MoonRanger
Lunar Rover

Put extremely briefly, MoonRanger is a compact lunar rover, funded by NASA's debut Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Program, and slated to fly ASAP. In spacefaring, every mission is an incremental test of something, making each mission special and unique. MoonRanger will be setting the scene and testing conditions for much greater investments in exploring the Lunar South Pole, like NASA's Viper.

 

MoonRanger though, is special for the following reasons:

- First robot aimed at the Lunar South Pole, which is very dark (bad for solar panels), very cold (bad for electronics), but rich in regolith-bound frozen water (good for fuel and potential humans)!

- Most autonomous robot to date, venturing far beyond the reach of it's wifi router, and hopefully making it back using some novel techniques for spotting rocks in the dark, like light-striping.

 

- Highest fidelity water data in history to be charted since the Lunar Reconnoissance Orbiter (LRO) swept the whole lunar-surface for hydrogenous volatiles from high in the sky. This is all thanks to NASA Ames's Neutron Spectrometry System (NSS), which will be strapped to MoonRanger's belly like a metal detector for icy regolith.

- First contracts for university-lead rover development, which means a LOT of turnover, but a lot of passion and once in a lifetime opportunities for people like me too! MoonRanger is actually #2, after it's systems-testing sister Iris, lead by an adjacent and overlapping team of Carnegie Mellon Students, will be the first up, and prove it's possible!

I created and lead the Mission & Surface Operations division during the programs early development. You can see a portion of my published work in this abstract, or this much more fun poster. It could not be more important to emphasize how this is very different from a traditional portfolio entry, and how very small a drop in the bucket my contributions amount to. A program like this takes the dedication of countless incredibly keen minds and is the culmination of incredibly long nights, of which I could only be there for a small portion of. Think of me as some of the early soil, in which our presently blossoming program grew up in and has grown out of.

Further, my division's results were the product of efforts from true champions, such as a cohort of Master of Computer Science candidates, several designers, PhD roboticists, mentors from NASA, and an incredible Systems lead to lean on, Lydia Schweitzer, that took over and brought my division into the stratosphere (figuratively, due to covid) after my departure. 

With all of that said, it will make more sense as to how a simple 22 year old boy found himself the DRI for staffing and organizing a budding lunar rover division that covered the following:

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- Mission Control: site, structure, layout, equipment decisions.
- Operators: Protocol documentation, operator team composition, scripts, rules of engagement, chain of command, comms channels, staffing/recruitment, comprehensive training and mock mission curricula (operating in 3 shifts 24hrs/day)

- Ground control software: Design, functionality/features, integration

- Surface Operations: Minute-minute schedule of events for the rover to achieve its several tiers of objectives

- Data Uplink/Downlink Communication & Prioritization: What the rover sends back in its precious packets, when, and how

- Landing Site Analysis: Factors such as angle of inclination, light, terrain, "~water" density/depth
- Requirements & FMECA: Failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis for all system requirements pertaining to the commanding and operating of the rover

I also did merch :) 

It's hard to produce a single document or video synthesizing the complex (and sensitive) work behind the operations. So, here's simply one of my favorite memories:

After months of back and forth, we finally got the operator roles/shifts locked in and fleshed out, surface operations gantt-charts/spreadsheets drawn up/approved, and comms chain decided. To test our operator composition and surface ops plan, we simulated the first trek of our mission, going through the command procedure out loud. My team and I had created a rover simulation that would make the software team gag, but computed cute approximations of rover IMU data like recharge rate based on solar vs. path angle and obstacle avoidance that I'm obviously still proud of today. In response to our operator's commands entered through a slackbot, when the rover reconnected, an ascii art map of the trek as well as heart-beat data would come pouring in. This was first time I got to hear all of my work come alive, on our . . X . ^ . fake moon, our stand-in operators verbally giving each other commands and confirmation, and sounding just like the real deal.

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I sure did pull my fair share of long nights and rip out a handful of hair under the pressure of this undertaking, but it was one of the most fulfilling things that I have ever contributed to, and is some of my proudest work. I lost access to nearly all of it, due to security, but below are some pictures that I could still scrounge up.