravity environments?) but we should be able to get the info we want for the various gravity levels.

[deljr15]

You are doing this wrong. Mass doesn't play a role in it. Also, we won't have anything more than 50mm from center.

I never sugested mounting anything greater then 50mm. Also mass does play a roll F=m*v^2/r

[Nicholander]

Incidentally Nicholander, we cannot operate with multiple mosses that start growing at different times. While you can manage that sort of things at labs on the ground, or even the ISS, we won't have the equipment on board to keep one bit of moss from growing while another does. Strictly speaking the moss will be growing from the time we seal up the cube sat at the location, until the atmosphere runs out or the sat burns up. What we will be doing is measuring how it grows during the initial part of its existence in a low gravity for several days, then up the gravity "quickly" then see how it continues to grow for the next few days. We might get little wonky transition edges in the growth patterns, but that is fine and useful data in its own right (how do plants grow in changing gravity environments?) but we should be able to get the info we want for the various gravity levels.

Hmm... okay then, though I really don't see how it's not feasibly possible to do that in a 10 cm isolated cube floating 418 km above Earth, but hey, I'm not a biologist. So chances are, you're right.

[deljr15]

Also mass does play a roll F=m*v^2/r

I found where I went wrong. Increasing the mass will require an increase in force (the forgotten step) to arrive at the same RPM so 82.4 it is.

I stuck a 10cm disk in the mill to get a feel for the spin after seeing it 82.4 seams kinda slow.

[K^2]

It's not too fast. But keep in mind that I'd need to take a good number of readings during a single revolution to estimate the rate of rotation and orientation of the axis. All on a processor that can push about 1M instructions per second. If attitude control was the only task, I'd say, the hell with it, lets go for 1k RPM. But if there is a delay of any kind while it's making adjustments at that rate, you can end up with an uncontrolled tumble, and that can definitely screw up the experiment.

But that's why I'm suggesting we go incremental and only set firm goals for easily achievable rates.

P.S. I reserve the right to change my opinion of this completely once the simulation is running.

[LvL]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_(spacecraft)

could we possibly do this sort of mission later?

[Nicholander]

Well, eventually we will land a CubeSat on Phobos.

[henryrasia]

Not at this pace we aren't. Let's first put something in LEO and then we'll talk over the celebration party, ok?

What is the to-do list for next week? I say we all put some signature immediately with a link to this thread (like I just did), is anyone half way decent in photoshop? We can use pictures of the cubesat in KSP at this point if no one will draw a cool mission patch/banner (I don't think Rareden is replying...). Shameless promotion is good, guys!

See, I'm not great at these things, but I managed to come up with at least SOMETHING. I should hope you do the same.

At least try to make a better one, but if you're that lazy just use this:

[CENTER][SIZE=4]Check out the [URL="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86010-KSP-Community-CubeSat"][B][COLOR="#FF0000"]KSP Community Cubesat Project[/COLOR][/B][/URL]
[I][U]We can into space![/U][/I][/SIZE]
To send an actual cubesat into actual space![/CENTER]

Edited November 13, 2014 by henryrasia

[Nicholander]

Hmm... do you know any other talented artists on the KSP forums?

[henryrasia]

No...

It appears we're all engineers around here. I was hoping someone in this thread would. Especially given that I don't personally really use the forums all that much.

[Lunniy Korabl]

Oh hey! I'm an artist. I made this and these.

I haven't been keeping up with the progress on this, but I'd be happy to make some promotional stuff. What is required?

Edited November 14, 2014 by Lunniy Korabl

[Nicholander]

Uh, henryrasia, what exactly did you ask Rareden? (You can copy and paste the PM here) And cool Lunniy Korabl, nice work!

[henryrasia]

Ooooohhh!!! Lunniy! You're a find! Thanks for offering your help!

We would need basic promotional stuff like a mission patch, banners, posters, avatars, etc to illustrate the first post on this thread, our signatures (oh, god, don't judge my attempt...), and website that's going to be released sometime between now and the end of the universe. Sorry if that's a lot, but I'm picturing something like the amazing forum threads on big projects that have those.

And Nicholander, I wrote exactly this:

SUBJECT: KSP Community CubSat Project

Hello Rareden!

I'm writing to you for the KSP community cubesat project. We're a team discussing in the science labs subforum about actually sending a cubesat mission to space. If you'd like to know more here's the thread (mind only the first post and the latest posts): Thread link.

Anyways, we've seen your work (amazing, BTW!) and thought if you could please do some logo/forum signature/poster or anything to help promote the project since none of us around here is any good at those things . I really do hope you can help us out!

Best wishes,

HenryRasia

[Nicholander]

Thanks henryrasia. Also, how long did it take you to make one of those planet banners you made?