For the obvious reasons, I invariably get too busy to blog exactly when things get interesting...
 NSS's Climber |
 Small is Beautiful |
NSS (National Space Society) started its participation in the games pursuing a novel Stirling Engine based design – very different than the rest of the teams. A Stirling engine is a heat engine, which means that the laser beam is converted to heat (with almost perfect efficiency), but the heat is then converted to mechanical energy subject to the laws of thermodynamics, which dictate a certain level of inefficiency that depends on the ability of the engine to dissipate the heat. I will dedicate a separate post to that concept, just as soon as Bert Murray, NSS’s Captain, will allow me to…
Construction of a competitive Stirling engine is very challenging, and even though NSS was able to design around many of the difficulties, time was drawing short and NSS decided to switchto a more conventional PV-based design.
The new PV climber is tiny – a micro-climber. The rules for the competition do not prohibit such a small climber, but at some level going too small is difficult since some components cannot shrink along with the rest of the climber and so end up being fixed-weight overhead. Whether such a smaller climber can indeed be made to work remains to be seen.
The bags in the picture are an interesting feature – can you guess when thet do?
As of this moment NSS is still not qualified, and with time drawing short and resource scarce, well, it’s a tight race. They are very close, as this post testifies, and are working hard to catch up.