Power and Monetary Budget
In keeping with DISOPS, a single VIRGIL will be a fraction of the cost of a traditional rover. Because cost, weight, and power are often a 'pick any two' proposition, Table 1 below includes these three items and is sampled from the manufactures website when possible. For special order items, data was extrapolated from similar item types and are denoted in italics.
Table 1. Cost-Weight-Power Chart of VIRGIL Components.
Clearly, the most power hungry device on the VIRGIL is the high powered amplifier. SiCLOPS plans to mitigate this effect by only operating the HPAs for a very short duration of time.
And the following table shows the overall material budget for our mission.
| item | Thousands of USD |
| SpaceX Falcon Heavy | 85,000 |
| Fuel (LOX/RP-1) | 600 |
| Solar Cells | 84 |
| Satellite Battery | 24 |
| Satellite Electronics / Mothership | 10,000 |
| VIRGILs (20 sensors) | 1,800 |
| Total Cost | 97,508 |
Table. Overall material budget of SiCLOPS.
Time Line
Risk Management
| Component | Risk |
| Power | Batteries will eventually run down, cell could fail and bring VIRGIL voltage below 12 volts. |
| Sensor/ADC/Processor | Could be corrupted on landing, or fail over time. |
| Communications | RF amplifiers could fail, antennas could fail, etc. |