tjresearch / research-amey

research-amey created by GitHub Classroom

Improving Space Exploration with Drone-Rover Connected Systems

The current methodology for conducting Space Exploration of an extraterrestrial body is as follows:

1. An Orbital Satellite identifies broad targets with potential anomalies.
2. An Unmanned Rover is sent to explore the identified targets and anomalies.

An Anomaly is defined as any unique occurrence that lends greater insight into the previous condition or current status of an extraterrestrial body. For this experiment, only anomalies that had been verified by peer-reviewed studies were assessed.

In this current system, the Satellite can quickly scan large regions, but lacks the precision to correctly identify anomalies. The Rover covers for this weakness by traveling to each anomaly and taking samples. The data collected by the Rover is sent to Earthbound laboratories to determine if an anomaly truly exists and what it reveals about the extraterrestrial body in concern.

This entire process takes at least 2 rocket launches and constant human involvement for years; wasting precious monetary resources, human capital and limited time. Given the rapidly decreasing budgets of governmental space agencies and the overall lack of private interest in Space Exploration, if exoplanetary exploration is to continue, our current system of Space Exploration must change.

One of National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA)'s ideas to reduce the cost of Space Exploration is a Mars Helicopter or Drone that would replace both the Drone and Satellite components of the current system. Building outwards from this idea, this project proposes a Drone and Rover working in tandem to explore extraterrestrial bodies, a Drone-Rover Connected System. Not only could both objects fly on a single rocket, reducing cost and time wasted, but this process could also be easily automated, freeing up human capital on Earth for further projects.

The purpose of this project is to create a control mechanism for a Drone-Rover Connected System (DRCS) that allows for greater efficiency and equal accuracy at anomaly detection than current models of Space Exploration, including an independent Rover, an independent Drone, and a Rover-Satellite system.

The only libraries currently needed to run this project are the standard Python 3.8 libraries, as well as Python 3's random and math libraries. Eventually, the Python 3 venv module will be neccessary to execute this code in the proper visual GUI.

There are no unique installation instructions thus far, simply download the Basic Environment.py onto your machine and view it on the development environment of your choice.

This repository currently contains no executable files.