Skip to content

Add lunar pole exploration simulation with realistic solar power #22

Description

@RBinsonB

This issue references space-ros/demos#36 opened in the demos repo.

There is no moon simulation in Space-ROS yet. A moon simulation could be added.

One subject of interest in particular is the exploration of the moon south pole region. Due to the presence of permanently shaded craters, there is a high chance of water ice being present and that could be used to establish a long lasting human presence on the moon (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/08/space-water-ice-moon-south-pole/).

The NASA VIPER rover mission aimed to explore this area. Unique challenges have to be addressed in this environment and would be interesting to simulate in Space-ROS. In particular the power generation and management:

  • Solar power being constantly available outside of shaded area
  • Solar power being unavailable while testing the presence of water ice in a shaded area
  • Solar panel placement to adapt to the sun low position on the horizon

Therefor a proposed approach could be to provide a Gazebo simulation with the following elements:

  • A fully controllable rover model with sensors, based as closed as possible on a real rover (VIPER)
  • A realistic Gazebo world, by using DEM data from NASA LRO mission
  • A plugin or set of plugin to simulate the power generation and consumption

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

No labels
No labels

Type

No type

Projects

Status
Done

Relationships

None yet

Development

No branches or pull requests

Issue actions