#Update #Space #Chandrayaan3 #thread
#Pragyan, has negotiated its first obstacle — a crater whose depth is approximately 100mm — boosting confidence of the team in control stations back on Earth. Read on for more from my chat with project director P Veeramuthuvel. 1/n
#Pragyan, has negotiated its first obstacle — a crater whose depth is approximately 100mm — boosting confidence of the team in control stations back on Earth. Read on for more from my chat with project director P Veeramuthuvel. 1/n
In his first full-fledged interaction after #Vikram’s picture perfect landing & deployment of the rover, #Chandrayaan3 project director P Veeramuthuvel, in an exclusive interaction said the team was expecting a good amount of science at the end of the lunar day. 2/n
“None of this was possible without relentless effort by hundreds of Isro colleagues, especially those from subsystems — NGC, propulsion, sensors, & all the mainframe subsystems. I am only privileged to lead the team, but the credit must go to all of the teams and team-leads… 3/n
…This was possible also because of guidance from URSC director M Sankaran and Isro top management,” he said. 4/n
Pointing out that the rover operations are not fully autonomous and require commands to be sent from Earth, Veeramuthuvel said movement of Pragyan is riddled with multiple challenges, each of which need to be overcome every time the rover moves. 5/n
“Moving the rover from point A to B involves many steps. For every path planning, onboard navigation camera data must be downloaded to ground for generation of a digital elevation model (DEM)... 6/n
…then ground & mechanisms teams will decide which path to take and uplink the command for the rover to follow,” he explained. Stating that the rover simply can't rove indefinitely, he said just as human eyes can only see up to a certain distance, rover has limitations too. 7/n
“The maximum DEM that can be generated is only for 5 metres each time the navigation camera sends images, which means every time the rover is commanded to move, it can at best cover 5 metres. Even there, there are challenges of obstacles etc… 8/n
…A small crater has also been crossed, its depth is approximately 100mm. We were very anxious but that obstacle has been overcome,” Veeramuthuvel said. 9/n
Isro has already done multiple rover movements as of Sunday. “If you see, it is not like a big rover. Within the limited resources, we’ve put in place miniature systems that are state-of-the-art… 10/n
…But there are limitations such as non-availability of telemetry and telecommunications 24/7, the need to track the sun continuously and so, the turnaround time between each movement operation is around five hours,” Veeramuthuvel said. 11/n
“The Sun is not static there. Each day, there’s a 12° rotation, which needs to be accounted for as unlike the lander which has solar panels covered on three sides... 12/n
...the rover has deployable solar panel, where one side is fully mounted with solar cells but on the other side, only half the space is available,” he explained. 13/n
Given that the rover is packed with telemetry, telecommand, battery, NGC, data handling storage, etc. power is crucial. 14/n
“The data rate is also limited from the rover given that it can only communicate with the lander from where we need to download to ground. This also consumes time as we need to also look at the science data coming in from the payloads… 15/n
…So, each movement of the rover is very carefully planned and we are confident of good work being done there,” Veeramuthuvel said. n/n
جاري تحميل الاقتراحات...