OS: OS X; Processor: Dual Core 2 GhZ; Memory: 2 GB RAM; Graphics: Intel HD 4000 or equivalent; Storage: 900 MB available space; Additional Notes: May run on lower-end machines at lower graphics settings. Try the free demo if you're not sure. All you need a compatible Windows/Mac/Linux computer with a high powered USB port to get started! Simply download the USB drivers, our mining software, plug in the Moonlander and you are ready to go! The Moonlander 2 works with most Windows 7/8/10 based systems, Mac OS 10.12 or greater, and most Linux based systems including Raspberry Pies!
The first soft moon landings were accomplished in the 1960’s by the Soviet Luna 9 and the U.S. Surveyor Spacecraft. These were followed by the U.S. Lunar Module landings during the Apollo program. The Soviets had their own LK Lander lunar lander for landing humans on the moon but it never flew. China’s Chang’e-3 landed on the moon on December 13, 2013. India plans to land the Chandrayaan-2 on the moon in 2018. South Korea intends to land a spacecraft on the moon in 2020.
The U.S. Lunar Module was flown by a crew but had a digital computer that performed guidance, navigation and control. A great new book by Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary an Apollo Memoir explains how that was accomplished with a computer less powerful than those in toaster ovens today. Don played a key role in saving the Apollo 14 mission when an abort light appeared on the crew’s console prior to descent. Read the book for for the whole story.
NASA intended follow-ons to the Lunar Module that would have been fully automated for delivering materials to the moon in preparation for a permanent human presence. Unfortunately, those plans never materialized.
As we are always looking for new missions for testing our Precision Attitude Control System, we added guidance, navigation and control for lunar landings. We use a really simple guidance algorithm called 2nd order guidance. It is nothing more than a Proportional Derivative (PD) controller with the landing spot as a target. You can adjust the damping ratio and undamped natural frequency of the controller to mimic more sophisticated, “optimal” guidance algorithms. The 2nd order guidance works until the lander gets near the surface and then it switches to landing algorithm that hovers, nulling any remaining translational velocities and then descends to the surface. Lidar would be used as guidance. Once it is hovering it would need to search for a flat spot for landing. NASA has developed Hazard Detection Software for Lunar Landing that uses lidar. It is available for licensing from Caltech.
Here is one simulation in our Simulation Framework. Once the descent is initiated, the spacecraft reorients so that the main engine thrust vector is in the desired direction. The display on the left shows the attitude errors (the two boxes) and the throttle setting (which is zero during the attitude maneuver.)
A close up of the attitude display. Pitch and yaw are offsets of the green rectangle. Roll is rotation of the rectangle. This is quite primitive but it is easy to add your own displays if you know a little OpenGL!
Descent starts and the throttle is about 50% at this point. The two plots are of altitude and velocity. The maneuver starts at 15 km and the target is 600 km along track. The lander has solar panels on a two-axis gimbal and a high gain antenna, also on a two-axis gimbal.
The propulsion page shows two attitude thrusters firing and the main engine.
The spacecraft has landed! You can see the terminal descent phase on the altitude and velocity plots. The lunar surface is featureless because we have not added close up maps of the landing zone to the planet display.
The descent page shows the throttle settings. You can monitor the guidance force demand and simulated force.
This is the propulsion page. The attitude thrusters get very busy during the terminal descent phase. Note that we have a lot of fuel left! We could have hovered for quite some time.
The graphics are from our VisualCommander product that runs on Mac OS X.
This GN&C system is capable of autonomous flight from LEO all the way to the moon. It uses our Optical Navigation System, developed under a NASA Phase II SBIR for trajectory determination on the flight to the moon and lunar orbit entry.
For more information contact us directly!
How Powerful Was the Apollo 11 Computer?
How Powerful Was the Apollo 11 Computer?
I got to thinking, how powerful was the computer that took Man to the Moon back in 1969? How does the Apollo computer compare to the iPhone? (Who wants to go to the Moon, anyway?)
It turns out that’s a tough comparison to make, as the simplest of iPhones is so advanced compared to the technology used in Apollo’s guidance system that it’s hard to believe they both came from the same planet, and we can be pretty sure that we’re dealing with some really archaic hardware.
Indeed, those Big Machines were nothing short of amazing. Comparing the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) to an IBM PC XT. Did you know that the 8088 which formed the basis for the IBM PC, released in 1981, just a decade after Apollo 11’s trip to the Moon, had eight times more memory than Apollo’s Guidance Computer (16k, vs the Apollo’s 2k). The IBM PC XT ran at a dizzying clock speed of 4.077MHz. That’s 0.004077 GHz. The Apollo’s Guidance Computer was a snail-like 1.024 MHz in comparison, and it’s external signaling was half that.
Internally, the architecture of 8086 had 8 16-bit registers available to work with. It could keep track of eight registers, the Apollo Guidance Computer held just four.
The most amazing part that will blow you away isn’t so much the hardware, as the software they used to get to the Moon. In fact, the real-time operating system in the Apollo 11 spacecraft could multi-task eight jobs at a time, something we take entirely for granted today, but no small feat for the time it was developed.
Multi-tasking however, wasn’t quite as we now think of it. Our operating systems use pre-emptive -multitasking, where the operating system itself is in control of the execution and can stop any program at any time. The AGC relied on non-pre-emptive multi-tasking, whereby programs had to relinquish control back to the OS periodically.
The Apollo system also implemented a virtual machine which offered more complex instructions, and could be used to perform more advanced mathematics. For its time, this was way-out stuff in 2k of memory and 32k of storage. The OS managed transition between native instructions and the instruction set of the virtual machine, which let developers mix and match the hardware level instructions with the virtual instructions within the same assembler code.
Even more, the Apollo 11 was actually the advanced “Block II” version of the AGC – the earlier missions had relied upon as little as 24k of core read-only storage, and only 1k of main memory!
And what about interface? The AGC was way switches and blinking lights, and every command was entered in a combination of “verb noun pairs”, which would be input as numbers. These numbers were translated into English on a painted sign in the spacecraft.
The Apollo Guidance Computer had only one error message, and when it flashed, it meant the real end was near. On the Apollo 11 mission a 1201 error, and then a 1202 flashed causing enormous concern on the lander and back on Earth, after the spaceship crew had mistakenly left one radar system on, while the landing crew used a second system to determine the distance to the ground. The computer was taking in too much data to function, and left the crew in the lurch.
So, when you think about all those amazing manned missions to the Moon, and what it took to get there, keep in mind that had the complexities of the eventual AGC been understood when the NASA team began to design it, they likely never would have started, as they would have considered the computer far outside the available technology of the day.
Lunar Lander Mac Os 11
We take interplanetary travel for granted today. One day Man is going to do the same with interstellar travel. And people will smile just looking at today’s iPhones and iPads, so obsolete and so out-of-date toys the Humans had to deal with to communicate.
See also:
Lunar Lander Mac Os Download
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