Forum | Lunar Numbat

"Lunar Numbat is a team of Australians and New Zealanders who use their skill and Open-Source technologies to partner with the Google Lunar X-Prize team White Label Space. Why? So as to put a Linux powered robotic Australian marsupial on the moon!

The Google Lunar X-Prize (GLXP) is US$30 million up for grabs for the first privately funded moon rover to land safely, rove 500 meters and send High Definition pictures and video back to Earth.

Lunar Numbat is developing innovative mission-critical technology as a partner to White Label Space, and in the process aims to lower the barrier to entry to Space Science by using and developing Open-Source technologies and inexpensive hardware combined with our skill and expertise."

Somebody mentioned these guys earlier (I think on Reddit) as working on an open source radar altimeter for one of the GLXP entrants, but it turns out they are actuall a little more of a general group than that, working on other projects as well, in propulsion control, telemetry and HD video transmission.  Some of it is for GLXP teams, some of it is for ASRI, the Australian Space Research Institute (not an official Australian space program, a non-profit group trying to fill that gap, but without any explicit open source commitments as far as I can see), and all of it is open source.  That said, the altimeter is probably the thing of greatest interest to us.  Because they are based in Australian and New Zealand it's possible that I may be able to occasionally meet up with people from Lunar Numbat in person which would be handy for swapping ideas.

I think we should send them a Friends of CSTART offer, but maybe wait a little while (~1 week) until the CLLARE Project Overview Document is a little more polished (and makes explicit mention of using their altimeter) so we have something we can really impress them with.

For the curious, a numbat is a native Australian animal that eats termites.  It looks a little like an aardvark but I doubt they're related since aardvarks are placental mammals and numbats are marsupials.  I'm not exactly sure why the Lunar Numbat guys chose to name their group after it, numbats don't seem to have any sort of echolocation ability or anything which would provide a link to the radar altimeter project.  I guess they just like numbats.