Hullo | Welcome Center | Forum

Welcome aboard!  Always a pleasure to have new people helping out.

The boards have been eeriely quiet for the past few days and I'm really not at all sure why (I think maybe Thanksgiving is getting close in the US, which might explain some of it).  Don't be discouraged, we are normally relatively active.

If you haven't already, the easiest way to get up to scratch on what we've been thinking would be to read the Wiki page for our moon project, CLLARE.  There's also a long list of things you can do to integrate with the team at this post here.  None of the things on that list are in any way compulsory and you can start participating in discussions on the forum before doing any of them, so if you want to make sure you're really interested in the project before adding your name to lists or anything, feel free.

As for specific stuff you can get involved in – the CLLARE project is divided into six workgroups, each of which has its own Wiki page (there are links to all of them at the CLLARE page and the Main page) which explains roughly their scope.  As an astrophysicist, my inclination is that you'd be really helpful with:

• Radiation issues.  At the moment nobody has really said much in detail about the issues involved in shielding (i) human occupants and (ii) electronic components from radiation in space.  Someone who is familiar with all the various sources of radiation in space, their relative intensities, what frequency waves / kinds of particles etc. would be helpful in making sure that whatever shielding issues we come up with.
• Navigation.  Obviously a central part of the navigation aspect of the project will be planning a trajectory to the moon and back.  I have made some very preliminary steps toward this in another forum post.  I have made a lot of improvements since that post and will probably post details on it today, but there is still an awful lot more to do and having somebody who knows more than I do about the various influences on trajectories, and about how to more accurately model the relative position of various celestial bodies than I do, will be a huge help.

Of course, these are just suggestions of things where your studies will come in handy.  You are very welcome to contribute to any other parts of the project if you think you can be helpful.  I have been trying to organise a "burst" of targetted, real-time work in the near future, but it seems a little up in the air at the moment.  Hopefully it will go ahead soon, and when it does you can feel free to participate if the time works for you.  The topic will probably be booster design, as discussed here.

Excellent!  This has been one of a few areas where we have a notable lack of ideas or expertese.

If you want to just start "thinking out loud" about radiation issues we will face, feel free to start a thread for it in, I would say, the spacecraft engineering forum.  Radiation issues will probably be relevant for the command module, service module and lunar lander, so stick it in the generic spacecraft engineering forum rather than one of the craft-specific sub forums.