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[Reply #60 on:]

And yes, lunar landers have successfully been put on the moon

OK, so Surveyor (5), Apollo (6) and Luna/Lunokhod (6 or 7?).
Any others?

[Reply #61 on:]

Hmmm..., so where does he ever say *he* is going to personally finance a lunar lander? Where did you get that idea in your head??? And yes, lunar landers have successfully been put on the moon, so if you have the $$$, it can be done.

What I want is to be able to build a cheap robot with a camera that could go to the Moon or Mars and wander around taking pictures

Where did you get the idea that he was a billionaire?

[Reply #62 on:]

Well, I'd like to... What would it take to space harden an AVR? Or do space hardened AVRs exist already?

You are starting in the wrong end. First build prototypes and explore ideas, get stuff working, then figure out how to get it to work in space.

The cooling would be simple enough, just attach every single thing to a heatsink (probably including passive devices like resistors and capacitors).

Space is cold and any heat produced will radiate away quickly. I don't think cooling will be an issue.

What I want is to be able to build a cheap robot with a camera that could go to the Moon or Mars and wander around taking pictures, the Moon would be preferable.

Despite that I agree with most people here and find it highly unlikely that you will be able to actually send stuff to the moon, this sounds like a really cool project. There are lots of interesting problems to be solved, but radiation and heat are not the biggest ones. You should focus on building prototypes that works on Earth first. That will keep you occupied for a long time. When you have a robot capable of wandering around the desert without any maintenance, doing all the stuff you want it to do on the Moon, then you can start working on making it "space-proof".

My conclusion so far has been that the reason space-based robots tend to be extremely expensive (in the range of billions of dollars) has less to do with what they make them out of than how much it costs to get there. In other words if it costs on the order of trillions to get there then it doesn't really matter if you're spending $1000 on your robot or $10 billion, it's such a tiny part of the overall cost anyway, might as well make it worth it.

If it costs trillions to send your robot to the Moon, you'd better make sure that everything works really, really well. That's why it's expensive. Fixing a robot on the Moon is not easy ;-)

[Reply #63 on:]

Giving a little thought to the power problem...  I've used solar cells and super-caps for a basic stamp project in the past.  Granted it was a low power remote temperature sensor that only sent data every 10 minutes and went to sleep between sends, but if you were able to optimize your power consumption, might this be a possible solution?  I'm not sure the operating efficiencies at -200^o  I imagine there is a temp where they will freeze up as badly as a battery.

-Chuck

[Reply #64 on:]

For those of you who just think space is cold, anything stationed on the moon will have to be able to operate in complete darkness at around -200°C to sustained sunlight at a bit more than 100°C. Anything traveling through space will probably have to rotate, as someone stated, so that there isn't a single side facing the Sun. If it wasn't rotated the side facing the Sun would get very, very hot while the other side would get very, very cold.

[Reply #65 on:]

For those of you who just think space is cold, anything stationed on the moon will have to be able to operate in complete darkness at around -200°C to sustained sunlight at a bit more than 100°C. Anything traveling through space will probably have to rotate, as someone stated, so that there isn't a single side facing the Sun. If it wasn't rotated the side facing the Sun would get very, very hot while the other side would get very, very cold.

I want to post a link for you but it's not letting me. So i will spam a bit.

[Reply #66 on:]

here is the link
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1236996885
I don't know if you have read this thread. it looks very good. It might be into space now as well

[Reply #67 on:]

The two have gone into space and it would appear that CASTOR is still on orbit and functioning.

http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/satellites/satInfo.php?satID=122&retURL=/satellites/status.php

[Reply #68 on:]

@BalkanLion 1.0: See reply #27.