biology

Penn State Lunar Lion Team

Penn State Lunar Lion Team is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Penn State Lunar Lion Team rather than just read about it. In short: Lunar Lion is a team of Penn State students and engineers from the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory. The team hopes to develop and land their spacecraft, the Lunar Lion on the Moon.

Key takeaways

Penn State Lunar Lion Team belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Penn State Lunar Lion Team to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Penn State Lunar Lion Team from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Lunar Lion is a team of Penn State students and engineers from the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory. The team hopes to develop and land their spacecraft, the Lunar Lion on the Moon. The team is student run under the direction of Dr. Alexander Rattner, a mechanical engineering professor at Penn State's Multiscale Thermal Fluids and Energy. The team, which is privately funded, secured its first $2.5 million, most of which was internal funding, to get the project started. The team was formerly a competitor in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, but has since withdrawn.

Spacecraft The Lunar Lion is the spacecraft currently being developed to reach the Moon. The craft is planned to be sent on a commercial launch vehicle which will send it into space and place it on a trajectory to the Moon. It is then expected to make a controlled descent to the lunar surface where it will transmit high-resolution photographic images and video to the mission operations center at Penn State. The craft will then take off and fly a short distance to a second landing site while streaming the event live.

Testing and Development

Phase 0 At the end of October 2013, the team successfully finished Phase 0, a series of tests that validated the rocket-testing procedure. The phase included the development of contingency plans, safety plans, and thorough rocket testing procedure. As part of this phase, full rocket firing was simulated and investigated. Test plans must meet the Environmental Health and Safety Standards.

Phase 1 Phase 1 included testing of combustible liquid fuel, a NASA-provided pencil thruster, and custom thrusters developed at Penn State.

Phase 2 The initial liquid bipropellant part of this phase was completed towards the end of summer 2014. The team characterized and tested hydrogen peroxide monopropellant thrusters. These were used on the first flight vehicle the team constructed, a prototype called Puma. Each of the four 100 lbf engines were characterized to generate a thrust profile which was used for Puma's flight testing. Puma was developed for constrained vertical flight, with guide cables restricting motion to a single axis. Static testing of Puma began during the summer of 2016, and a constrained flight test was conducted on October 22, 2016. Puma made its first flight to an altitude of 3.5 feet, soft landing under its own power.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Penn State Lunar Lion Team

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Penn State Lunar Lion Team claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Penn State Lunar Lion Team before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Penn State Lunar Lion Team ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Penn State Lunar Lion Team

In research: Penn State Lunar Lion Team appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Penn State Lunar Lion Team in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Penn State Lunar Lion Team is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2013 establishments in Pennsylvania, Cancelled spacecraft, Engineering companies of the United States, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Penn State Lunar Lion Team outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Penn State Lunar Lion Team in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Penn State Lunar Lion Team means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Penn State Lunar Lion Team out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Penn State Lunar Lion Team in simple terms?

Lunar Lion is a team of Penn State students and engineers from the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory. The team hopes to develop and land their spacecraft, the Lunar Lion on the Moon.

Why does Penn State Lunar Lion Team matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Penn State Lunar Lion Team?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Penn State Lunar Lion Team.