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60 Insight | Unmanned space vehicles SpaceIL has signed up with Spaceflight Industries, which is using a Falcon 9 re- usable launcher from SpaceX to carry the SpaceIL rover. The SpaceIL craft will use advanced navigation sensors to guide it to the lunar surface autonomously using a STIM300 IMU from Sensonor, with engineers on Earth monitoring the craft to give corrections if necessary via a transceiver developed by Space Micro. The craft will land, then ‘hop’ to travel over 500 m across the surface. International team Synergy Moon is using a customised version of the N8 modular rocket system designed, built and tested by Interorbital Systems at its Mojave Air and Space Port in California. “We decided early on that our focus would be on creating an alternative launch vehicle and launch process – the most expensive parts of current space missions,” says Kevin Myrick, co-founder of Synergy Moon. Moon Express is using a launcher called Electron from Rocket Labs, a Los Angeles-based company founded in 2007, for three lunar missions using its MX-1E lunar lander. “Moon Express is building disruptive technologies that will change the cost of access to space, including the asteroids and even the moons of Mars,” says Naveen Jain, co- founder and chairman of Moon Express. The company is using 3D printing and inexpensive sensors to reduce the cost of building the autonomous systems that will eventually, it hopes, lead to mining on the Moon. Three other teams have signed up with competing team Astrobotic to transport their rovers to the moon, although these deals have not yet been verified by Lunar-X as part of the competition. Like Moon Express, Astrobotic is looking at how to send autonomous mining equipment to the Moon, and wants to learn from the experience of the Lunar-X teams. Astrobotic has two different craft, or landers, for delivering a rover to the Moon’s surface. The company is working with Airbus on the Peregrine lander, which is 1.5 m high and has a diameter of 2.5 m. During orbit, the craft will use what Astrobotic calls ‘heritage’, or well- established, navigation algorithms. For landing, data from the off-the- shelf optical cameras, the IMU and Lidar sensors will be combined to perform an autonomous safe landing within 100 m of the target location using Astrobotic’s Autolanding System, which uses proprietary techniques developed at the company with Carnegie Mellon University in the US for precision navigation. The lander then acts as a relay station for a rover to send a signal back to Earth. Payloads can be mounted above or below the lander’s decks, and can remain attached or be deployed as needed. The rovers for example will be deployed from the bottom of the lander. The lander, with Astrobotic’s second rover, Andy, and a rover from another Lunar-X team, along with other payloads, will also use a Falcon 9 launcher. October/November 2016 | Unmanned Systems Technology Hakuto is teaming up with Astrobotic to send its rover to the Moon (Courtesy of Hakuto) The STIM300 inertial measurement unit is being used in NASA’s Raven project to develop an autonomous navigation system (Courtesy of Sensonor)