KSP Community CubeSat

[Rakaydos]

The problem with using Sphinx is launching a 10 ton transfer stage on a croudsourcing budget. A 4.5 KG cubesat can hitchhike for MUCH less than a dedicated launch for sphinx would be.

That's also the reason we planned for a GTO launch, because those are far more common than lunar transfer or mars transfer launches.

One possibility for comunication is to laounch 2 cubesats, one of which is a "Ion engine as massive radio emitter and an antenna formed by folding the 3u hull out into a cross" in a stable martian orbit as a comunications relay, and a dedicated landing cuesat.

[Nicholander]

Uh... I honestly don't believe that we could afford 2 Martian CubeSats.

[ProjectThoth]

Uh... I honestly don't believe that we could afford 2 Martian CubeSats.

Yeah, the cost would be astronomical (ha! Puns!). Again, you're forgetting that Sphinx is going to be part of a payload service - about five are scheduled to fly before the end of the decade.

Assuming a Falcon 9 launch (because it's cheaper), you're looking at roughly $122,400 per kilo (assuming a 500 kg payload for this service). That's assuming a break-even plan, however, so double that for a worst-case scenario. If you guys can afford to put a CubeSat in low Earth orbit, you guys can afford to send a CubeSat to Mars.

Still, though, I'd recommend doing what I said earlier and start to organize all your information. Believe me, it makes things a lot easier.

[Nicholander]

Yes, I know it's a service, but I still feel like the Sphinx is too ambitious and a bit underdeveloped (The only good description of it is "Like the Apollo LEM Descent Stage"). You can feel free to tell me other wise, but I still feel a bit skeptic about it. And remember, we're being crowd sourced, and you said that just the cost to get a flight alone would be $122,400, and how much would building a Sphinx cost?

Sorry if you think I'm just attacking your Sphinx project, but I just feel a bit skeptic about it, that's all. Also, when is the first scheduled flight of Sphinx?

[ProjectThoth]

Yes, I know it's a service, but I still feel like the Sphinx is too ambitious and a bit underdeveloped (The only good description of it is "Like the Apollo LEM Descent Stage"). You can feel free to tell me other wise, but I still feel a bit skeptic about it. And remember, we're being crowd sourced, and you said that just the cost to get a flight alone would be $122,400, and how much would building a Sphinx cost?

There's a lot more information on Sphinx than I'm willing to let out into the open (corporate secrets, mostly, because it's a product). Second, that's pretty much what it is - it's designed to be a lander stage with possible upper stage applications. The payload mount is still under consideration. You aren't paying the cost of building a Sphinx. Sphinx is an (eventual) Astrobotic product (or at the very least, a joint product of Thoth and Astrobotic) - it exists independently of the Phobos lander.

Additionally, a standard CubeSat launch (as a piggyback sat) is between 100k and 130k. $122,400 is right in the middle of that - development costs not factored in because Sphinx will be fully operational by 2022, and those costs will be offset by lunar payload deliveries. I don't think you'll have much issue raising that via crowdfunding, but I'd strongly suggest not going down that route as your main source of financing. It's good for capital, or buying the bits and bollards for the lander, but you're best off with a sponsorship of some kind (a la the Planetary Society) for the actual launch.

Also, when is the first scheduled flight of Sphinx?

First quarter of 2019, plus or minus a year. Really, it depends on how fast we get a prototype out into the real world, and that will come after the launch of Jebediah Kerman.

[Nicholander]

Wait, what?!?! How are you going to do 5 flights in less then a year?!?

[ProjectThoth]

Wait, what?!?! How are you going to do 5 flights in less then a year?!?

Less than a year? Launch is in 2022. Debut is in 2019+/-1. That's about three years, though that's erring on the side of caution. Regardless, I'm fairly confident that the financing plan I have laid out at this time is going to pay for the development costs. More on that here, though those figures assume raw profit values and really apply to my own program.

I'm simply after using Sphinx as a means of aiding the Phobos CubeSat, not touting it as a part of the project.

[Kryten]

For this phobos cubesat, how do you intend to do communications? DSN time isn't exactly cheap.

[ProjectThoth]

For this phobos cubesat, how do you intend to do communications? DSN time isn't exactly cheap.

Good question. I'd suggest applying to become part of the Interplanetary Citizen Science folks (the guys currently operating ISEE-3), and piggybacking off of whatever they're doing. I mean, a Phobos lander is technically citizen science, isn't it?

[Nicholander]

Well, you said it will do 5 missions by the end of the decade, unless of you mean the 2020's.

[ProjectThoth]

Well, you said it will do 5 missions by the end of the decade, unless of you mean the 2020's.

Nono - I meant to say that we're going to debut by the end of the decade.

[Nicholander]

Ah... Sorry, derp. But, anyway, didn't you say you were working on some visual pdf like thing for the Phobos mission? How's that going?

[ProjectThoth]

Ah... Sorry, derp. But, anyway, didn't you say you were working on some visual pdf like thing for the Phobos mission? How's that going?

Still in progress. Have a lot to do with the lunar CubeSat, too.

[Mazon Del]

Greetings everybody! Finally I now have an official scheduled visit with Luis on Wednesday. If you have any new questions for me to ask him, do post them. I heard something about an algae floating around earlier in the thread. Someone tell me a bit about that.

[Nicholander]

We've changed to having spirulina be the plant we bring up.

[NERVAfan]

Yeah. Spirulina is potentially useful for life support systems and apparently has fairly broad environmental tolerances.

It's actually a cyanobacterium (aka 'blue-green alga') rather than a true (eukaryotic) alga, by the way.

[Mazon Del]

I will ask Luis about it when I see him tomorrow, the old question set is what he researched so I'll be providing his responses on that. We may still want to go with a moss of some sort based on his answers. Even if only because it is a little more showey for pictures, a growth tray with moss on it rather than a tube with algae in it. Though frankly, there is nothing that really says we can't do both in some fasion.

[ProjectThoth]

Mildly unrelated, but here's the first installment of stuff on the KSI lunar CubeSat.

[Endersmens]

Mildly unrelated, but here's the first installment of stuff on the KSI lunar CubeSat.

Wait, so are we changing the names to KCCI or not?

Also, that looks really nice, I will probably use that on the website somewhere. Probably under Mission two Phase I.

[Nicholander]

Endersmens, the KSI and KCC (KSP Community CubeSat) are 2 different projects, but they are cooperating and have similar goals.

[Endersmens]

Actually, me and ProjectThoth talked about a full merge. I posted about it a few pages back. explaining how they would be the "lunar division" of the project.

[Jhonny007]

We definetly need a subforum just for this project. One thread is just not managable enough to communicate. We need threads for mission goals, hardware, groundsupport and many more. I was on vacation for a week and it's a pain to follow this thread.

Maybe ask a mod to create a subforum for this mission? If anything community related should have it's own subforum then this should be it.

[LvL]

We aren't big enough for a sub-forum. not yet.

[Mazon Del]

Whatever happened to that website someone was making?

So yesterday I had a meeting with Professor Luis Vidali to talk about the project. Here is the information he provided (I took some notes, but I apologize if my posting ends up a bit disjointed).

After explaining our goal to him, Luis surprised me by stating that he had actually been quietly working on the preparatory stages of a project such as this for some time. He knew that he didn't have a chance at getting the funding for an ISS mission so it had mostly been just a thought exercise. He is quite enthusiastic about trying to help out with this project.

First off, we had asked him about what model species of moss was used as the model species. He provided me with three.

Arabidopsis Thaliana - Actual Model species, 2nd choice.

Physcomitrella Patens - Actual Model species, 1st choice.

Ceratodon Purpureus - On the verge of becoming a model species within the next several years, 3rd choice.

At a base level (before any modification to the strain) the Purpureus tends to grow faster and with more extreme gravitometric responses (it grows with relation to gravity).

That said, one thing Luis brought up that was quite fascinating was that in all three of the above species it is possible to quickly selectively breed for mutations in the mosses gravitometric response. In effect three different strains can be created. One that grows upwards away from gravity, one that grows downwards towards gravity, and one that tends not to react to gravities presence at all. There was a scientist that had put work on the space shuttles way back utilizing these mutations before, but they had not done >0 gravity experiments with them.

With these mosses it is possible to visually determine a lot about the characteristics of the mosses growth as the features are large enough that for the basic level of detail we only need a microscope with a 5-10x zoom lens. If we want to look within the cells themselves we would need something more powerful (I failed to write this one down but I think it was on the order of 25-50x zoom, could be wrong though).

Additionally Luis informed me that with respect to gravitometric responses it has been known that mosses are more heavily influenced by gravity (in terms of growth patterns and such) when they do NOT have access to sunlight. I believe the theory is that in darkness the moss assumes it has been covered in dirt and so it relies upon its gravity sensing in the hopes of growing towards light. In absence of sunlight the moss can break down sucrose to produce energy, though in an interesting turn of events, for this method of growth the moss tends to burn oxygen and not carbon dioxide.

Luis recommends that the experiment take place in a dark enclosed environment where we either use IR LEDs for light (we can remove the IR filter off a webcam or normal camera in order to see these wavelengths. It is a hack I've done before that makes for an interesting set of night vision cameras) as the infrared light is largely ignored by the plants, or we can turn on normal light whenever taking images. Leaving the growth chamber enclosed in darkness simplifies a lot for us as we no longer need to worry about the exposure to direct sunlight or hatch covers, etc.

We had asked about text and such dealing with similar experiments and he was able to provide me with these two links. He is able to provide us with PDF extracts from those locations if we require.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17080959 "Agravitropic mutants of the moss Ceratodon Purpureus do not complement mutants having a reversed gravitropic response."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15660206 "Gravitropic moss cells default to spiral growth on the clinostat and in microgravity during spaceflight."

Since we cannot recover the samples, he recommends that our sensors focus on the following: Humidity, temperature, gasses (O2 and CO2 primarily, but if the sensor can detect others, so much the better), and visual (camera/microscope).

One of the issues we had all been worried about was of the moss eating away the atmosphere and starving/poisoning itself to death. However, with the samples in question (they are quite small) with the volume that he showed me in the enclosed petri dishes (think maybe 1.5-2.0 times as long as a quarter and 5-10 mm thick) the sample has enough air to live and grow for 2-3 weeks. Given that our flight window is a somewhat unreliable 1-6 weeks and that we may have the sample dishes open to a common atmosphere of "large", we probably don't actually need to care about providing a system for controlling the air quality unless we really want to. Additionally through the use of a mesh netting referred to as a phytoagar keeping the samples moist will likely not be a problem as well. The phytoagar allows the free flow of air, but effectively prevents the passage of moisture. If the moss samples were to start with some water and the phytoagar started wet, we likely would not need to worry about watering the moss over our mission time. Providing sucrose to the moss in the required amounts for our mission time is similarly easy (just a matter of how much we stick on any dish). So really all we have to worry about for the most part is keeping the temperature stable to something roughly approximating room temperature.

As we talked, Luis brought up something that I thought was a pretty excellent break for us if we decide to go with the moss route. As soon as we have a mockup growth chamber (sealed environment, dark, IR lighting, etc) he can provide me (for free) samples to begin growing in the controlled environment here on Earth for test purposes. The moment we begin performing tests like this, he can take that data to his contacts at NASA and believes strongly that he would be able to obtain funding to have at least one grad student working full time on engineering specific strains of the mosses in question for our experiment specifically. So we would be able to launch with multiple strains of heavily selected gravitometric responses (up, down, doesn't care). These strains would also have a measured history of how they normally perform in an Earth based gravity environment. These strains, the dishes, and other plant gear (phytoagar, sucrose, etc) would likely be able to be provided to the project free or at heavily discounted rates.

One thing he brought up that we may want to do, is see if it is possible for us to try and determine at what G level the gravitometric responses of the moss kicks in. This is actually pretty important data as quite a few plants grow away from gravity rather than specifically toward sunlight. If we can determine at what G level is required before the moss 'knows' which way is up/down this can be applied towards other plants and would allow NASA and others data on conditions they will have to plan for. Imagine if it turns out that the gravity of the moon is insufficient for plants to determine a growth direction (thought to be unlikely), this would have some interesting problems for any colony that is trying to build up there. This experiment for the most part is an extension of the idea that we first spin up to Moon gravity, then spin up to Mars gravity. We would just operate perhaps a bit slower.

Additionally, something that he brought up as an interesting experiment to try if we end up having the ability to do so, but is sort of on the low side of the list considering what could be the difficulties in doing so with a 1U cubesat. Venting the atmosphere, letting it sit for several days or so, then putting back in an atmosphere and moisture to see if the moss will continue to germinate. The reason he brings this up is that at some point a creature he referred to as a mossbear (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade) was exposed to the vacuum and radiation of space for several days and survived quite happily. Mossbears tend to eat mosses like our samples. Considering the very basic needs of mosses, if we could prove that mosses (to some extent) can survive the rigors of empty space just as the mossbear did, then it is possible to provide a bit more data to the Panspermia theory (that life on Earth or elsewhere may have been seeded by a minute amount of living matter from another planet). Effectively if you managed to have a rock with some hibernating moss and mossbears touch down on a planet that can support them to some extent, then you have a self-sustaining ecosystem in the making.

Quite a lot of info!

Personally my vote lies with the moss considering everything we can leverage through Luis' lab and also the ease of use (we effectively only need to control the temperature, which we were already going to be doing). For those that may dislike not having a view outside the cubesat for pictures, we can always put a webcam on the hull.

If anybody has any further questions for me to pass towards Luis, let me know.

Thoughts?

[Creature]

That's pretty amazing. An expert with contacts, lab access and a personal research interest plus some groundwork already done. I think you hit the jackpot there.