IPNSIG IM-2 Moon mission keynotes
The Internet Society Interplanetary Chapter's IPNSIG Academy keynotes in May and July both featured projects that will be riding to the Moon on the IM-2 mission aka Athena, which will launch some time in Q4 2024. IM, by the way, I have discovered, stands for 'Intuitive Machines' which is a Houston company whose IM-1 aka Odysseus was not only the first privately built craft to land on the moon, but the first successful American soft landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The May keynote was by MIT doctoral student Fangzheng Liu, and focused on creating miniature IoT devices that can crawl on the surface of the lander, or be sprayed around an inaccessible area, to assist in the gathering of data from the regolith (added that one to my vocabulary, too!) communicating via LoRa. One of Fangzheng's innovations is a self-righting system whereby the devices can orient themselves, no matter how they land.
VIDEO | AUDIO | TRANSCRIPT
The July keynote was by Luis Maestro of Nokia Bell Labs, who, with his team, has been tasked with setting up a one time robust 3GPP LTE/4G network for the IM-2's vehicles, the Nova-C lander, the MAPP rover, and the MicroNova hopper all to communicate with each other. (See a bunch of images). For the project they created a 'network-in-a-box' that is standards-based, including IP/TCP, so that it is scalable going forward. Spectrum under consideration includes 3.5Ghz (aka CBRS in the USA).
VIDEO | AUDIO | TRANSCRIPT | SLIDES
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