biology

Team FREDNET

Team FREDNET 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 Team FREDNET rather than just read about it. In short: Team FREDNET is an international Open Source and Open Participation competitor in the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. Uniquely, the team also allows organizations and individuals to participate freely in its mission through the team's website.

Key takeaways

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

Reference excerpt

Team FREDNET is an international Open Source and Open Participation competitor in the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. Uniquely, the team also allows organizations and individuals to participate freely in its mission through the team's website. Their strategy is to utilize the same approach for developing open source software in order to build a lunar lander and a lunar rovers capable of winning the Google Lunar X Prize. Team FREDNET plans to establish an Open Space Foundation that provides incentives, education, and funding to future individuals and organizations seeking to develop their own space projects. In addition, they hope to foster greater public interest and education in Space Exploration and Research.

Organization Overview

Key People Team FREDNET is led by Fred J. Bourgeois, III. Dr. Sean Casey of the Universities Space Research Association manages business development for Team FREDNET. Mike Barrucco is the principal guidance, navigation, and control engineer for the team. Richard Core is Team FREDNET's project manager.

Key Affiliations Team FREDNET has affiliations with a number of clubs, schools, and businesses.

Stuyvesant Robot Club Elphel Team Cheese of the Fall 2009 MECH 460 course from Queen's University in Kingston Ontario, Canada - Working on designing systems to be used for the Lunar Lander System. As of 2009, the team had two sponsors.

Applios Inc—Applied Open Source Technologies Robot Club of Traverse City

Open Source Development Team The team's charter is "Make Cool Stuff." This objective applies towards "stuff" that can be used in Space and towards building tools that will make it easier to build design the space "stuff". Essentially, the goal is to build a catalog of Space Components in order to make Space Commercialization more open, cost-effective, productive, and accessible.

Open Source Development Team Organizing this far-flung group posed perhaps the biggest and earliest challenge. Open source software teams can normally download a program and add their own contributions, but Team FREDNET had to translate its many individual ideas into rocket engines and rover gears. To address this challenge, Team FREDNET took major steps in August and September 2009 to make it easier for globally distributed collaboration to occur by providing guidelines for people who wanted to make contributions.

Open Source Development Software Tools Team FREDNET relies heavily on Open Source Software Tools to accomplish their mission.

The team uses MediaWiki software from the Wikimedia Foundation for organizing its development efforts. Launchpad is used for certain bug tracking and configuration management utilities. Blender is the animation software the team uses for showing a simulation of the mission.

Missions and Objectives

Mission Architecture Team FREDNET plans to use a simple architecture in their bid to win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, consisting of a small lander that will deploy a small lunar rover which in turn will use the lander as a communication relay back to Earth. There are three main components to the Team FREDNET mission which include (a) the transfer mission (i.e. getting the rover from the Earth to the Moon), (b) the Moon mission (i.e. directing the rover to accomplish the tasks needed to win the Google Lunar X-Prize), and (c) the Earth mission (i.e. receiving the data that the rover must transmit to Earth to win the Google Lunar X PRIZE).

The Transfer Mission The Launcher cost is proportional to mass. An applicable approximation is 31,000 $/kg. The launcher will put this mass to LEO orbit (8600 m/s of Delta_V for about 200 km LEO) with a solid propellant stage having a 260-second specific impulse. The Lunar Bus will do a number of maneuvers (elliptic transfer orbits) in order to gain 4400 m/s of Delta_V for the transfer orbit to the Moon. The Lunar Bus will use bi-propellant with a specific impulse of 320 s. Note that in some contexts we regard the Launcher and Bus as one component, the vehicle system transporting the Lander and Rover.

The Moon Mission The Lunar Lander is being designed to do a descent maneuver in order to gain 2200 m/s of Delta_V to transfer orbit to the Moon. The Lunar Bus will use a bi-propellant with a specific impulse of 320 s. The Lunar Rover plan is to travel 500 meters from the Lunar Lander then send prize-specified Mooncast, videos, pictures, emails, etc.

The Earth Mission A Ground Support System is planned to be able to receive the weak signal from the Moon in order to receive the rover Mooncast.

Education Programs The team wants to offer educational institutions an opportunity to add science projects fitting inside the parameters of the mission to promote awareness of commercial space travel and space exploration. As part of this education effort, the team has contributed towards a team that created a LEGO Mindstorms based rover that is controlled by Bluetooth technology. A future elementary school level competition will be used to name the Rover that the team will eventually send to the moon.

References

External links Official website

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Team FREDNET

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Team FREDNET 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 Team FREDNET 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 Team FREDNET 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 Team FREDNET

In research: Team FREDNET 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 Team FREDNET 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: Team FREDNET is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Cancelled spacecraft, Google Lunar X Prize, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Team FREDNET 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 Team FREDNET in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Team FREDNET 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 Team FREDNET out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Team FREDNET in simple terms?

Why does Team FREDNET 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 Team FREDNET?

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 Team FREDNET.