SaTec students research at AMADEE-24

For sever­al years now, the Aus­trian Space Fo­rum has been con­duct­ing ana­log Mars simu­la­tions, which are in­tend­ed to serve as a trial run for astro­nauti­cal explo­ration of the red plan­et. The latest itera­tion took place in the Ar­meni­an desert near Ar­mash. So-called ana­log astro­nauts live in isola­tion for a month and carry out vari­ous exper­iments there, as would be the case on an actual Mars mis­sion. A group of stu­dents of the Elite Grad­uate Pro­gram “Sat­ellite Tech­nolo­gy” at Julius Max­imili­an Uni­versi­ty of Würzburg de­signed and built two robots for this pur­pose, which were con­trolled by the ana­log astro­nauts on site.
The main tasks of the robots were 3D map­ping of the envi­ron­ment using Li­DAR sen­sors, iden­tify­ing Mar­tian rocks and test­ing ul­tra-wideband sen­sors for more accu­rate posi­tion­ing.

At the be­gin­ning and end of the simu­lation, two stu­dents trav­eled to Ar­menia to en­sure that the robots and their exper­iments had sur­vived the jour­ney safely and were sent back ac­cord­ingly. To en­sure that the mis­sion went smoothly, the stu­dents ex­plained the opera­tion of the robots to the ana­log astro­nauts be­fore­hand and col­lected their own data in the Ar­meni­an de­sert. The stu­dents not only pre­sented their pro­jects and study pro­gram at the Uni­versi­ty in Yere­van, but also to the press.

The stu­dents had one year to pre­pare the robots for the actual mis­sion in Ar­me­nia. Dur­ing this peri­od, two dress re­hears­als took place in Peu­er­bach and Vien­na, where the re­search groups from all over the world met and pre­sented the status of their exper­iments. Through the pro­ject, the stu­dents were able to apply the knowledge they had learned in the lec­ture in an inter­disci­pli­nary way and learned a lot about the plan­ning of inter­na­tional pro­jects and the asso­ciated coop­era­tion.

Text: Maximilian Gmöhling & Pascal Meyer, Elite Graduate Program "Satellite Technology"