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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitive_Machines_Nova-C#Eagl...:

“EagleCam to record lunar landing

Just before landing, at approximately 30 m (98 ft) above the lunar surface, the Odysseus lander will eject the EagleCam camera-equipped CubeSat, which will drop onto the lunar surface near the lander, with an impact velocity of about 10 m/s (22 mph). From the surface the EagleCam will attempt to capture the first third-person images of a lunar landing. The EagleCam will use a Wi-Fi connection to the Odysseus lander to relay its images back to Earth.”

That CubeSat is student built. I wonder what camera they have and how hard it will be to make it record the landing. Will it orient itself during that six-ish second drop or can it move the camera after landing? Does it have a fisheye lens to increase the likelihood of the lander being in its field of vision?

Unfortunately, their project page (https://erau.edu/eaglecam) seems to be light on such details.

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I was a part of this project over a decade ago when I attended ERAU! At the time the goal was just to take pictures of earth. It is so cool to see how the scope has expanded over the years.

Our student group drove down to Cape Canaveral to pick up and haul a clean room back to the university that NASA donated for use to build the satellite. I will never forget those experiences.

The simplest way to do it is probably just to have a high quality 360 camera, that way you mostly get around the problem of orientation

Yes, but even that isn’t simple, I think. They’d not want to land on top of it, so they’d have to push it out from the lander or have it propel itself away from the lander. If they push it out and it doesn’t have a way to stabilize itself, keeping the lens pointing upwards then will require tight control over that push.

So, I guessed (see below) you’d need power to make the sat orient itself.

However, I googled a bit more, and found this: https://mynews13.com/fl/orlando/space/2024/02/21/embry-riddl..., which says:

“EagleCam will be spring ejected from the Nova-C class lander Odysseus about 30 meters above the lunar surface during the final descent. It will take three images a second from each of its three cameras (a total of nine images a second), capturing its six-second freefall to the surface and Odysseus’ descent and soft landing. About an hour after landing, our team will receive the five images of our choosing. During descent, Dr. Henderson and I will be timing events in landing sequence to match to image numbers to choose the first five images we bring back to Earth. Once we have those images, I will post them directly to @eraueaglecam on Instagram. Shortly after that, they will also be available on @spacetechnologieslab on Instagram and @SpaceTechLab on X (formerly Twitter).”

So, it isn’t a 360 camera, and they’re making 50-ish images and hoping for the best. Doesn’t look like the sat has rockets or that they’re trying to make it possible to make more photos after impact on the moon.

If my guesses/intuition is right we won’t see the actual touchdown (still cool to have anything, of course), but corrections welcome.

Have two. One on each side. Doesn't matter if one ends up in the regolith.

It’d surely land sidewise. :D

Which is fine. 360 degree camera.

Have three, 120 degrees apart. They'll double as backup landing legs.

Wouldn’t be any better. You’d need 4 to be able to reliably land with one pointed out of the regolith. That’s probably pushing it in terms of mass. 3 wouldn’t be any better than 2 though.

> push it out from the lander

Selfie stick sounds simpler.

That's an impressive school project! First university to land on the moon

Unless they would have build and operated the rocket themself (and not SpaceX), I would consider that a false clickbait headline.

A decade ago, maybe. Today? SpaceX is commoditizing access to space - we're at the point we can start treating Earth-orbit delivery as a given, i.e. just a service you pay money for.

Earth orbit maybe. But here we are at earth-moon. And the lander is not build or operated by the school/university either.

Flying to the moon is the easy part. Landing is the trick.

Flying is not so easy either, and the landing is done by the private company, not by the school.

Weight it by funding and I’ll bet you the school cube sat comes out far ahead.

Funny that the student project will be the first private landing followed by the commercial vehicle?

I always assumed that space was noisy enough that things like wifi wouldn't work on the lunar surface.

If basic radio worked for talking between suits and the landing craft in '69, it surely shouldn't be a surprise that modern frequency-hopping, error corrected, wireless comms, with much more sensitive equipment would work well?

The walkie-talkie toys I had as a kid in the 90s had at least 10x the range of modern home wifi routers. Not to mention how far radio stations broadcast. I'm guessing that's the context they're working from.

That's because of different frequencies and power caps that are enforced by the FCC. If your WiFi broadcast with the same power, the frequency space would be unusable by your neighbors for their WiFi. The range of WiFi is very purposefully sabotaged to make it useful for more than just you.

And also because our kid-era walkie talkies were VHF (or at least mine were) which is a much lower frequency band than wifi. At a given power level, lower frequencies travel farther (i.e. around obstacles) but can't transfer as many bits as wifi.

I wonder how much power the wifi antenna on the cubesat is pumping out.

Assuming you are talking about FCC Part 15 regulations for 2.4 GHz, you couldn't be more wrong. There is no 'sabotage'

The EIRP is 4 watts in 2.4 GHz band. More than enough to wipe out your neighbors. Also more than enough to get absolutely tremendous range in line of sight conditions.

I can purchase and install an unlimited number of 2.4 GHz Part 15 devices, rendering the band useless to anyone so long as I am attempting to use those devices in a manner consistent with their application. As another Part 15 user, you have no recourse. If a licensed user complains to the FCC, they may decide I have to stop using them and notify me as such. Note: one of my neighbors does this, by having an AP on every 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz channel.

Newest Wifi 6 stuff in the US has a power limit on some spectrum and some usages, but nowhere near as low as what I was hoping for.

> Note: one of my neighbors does this, by having an AP on every 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz channel.

Sounds like a fun and ethical excuse to DOS some WIFI routers.

Why isn’t the limit 40 watts? Or 400? Why is there a limit at all?

You can pedantically criticize the use of the word “sabotage”, but then you’d be entirely missing the point.

400 watts would cause RF burns at 2.4 ghz.

And most people have a 1200 watt version in their kitchen for that exact purpose!

And all of that without an appreciable atmosphere to get in the way

If you're above the frequency at which the ionosphere becomes reflective (around 30 MHz), why should space be noisier than the Earth's surface? Anything propagating there will reach down here (unless it's something really short wave absorbed by molecular bands in the atmosphere.)

In practice, it's going to be noiser down here, because of all the sources down here.

Noise you can correct for with directional antennas, filters, and/or more signal processing voodoo. Meanwhile you benefit from space being actually empty - no pesky atmosphere in the way to attenuate signals (though also no layers to bounce the signal off), and no other transmitters in your area. Inverse square law works to your advantage in this context.

I don't know specifically about wifi but, check out EME bounces. With a hand held ham radio on the 6M band and a directional antenna made from like $6 of supplies from your local hardware store, you can have a radio that can bounce a signal off the moon and talk to someone on the other side of the earth.

It’s more like the 2m and 70cm bands, and really big expensive antennas. You can bounce signals off of meteor trails with a cheap antenna and 6m radios, though!

Been out of it awhile so i was thinking 6m, mighta gotten mixed with the scatter-e propagation. But I knew a guy down in San Diego who used to do EME bounces with cheap directional antennas he homemade. But that guy was also an EE at Qualcomm there.

But that was 6 years ago and since I've moved up to Oregon, I havnt gotten to do much ham stuff because I could never hit the repeaters around here. Maybe they are no longer up, maybe its all the hills and volcanic rock?

You can make it work with normal human antennas, as long as the other person has the big ones! I could never contact someone with the same antenna and radio as me via the MOON, but I can on certain days be heard by those big dogs!

Meteor scatter is pretty fun though!

According to https://www.npr.org/2024/02/23/1233677833/lunar-lander-odyss... it's a cube with four cameras, which was supposed to pop off 30 seconds before touchdown to capture pictures of Odysseus' landing. But EagleCam was deliberately powered off during the final descent because of the navigation switch and stayed attached to the lander.

The team will try to release EagleCam in the coming days, so it can photograph the lander from roughly 26 feet (8 meters) away.

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