The Lunark mission and a LEGO® rover wandering about in Greenland
22 January 2021
In September 2020 two men set off to study life in moon-like conditions, in preparation for human settlements on the moon. Whatever our personal feelings are about human life on the moon or mars, it was an absolutely extraordinary mission! Karl-Johan Sørensen and Sebastian Aristotelis have spent two months in total isolation and autonomy in Greenland. With limited coms other than emergency. And we’re so excited that Lacuna Space was part of the mission!
Since May 2019, Saga Space Architects have been working on a Moon habitat, in their quest to develop the best future space home for humans, not just trained astronauts. During the Lunark mission they conducted a range of experiments in collaboration with scientists and professors in various fields. We have been working with SpaceTech denMACH in Denmark on transferring sensor information and biometrics from the habitat such as temperature, humidity, air quality and positional information of the crew inside the habitat.
But it gets even better! On 17thNovember, a LEGO rover named Hugin, which was airdropped by a helicopter made its first journey around the habitat in Greenland and equipped with a Lacuna module transmitted its data back to Denmark! Using just the radio signals from the transmission and the Lacuna satellites, we were also able to geo-locate the LEGO Rover. This is one of the new features of the Lacuna network, performing outdoor geolocation without needing a GPS chip on the device or a ground network. Join us at The Things Conference 2021, to find out more!
The Lego Rover project was funded by ESA and Lego Education. We’re not there yet, but we do look forward to when we’ll see as many students as we can receiving their own data, from their own built devices from space!
LUNARK is concrete evidence that a two-person crew in a small habitat can carry out an extended mission in Moon-like conditions and we’re proud to have been part of it. An exciting future awaits, and we’d love to be the first to transmit LoRaWAN® messages from the moon!
