space mirror concept

Last crawled date: 1 year, 11 months ago

This is my final entry for this competition. I have uploaded the mirror part alone before, this is a more complete version. This is merely a simplified representation.

The idea for the mirror is to have 5 mirrors slide in front of each other to expand or retract. They are all connected to the center mirror with sliding rails. Two of which have 2 rails and 2 only have one because otherwise they would interfere. This is all encased in a housing that is also part of the structural integrity of the whole mechanism. Each of the outer mirrors will be connected with two additional sliding rails to the corresponding outer casing. This entire mechanism will be able to work by separating just two of the outer casings with some motorized mechanism.

Reflective material is also applied to two parts of the outer casing of the mirror. To the other two there can be solar panels mounted marked in blue. This way the solar panels are always facing the sun and are still exposed when the mirror is folded.

The mirror is mounted on an arm that allows for tilt, rotation of the mirror and rotation of the entire assembly. This in therm is mounted on a simple scissor lift mechanism.

This then can be mounted to an existing rover which i haven't included here.

The supplied animations should speak for itself, more questions are always welcome.