Project 8 - Artemis 13

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After the incident with Spurgeon Tanner's heart attack, you and the rest of the team of the Artemis 13 continue with your testing missions. Your pilot, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, has been performing some upper atmosphere maneuvers while you and the crew have been testing the systems and equipment on board. The final test was a short “jump” to the moon and back. A jump occurs when a large energy flux accelerates the ship to 11 km/s in a short time frame. The inertial dampeners prevent the crew members from any adverse affects of rapid acceleration. The purpose of this system is for what JPL is labeling Fast Action Maneuvering (FAM).

After a successful jump, the Artemis 13 makes a pass by the moon and begins the return trip to Earth. However, Maverick notices some systems warnings. Apparently, there was a power delivery failure, and the jump has drained the batteries of the Artemis 13 to unexpectedly low levels. This being a prototype ship, and with NASA's space program on hold, there is no way to get a ship up to the Artemis before it zooms by Earth and gets lost in deep space. The other issue, there is a limited air supply on the Artemis 13 as most of the systems are still in a Beta phase, so time is of the essence.

Project 8A: Austin, We Have A Snafu

The Artemis 13 is split into the two separate sections and it has been decided that in order to conserve resources that everybody should be put into the command ship and power transferred into it. However, power supply for the whole ship is running critically low, so you are now only running the ECS to maintain oxygen in the command module. You no longer have communications with Austin.

You notice as you begin powering up the command ship (which operates on its own reserve power system) that although the navigational controls have been primed, there are several components that are not responding to testing. It appears that the circuit switch control board got fried during the test jump, as a result, you now need to create a new circuit that will allow you to provide different amounts of energy to the propulsion system's module in the command ship.

That propulsion system consists of the primary burners and the cooling system, which have a total resistance of 65 $\Omega$. The primary burners require a short burst of 200 J to power-up. The cooling system requires a short burst 300 J to power-up.

You need to be able to deliver different amounts of power to this module; however, you are growing concerned that your re-entry power supply of 100 V may not be sufficient to power these command ship systems. You manage to find some additional batteries onboard (three 10 V batteries from the supply room) to use if you need them.

You also have several 0.125F capacitors and resistors (1 $\Omega$, 5 $\Omega$, 10 $\Omega$, 50 $\Omega$, 100 $\Omega$) on hand. You also have access to multiple switches that can be used to open and close parts of the circuit you are designing.

There is a breaker in the circuit that is a failsafe and will trip if the current exceeds 2 A. You also know that there are delicate circuit elements in the primary burners and the cooling system, so the propulsion system should not be connected to any power supplies when charging capacitors.

You should provide a circuit diagram of your design that helps you explain to your crew that the current in the circuit is safe and that you are going to be able to supply the needed power to the systems when the time comes. As a check for yourself, you should make sure that the voltage in the circuit adds up to the correct amount as to not suffer any voltage shortages.

Project 8B: Power Is Everything

There have been enough disasters for the Artemis 13. Mission Control has decided to abort the mission and are now working on trying to get the crew home. Since they have quickly been draining their batteries, they have cut the power to the remainder of the ship, but to get back to Earth they MUST turn on the guidance computer system (GCS), Environmental Control Systems (ECS), Communications Relay (CR), the warm-up control for the primers for the parachutes (PP), and the Command Control Module (CCM), as well as two floodlights (FL) in the cockpit.

Your team has been working in a simulator to figure out how to turn on each of the systems in various orders, but keeps running into problems. If the total current from the 230 V battery on board exceeds 0.35 A, the battery will die and the Artemis will lose power before it can return safely to Earth. Your flight expert has sent over the most recent steps he has tried and the data they collected for each step.

  1. Turn on only the CR, which seems to work properly and only draws 0.242 A from the battery.
  2. Then turn on the PP, which decreases the current from the battery. The CR seems to barely be functioning so you conclude that it is running at it's minimum power of 18.35 W.
  3. Next they turned everything off, and switched on only the PP and the two FL. Immediately the warning light goes off in the simulator because the current from the battery is way too high at 1.48 A and the flood lights have burnt out because the power in each of the bulbs was 132.3 W (exceeding their maximum power rating of 60 W).
  4. You decide to start over and turn everything off again. You turn on the CS, ECS, and CCM - which seems to be perfectly alright. The current from the battery is maintaining at a nice and safe 0.188 A. Since this combination works well, you grab the hand-dandy multimeter and find that the CS, ECS, and CCM have the same current but that the CS is using the most power (17.7 W) and the ECS is using the least (10.6 W).
  5. Just to try one more thing, they turn everything off and then turn on only the PP and the CS. You find that even though they have the same voltage the current going through these elements are different.

Mission Controls wants to try to turn everything on at once as it is currently configured. They are running out of time and need to get something to the Artemis. Will the current configuration of these elements in a circuit allow the Artemis 13 to get home safely??