User:Bledalot/sandbox

Colmena, or the Colmena Lunar project, is a project from the Agencia Espacial Mexicana that launched as part of the payload of Peregrine Mission One that launched on January 8, 2024. The project was worked on by over 200 students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The project consists of five 56 gram robots as well as a small catapult to propel the robots away from the lunar lander. The total weight of the payload is 608 grams. The robots do not have onboard batteries, relying entirely on solar panels for their energy. As a result, they need to be propelled away from the lunar lander in order to avoid being caught in its shadow where they would get no sunlight. This will also ensure that they land in a random configuration, separated from each other.

Once catapulted, the 5 autonomous robots will commence their main mission, which is to attempt to autonomously navigate the lunar regolith and assemble, connecting with each other to form one larger solar array. After this, the cluster will commence its secondary goal, which is to perform scientific measurements on the moon's surface layer of dust. Including measuring average size, density and dielectric constant of the dust as well as the Debye length near the surface.

The instruments onboard the robots include current, voltage, proximity and temperature sensors, as well as magnetic field sensors from 1Hz to 200KHz and 3D gryoscopes and accelerometers.

Scientific measurements will continue for the rest of the lunar day. When the sun goes down, the robots will deactivate. After the lunar night, the robots will attempt to turn themselves back on, though it is not expected that they will survive the cold temperatures of the lunar night, as they do not have any form of heating or insulation.