September 2006
From RmmsWiki
7.00 pm, 18 September, Environmental Design, University of Colorado
- X-prize cup
- ISS
- First woman space tourist
RMMS Meeting 9/18/06 In attendance: Brian E., John B., Ray McC., Tony M., Dewey A., Farin Z., Ryan K., Rebecca R., Jim W.
Dewey passed around a copy of Squyres new book Roving Rovers which looked very interesting and informative. We then went to our guest speaker, Ryan Kobrick who has worked with the X Prize team for three years and is heavily involved in the upcoming X Prize Cup in N.M. 10-18 through 21. He spoke about the rocket displays and mock-ups from various private companies, the space elevator compettition that has recently been awarded prize monies from NASA to be given for E-beam and space tethers competitions, the Rocket Racing League (Nascar for the rocket scientists), the various vendors and educational components and displays and NASA's ocmpetition and specs for the new Lunar Lander design. He also covered Jon Carmak's open-source rocket team for Armadillo Rockets and showed some video clips from last year's Cup which were fun and interesting. The theme for this year's Cup is Moon 2.0, and efforts to coordinate travel to the event were discussed and can be followed up by the CU-SEDS web site.
Ryan then gave a presentation about SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) and the activities of the CU chapter which were varied, numerous, well-attended and growing. He let us know about the upcoming Jack Schmitt talks for them as well as other upcoming events and invited RMMS to give a talk at one of their meetings sometime in the future to encourage cross-fertilization and cooperation towards similar goals.
Jim announced that the Northern Colorado subchapter of RMMS was starting and will update RMMS of their activities and events as the organization gets started.
Tony spoke about Robert Zubrin's and Chris Mc Kay's cooperative venture with NASA-AMES to give students a chance to do some MDRS rotations with 500$ stipends for travel and expenses and the guidelines for research areas and applications. They will have previously-experienced MDRS commanders with webcasting and experimental regimens and are hoping to field four crews through this season. The upcoming MDRS season is already nearly completely filled and many are continuations of previous expeditions and research.
General discussion followed about Ansari's trip to ISS and the significance of her being a Iranian woman as a role model for other Muslim women; MRO's successful aerobraking and stabilized orbit and early pictures coming in though bandwidth limitations from a stuck antenna may be solvable later, as well as the problem of Mike Malin having proprietary rights to the pictures; the fact that Mars Global Surveyor has been working now for nine years and still going strong; Pluto's demotion as a planet; the completed round of ISS construction; Dewey showed a new face-plate design for shading the analogue helmets-very slick and sensible; and how Boeing had recently removed human factors from their MSIS project.
Next month we will have Jim Bergstrom of MRO fame speaking about the pics and data they're getting from MRO and the new algorithm that is allowing them to defuzz pictures and get heretofore unheard-of resolution and detail in the new pictures and the landing sites that they are looking for future expeditions. A must-attend talk, to be 10/16/06 7 P.M. CU Boulder. Be there.
On to Mars!
