NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Determining Lunar Regolith Properties Through Distributed Sensor Packages

The goal for the student team is to determine the properties of lunar regolith through distributed sensor packages on the moon. This will provide ground truth for remote sensing observations. As a first step, the student team will build a rough version of AstroJacks from JPL provided hardware, programmed, use network to find each other's locations, and determine Earth soil properties based on accelerometer data. This will develop skills on assembling hardware, writing software to operate it, and then taking test data using this hardware and software, which provides valuable experience in creating an electrical/software system. JPL will provide the student team with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos, and a variety of sensor, power, and communications hardware. These will be assembled on a breadboard and programmed using F'prime, JPL's open-source flight software. After building this hardware, the team will then have the sensors be able to determine each other's relative locations with signal strength, and determine the difference between being dropped on soft soil (sand) and hard soil (packed dirt). The goal is to determine each sensor's location to within 1 meter, across 30 meters of distance, and the difference between sand and packed dirt. It is a bonus if students can use machine learning to better predict soil types based on landing, and a greater variety of soil types. The student team will work to deliver to JPL the F'prime software capable of running on the sample platforms. The key desired outcomes are that these platforms can locate each other and provide input on the properties of the soil they land on.