Space to Breathe: An Inflatable Dome on the Moon
Meet Lab2Moon team LunaDome, made up of Sam Brass and Nick Doughty, both aged 21, and 18-year-old Elliot Robinson. Sam has just arrived in Bangalore to continue work in collaboration with TeamIndus engineers, and had this to say about the Lab2Moon journey so far:
Tell us about your experiment…
Our experiment aims to replicate earth’s atmosphere in a container on the moon! There is no air on the moon so if humans were placed there, we would not be able to survive very long. Our soda-can-sized experiment uses compressed air to pressurize a dome which maintains similar conditions to what we are used to on earth. To accommodate leakage and temperature effects, we are using an electronic control system to let air into the dome if the pressure drops too low and release air into space if it gets too high.
Tell us about your team…
The team is made up of three aerospace engineering students, all from the University of Bath in the UK. Nick and I are third-year students, and were on a year-long internship at Honeywell Aerospace when we met and entered Lab2Moon in September 2016. After being shortlisted, the team needed an electronics expert so I asked Elliot to join, who I know from tutoring at school.
Describe the experience of being in the finals in Bangalore…
We all had an incredible experience in the finals! We were very impressed with how welcoming and helpful all the TeamIndus engineers are. They often let us stay and work on our prototype through the night in their HQ. Our ObiWan, Hari Gokul (who works on rover communication and data handling for TeamIndus), is a great mentor and became a good friend by the end of the week. He was always happy to show us around Bangalore and experience the culture. The other teams were very like-minded and each have great experiments — we hope to see our experiment alongside theirs on the spacecraft!
What is the status of your experiment now?
Now that we have modeled our final flight model, we are in the process of making the engineering drawings and choosing the materials needed to manufacture our components. The electronic circuit has been designed so now all we need to do is purchase the components, assemble everything and test the experiment.
How did the Lab2Moon experiment shape your path?
I always knew I wanted to be an engineer but had no idea what kind of engineering I preferred. I have recently leaned towards aerospace engineering but since I have been involved in Lab2Moon working on LunaDome, I would love to be working on spacecraft in the future.
