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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 271 records · Page 15
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2013

Monitoring Regional Forest Disturbances across the US with near Real Time MODIS NDVI Products Resident to the ForWarn Forest Threat Early Warning System

Forest threats across the US have become increasingly evident in recent years. Sometimes these have resulted in regionally evident disturbance progressions (e.g., from drought, bark beetle outbreaks, and wildfires) that can occur across multiyear durations and have resulted in extensive forest overstory mortality. In addition to stand replacement disturbances, other forests are subject to ephemeral, sometimes yearly defoliation from various insects and varying types and intensities of ephemeral damage from storms. Sometimes, after prolonged severe disturbance, signs of recovery in terms of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) can occur. The growing prominence and threat of forest disturbances in part have led to the formation and implementation of the 2003 Healthy Forest Restoration Act which mandated that national forest threat early warning system be developed and deployed. In response, the US Forest Service collaborated with NASA, DOE Oakridge National Laboratory, and the USGS Eros Data Center to build and roll-out the near real time ForWarn early warning system for monitoring regionally evident forest disturbances. Given the diversity of disturbance types, severities, and durations, ForWarn employs multiple historical baselines that are used with current NDVI to derive a suite of six forest change products that are refreshed every 8 days. ForWarn employs daily quarter kilometer MODIS NDVI data from the Aqua and Terra satellites, including MOD13 data for deriving historical baseline NDVIs and eMODIS 7 NDVI for compiling current NDVI. In doing so, the Time Series Product Tool and the Phenological Parameters Estimation Tool are used to temporally de-noise, fuse, and aggregate current and historical MODIS NDVIs into 24 day composites refreshed every 8 days with 46 dates of products per year. The 24 day compositing interval enables disturbances to be detected, while minimizing the frequency of residual atmospheric contamination. Forest change products are computed versus the previous 1, previous 3, and all previous years in the MODIS record for a given 24 day interval. Other "weekly" forest change products include one computed using an adaptive length compositing method for quicker detection of disturbances, two others that adjust for seasonal fluctuations in normal vegetation phenology (e.g., early versus late springs). This overall approach enables forest disturbance dynamics from a variety of regionally evident biotic and abiotic forest disturbances to be viewed and assessed through the calendar year. The change products are also being utilized for forest change trend analysis and for developing regional forest overstory mortality products. ForWarn's forest change products are used to alert forest health specialists about new forest disturbances. Such alerts are also typically based on available Landsat, aerial, and ground data as well as communications with forest health specialists and previous experience. ForWarn products have been used to detect and track many types of regional disturbances to multiple forest types, including defoliation from caterpillars and severe storms, as well as mortality from both biotic and abiotic agents (e.g., bark beetles, drought, fire, anthropogenic clearing). ForWarn offers products that could be combined with other geospatial data on forest biomass to assess forest disturbance carbon impacts within the conterminous US.

Spruce, Joseph P.↗
NASA NTRS2016

The Impact of New Trends in Satellite Launches on Orbital Debris Environment

The main goal of this study is to examine the impact of new trends in satellite launch activities on the orbital debris environment and collision risk. Starting from the launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957, space borne technology has become an indispensable part of our lives. More than 6,000 satellites have been launched into Earth orbit. Though the annual number of satellites launched stayed flat for many decades, the trend has recently changed. The satellite market has been undergoing a major evolution with new space companies replacing the traditional approach of deploying a few large, complex and costly satellites with an approach to use a multitude of smaller, less complex and cheaper satellites. This new approach creates a sharp increase in the number of satellites and so the historic trends are no longer representative. As a foundation for this study, a scenario for satellite deployments based on the publicly announced future satellite missions has been developed. These constellation-deploying companies include, but are not limited to, Blacksky, CICERO, EROS, Landmapper, Leosat, Northstar, O3b, OmniEarth, OneWeb, Orbcomm, OuterNet, PlanetIQ, Planet Labs, Radarsat, RapidEye Next Generation, Sentinel, Skybox, SpaceX, and Spire. Information such as the annual number of launches, the number of orbital planes to be used by the constellation, as well as apogee, perigee, inclination, spacecraft mass and area were included or approximated. Besides the production of satellites, a widespread ongoing effort to enhance orbital injection capabilities will allow delivery of more spacecraft more accurately into Earth orbits. A long list of companies such as Microcosm, Rocket Lab, Firefly Space Systems, Sierra Nevada Corporation and Arca Space Corporation are developing new launch vehicles dedicated for small satellites. There are other projects which intend to develop interstages with propulsive capabilities which will allow the deployment of satellites into their desired orbits beyond the restrictions of the launch vehicle used. These near future orbital injection technologies are also covered in the developed scenario. Using the above-mentioned background information, this study aims to examine how the orbital debris environment will be affected from the new dynamics of the emerging space markets. We developed a simulation tool that is capable of propagating the objects in a given deployment scenario with variable-sized time-steps as small as one second. Over the course of the run, the software also detects collisions; additional debris objects are then created according to the NASA breakup model and are fed back into the simulation framework. Examining the simulation results, the total number of particles to accumulate in different orbits can be monitored and the number of conjunctions can be tracked to assess the collision risks. The simulation makes it possible to follow the short- and long-term effects of a particular satellite or constellation on the space environment. Likewise, the effects of changes in the debris environment on a particular satellite or constellation can be evaluated. It is authors hope that the results of this paper and further utilization of the developed simulation tool will assist in the investigation of more accurate deorbiting metrics to replace the generic 25-year disposal guidelines, as well as to guide future launches toward more sustainable and safe orbits.

New Space↗
NASA NTRS2016

The Strata-l Experiment on Microgravity Regolith Segregation

The Strata-1 experiment studies the segregation of small-body regolith through long-duration exposure of simulant materials to the microgravity environment on the International Space Station (ISS). Many asteroids feature low bulk densities, which implies high values of porosity and a mechanical structure composed of loosely bound particles, (i.e. the "rubble pile" model), a prime example of a granular medium. Even the higher-density, mechanically coherent asteroids feature a significant surface layer of loose regolith. These bodies will evolve in response to very small perturbations such as micrometeoroid impacts, planetary flybys, and the YORP effect. A detailed understanding of asteroid mechanical evolution is needed in order to predict the surface characteristics of as-of-yet unvisited bodies, to understand the larger context of samples from sample return missions, and to mitigate risks for both manned and unmanned missions to asteroidal bodies. Due to observation of rocky regions on asteorids such as Eros and Itokawa, it has been hypothesized that grain size distribution with depth on an asteroid may be inhomogeneous: specifically, that large boulders have been mobilized to the surface. In terrestrial environments, this size-dependent sorting to the surface of the sample is called the Brazil Nut Effect. The microgravity and acceleration environment on the ISS is similar that of a small asteroid. Thus, Strata-1 investigates size segregation of regolith in an environment analogous to that of small bodies. Strata-1 consists of four regolith simulants in evacuated tubes, as shown in Figure 1 (Top and Middle). The simulants are (1) a crushed and sieved ordinary chondrite meteorite to simulate an asteroidal surface, (2) a carbonaceous chondrite simulant with a mixture of fine and course particles, and two simplified silicate glass simulants; (3) one with angular and (4) another with spherical particles. These materials were chosen to span a range of granular complexity. The materials were sorted into three size species pre-launch, and maintained during launch and return by a device called the Entrapulator. The hypothesis under test is that the particles that constitute a granular medium in a micro-gravity environment, subjected to a known vibration environemnt, will segregate in accordance to modeled predictions. Strata-1 is currently operating on ISS, with cameras capturing images of simulant motion throughout the one year mission. Vibration data is recorded and downlinked, and the simulants will be analyzed after return to Earth.

Fries, M.↗
NASA NTRS2018

Mission Status for Earth Science Constellation MOWG Meeting @ Sioux Falls SD EOS Aura

This presentation provides mission operations status for the Earth Observing System (EOS) Aura satellite for the past six-months (December 2017 through May 2018). It only contains information that is of interest to the International Earth Science Constellation (ESC) Mission Operations Working Group (MOWG) member missions. It will be presented at the bi-annual MOWG Meeting at the USGS EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on Wednesday, June 12, 2018. These meetings have been occurring twice a year since the MOWG was formed in 2003. The presentation has been reviewed and approved by Eric Moyer, ESMO Deputy Project Manager Technical.

Aura satellite↗
NASA NTRS2014

Exploration of Planetary Skylights and Tunnels

While planetary pits and caves have been fiction for a century, they have been seen from orbit only in the last few years. These discoveries exceed the fantasies in diversity, scale, and abundance. For pits and caves, this is the age of discovery, ranging from a few pits on the Moon and Mars in 2009 to hundreds within the time of this research, with many more to come. Pits with subsurface voids have been confirmed on the Moon and Mars and indicated on Venus, Phobos, Eros, Gaspra, Ida, Enceladus, and Europa. Compelling next steps are surface and subsurface exploration.Pits and caves are opportunistic study targets for unique origins, geology, and climate that will broadly impact planetary science. Holes on Mars are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface, making them good candidates to contain Martian life. Pits are prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers. Caves and caverns could be ready-_made shelters for future Moon and Mars explorers and colonists. Discoveries to date look down from on high with satellites but cannot reveal the wonders of caves. They cannot enter, touch, or view pits up close. Genuine exploration is only achievable through surface missions. Robotic missions can assess suitability for safe entry and habitation, plus inform techniques for developing subsurface infrastructure.Missions into planetary voids redefine the future of exploration, science, and habitation beyond Earth. We can reach this future only by targeting specific technological advancement now. Prior missions and current roadmap priorities target regions of benign terrain. While in-cave concepts have been postulated, the critical technologies have not been identified and demonstrated.While robotic exploration of skylights and caves can seek out life, investigate geology and origins, and open the subsurface of other worlds to humankind, it is a daunting venture. Planetary voids present perilous terrain requiring innovative technologies for access, exploration, and modeling. These same technologies are broadly applicable to explorations of rough and/or subsurface planetary environments, including caves, craters, cliffs, and rock fields. This research speculates on the possibilities and means of such exploration with fundamental contributions to exploring, modeling, and visualizing this new class of large-scale, highly three-dimensional concave planetary features.

Whittaker, Red↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

MBSE Applications for the MSR SRC Mars Ascent Vehicle

The objective of the NASA Mars Sample Return (MSR) Campaign is to collect samples from the surface of Mars and return them to Earth for scientific research. The Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) will be integrated into a larger Mars Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL) for transit to and storage on Mars. After all Martian samples have been collected and loaded into the MAV payload assembly, MAV will deliver the samples from the Martian surface to Mars orbit. A separate spacecraft, the Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) will retrieve the samples from Mars orbit and return them to Earth. To address common systems engineering challenges associated with using traditional systems engineering practices on complex projects, the MAV systems engineering team has explored implementation of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tools and languages. This paper describes the current state of implementation and development of the MAV MBSE model with the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) within the scope of the MAV Systems Requirement Cycle (SRC) systems engineering workflow. The MAV MBSE model has been developed within Magic Draw – a SysML editor commonly used to implement MBSE. The MAV MBSE model has been used to develop mission phase functional flow diagrams for the Concept of Operations, decompose mission to vehicle subsystem functions, develop a functional decomposition, derive functional requirements, trace requirements up to customer-imposed requirements, trace requirements within MAV requirement space, identify requirements trace gaps, define and map the physical design space architecture, allocate requirements to subsystems, develop validation items, define assembly, integration, and test (AI&T) operations, and trace these items across driving goals to develop an integrated digital thread of systems engineering information used to drive design specifications, decision making, and ultimately design verification and validation. Findings and results associated with implementing MBSE in these ways, alongside traditional methods will be discussed.

MBSE↗
NASA NTRS2020

Concept for an On-orbit Capture and Orientation Module for Potential Mars Sample Return

An orbiting sample Capture and Orient Module (COM) architecture for a Capture, Contain, and Return System (CCRS) payload concept for an Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) was developed to enable on-orbit capture, orientation, and transfer of a Mars sample container into a containment vessel for potential Mars Sample Return (MSR). The module is composed of a capture mechanism for containing the Orbiting Sample (OS), a capture cone to capture and contain the OS, an orientation mechanism to orient the OS, an External Transfer Mechanism (ETM) to cage the OS during capture and assemble it into the containment vessel, a capture trigger to trigger capture mechanism and ETM closure during OS capture, and a sensing system to inspect the OS and confirm capture and orientation. Statistical modeling and simulations of the OS during capture were performed to analyze the time to contact and perturbations to the spacecraft at first contact. A half-scale functional prototype of the module was developed to demonstrate end-to-end operation.

Younse, Paulo↗
NASA NTRS2020

Robotics System Process and Concept for On-orbit Assembly for Potential Mars Sample Return

Proposed Mars Sample Return (MSR) missions would require on-orbit assembly of containment vessels to meet backward Planetary Protection requirements and transfer of the sample container through various stations and positions. Some operations would have to be performed autonomously, and others would require ground-in-loop decision-making stages and verification processes. One concept design for an Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) Capture, Contain, and Return System (CCRS) Transfer Mechanism (TM) is a multi-Degree of Freedom (DOF) manipulator that utilizes a passive End Effector (EE) to assist in containment vessel assembly. To converge on a feasible design, a robotic system process has been instantiated. This process is composed of three main phases: robotic problem definition (operating environment, operations/functions, system goals), robotic solution selection (trade studies on the number of degrees of freedom, number of mechanisms, types of mechanisms), robotic solution design, implementation, and verification and validation (kinematic configuration, robotic and kinematic analysis and topology optimization of components). As a final product of this process, a half-scale functional prototype of the TM was developed to demonstrate the end-to-end operation capability.

Strahle, Jackson W↗
NASA NTRS2020

Challenges of Mars Sample Return Lander Entry, Descent, and Landing

The proposed Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign would be perhaps the most ambitious robotic mission ever attempted in space exploration. The notional cam-paign consists of three Flagship-class missions operating in cooperation for over a decade in order to return samples of the Martian surface and atmosphere to Earth for analysis. The Mars 2020 rover, scheduled to launch in July 2020, will cache samples and place them on the surface for possible return. The second mission would be a Sample Return Lander (SRL) that consists of a small Sample Fetch Rover (SFR) to gather the samples, a Sample Transfer Arm (STA) to load the samples into a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), and the MAV itself to launch the samples into orbit around Mars. The third mission would be an Earth Return Or-biter (ERO) designed to rendezvous and capture the Orbiting Sample (OS), return to Earth, and separate the Earth Entry Vehicle (EEV) for Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) at a location to be determined. This paper will focus on the SRL mission concept, specifically the EDL phase. Given the ambitious SRL sample re-trieval baseline surface mission, including a rocket launch of the samples into Mars orbit, it is estimated that the EDL system may be required to deliver as much as 2100 kg of dry mass to the surface. This represents an approximate 20-25% in-crease in mass capability over previous landed Mars missions. Additionally, there is a high probability that SRL would have to land very close to the samples on the surface to expedite retrieval operations; therefore, Pin Point Landing (PPL) accu-racy may be required. To address these challenges, promising EDL configuration augmentations were studied to include larger forebody/higher drag entry capsules, hypersonic/supersonic inflatable/non-inflatable aerodynamic decelerators, hypersonic trim tabs, ballute drag devices, larger parachutes, higher Mach and higher dynamic pressure parachute deployments, lower parachute deployment altitudes having shorter chute timelines necessitating more efficient terrain sensor strategies, and ad-ditional fuel for longer powered descent diverts to the target landing site. Over-arching the entire trade study was an attempt to stay as close to the experience base of past successful missions as possible to reduce implementation cost and risk. This paper will discuss the entire SRL EDL trade study in detail. The information presented about the potential MSR campaign is pre-decisional and is provided for planning and discussion purposes only.

Ivanov, Mark C.↗
NASA NTRS2020

Thermal Architecture of A Conceptual Mars Sample Return Lander during Cruise and on Mars

A Pre-Project team is currently studying a conceptual Mars Sample Return (MSR) architecture that would return samples collected by Mars 2020 to Earth. The basic architecture comprises of acquisition of these samples using a sample retrieval lander (SRL), which also would also house the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) and Sample Fetch Rover (SFR). The MAV would put the orbiting sample container (OS) in a Martian orbit, which would then rendezvous with an Earth return orbiter (ERO) and be sent to Earth. This paper focuses on the SRL portion of the potential MSR campaign. The thermal architecture of this mission during cruise to Mars presents several challenges that pertain to the thermal control of the spacecraft and the lander/MAV/rover throughout cruise under varying thermal environments & operating conditions. Additionally, the control of these systems within their allowable operating temperature limits on the Martian surface is very challenging because of the large fluctuations in the environment, operating conditions and limited electrical power and energy availability. This paper will describe the thermal architecture for a potential SRL mission, the key thermal requirements and interfaces.It should be noted that the decision to implement MSR will not be finalized until NASA’s completion of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process. This document is being made available for information purposes only.

Nicholas, Austin↗
NASA NTRS2020

Communication-Aware Orbit Design for Small Spacecraft Swarms around Small Bodies

Exploration of small Solar System bodies has traditionally been performed by single monolithic spacecraft carrying a number of science instruments. However, science instruments typically cannot be operated simultaneously due to the instrument requirements including optimal viewing angle, surface illumination, altitude and ground resolution, power, and data constraints. This observation has motivated interest in multi-spacecraft architectures where a swarm of small spacecraft, each carrying a single science instrument, studies a small body after being deployed by a carrier spacecraft, which then collects data from the vehicles and relays it to Earth. Such architectures hold promise to yield significant improvements in mission efficiency, increases in data quality, and shorter mission duration. A key difficulty in the design of such missions is the selection of orbits for the small spacecraft, which must satisfy not only instrument requirements, but also strict inter-spacecraft communication and on-board storage constraints. To address this, in this paper, we present a novel computationally-efficient optimization algorithm for \emph{communication-aware design} of the orbits of a small spacecraft swarm orbiting a small body. The proposed approach captures constraints including instrument requirements, inter-spacecraft communication bandwidths, and on-board memory usage, and it can accommodate highly irregular gravity field models and surface geometries. We propose an efficient algorithm for optimization of instrument observations and inter-spacecraft communications; we then leverage the differentiable nature of the proposed algorithm to accelerate a gradient-based global search algorithm. Numerical simulations of a six-spacecraft swarm studying 433 Eros show that the proposed approach successfully identifies high-quality orbits, and significantly outperform communication-agnostic optimization techniques, resulting in a 10% increase in scientific returns and a 30% increase in the quality of the collected data.

Rahmani, Amir↗
NASA NTRS2021

LiDAR-Inertial Based Navigation and Mapping for Precision Landing

Future lander missions will travel to ambitious, scientifically interesting locations near rough and dangerous terrain. They will need to operate with limited prior information about the terrain, and under varying lighting conditions. Landing safely and precisely in the face of these challenges is difficult for existing vision-based landing systems, which require detailed orbital reconnaissance, a priori hazard maps, and impose time-of-day restrictions on landing to ensure similar lighting conditions in orbital and descent imagery. Advanced 3D imaging LiDAR systems currently under development, and originally intended for single-scan hazard detection, have the potential to be operated continuously from altitudes of up to 5 km. Used together with existing inertial measurement units (IMUs), these sensors open a path-to-flight for a full navigation and mapping system, which could replace or augment a traditional landing sensor suite. A landing system based around these sensors can perform accurate altimetry, map-relative localization (MRL), LiDAR-inertial odometry, and map refinement in an illumination-insensitive manner, over unknown or partially known terrain. This paper outlines preliminary work on a LiDAR-inertial landing system that: estimates the spacecraft trajectory during entry, descent, and landing (EDL); and maps the topography of the terrain below, for future use in hazard detection and avoidance. An incremental, factor graph based, smoothing approach is used to solve for the maximum a posteriori trajectory of spacecraft states. Integrated IMU measurements and features tracked in adjacent range and intensity images are used to estimate motion (LiDAR-inertial odometry). LiDAR scans are binned into motion-corrected digital elevation models (DEMs), which are matched to an existing orbital topographic map to provide absolute position information (MRL). The estimated trajectory is then used to project the LiDAR scans into the map frame, creating a variable-resolution quadtree topographic map suitable for hazard detection and avoidance. Existing topographic maps from throughout the solar system (i.e., Earth, the Moon, Mars, Ceres, Vesta, Europa, Enceladus, and Eros) are upsampled for use in EDL simulations. The Mars 2020 Lander Vision System Simulator (LVSS) is extended to simulate LiDAR-inertial data for realistic EDL trajectories. Results of the algorithm operating on the simulated data are presented. Estimated spacecraft trajectory and refined map are compared to ground truth to assess estimation accuracy.

Katake, Anup↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

MBSE Applications for the MSR SRC Mars Ascent Vehicle

The objective of the NASA Mars Sample Return (MSR) Campaign is to collect samples from the surface of Mars and return them to Earth for scientific research. The Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) will be integrated into a larger Mars Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL) for transit to and storage on Mars. After all Martian samples have been collected and loaded into the MAV payload assembly, MAV will deliver the samples from the Martian surface to Mars orbit. A separate spacecraft, the Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) will retrieve the samples from Mars orbit and return them to Earth. To address common systems engineering challenges associated with using traditional systems engineering practices on complex projects, the MAV systems engineering team has explored implementation of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tools and languages. This paper describes the current state of implementation and development of the MAV MBSE model with the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) within the scope of the MAV Systems Requirement Cycle (SRC) systems engineering workflow. The MAV MBSE model has been developed within Magic Draw – a SysML editor commonly used to implement MBSE. The MAV MBSE model has been used to develop mission phase functional flow diagrams for the Concept of Operations, decompose mission to vehicle subsystem functions, develop a functional decomposition, derive functional requirements, trace requirements up to customer-imposed requirements, trace requirements within MAV requirement space, identify requirements trace gaps, define and map the physical design space architecture, allocate requirements to subsystems, develop validation items, define assembly, integration, and test (AI&T) operations, and trace these items across driving goals to develop an integrated digital thread of systems engineering information used to drive design specifications, decision making, and ultimately design verification and validation. Findings and results associated with implementing MBSE in these ways, alongside traditional methods will be discussed.

MBSE↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NASA Capture, Containment, and Return System: Bringing Mars Samples to Earth

The Capture, Containment, and Return System (CCRS) project is NASA’s last step in bringing back Mars samples. CCRS will close a decades-long multi-mission and multi-agency effort to bring Mars surface samples back to Earth for scientific studies. CCRS will launch in 2027 on the European Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) spacecraft, which will provide communications relay for the Mars Sample Return ground missions, Perseverance rover and the Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL) (to be launched in 2028). The main mission for CCRS begins when the first-ever orbital planetary capture operation occurs with CCRS catching and securing the Orbiting Sample (OS)in low Mars orbit. From this point, the system will perform additional "firsts": it will autonomously contain the OS with heat-shrink-fit, sterilize the outside surface, and assemble the Earth entry capsule, named Earth Entry System (EES), in orbit around Mars using a gantry mechanism. At approximately 2.8 Lunar distances from Earth, or 3-days from entry into Earth’s atmosphere, CCRS will open its micrometeoroid shield and release the EES on a ballistic trajectory to Earth. The EES is designed to be a fully passive system that will enter the atmosphere and land without parachute at the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR).

Mars mission, Sample return, Mission design↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Improved Aerothermal Reliability Analysis Enabled by the Mars Sample Return Earth Entry System Aerothermal Database

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign is a series of missions designed to retrieve Martian rock and soil samples for detailed study on Earth. The campaign is split into three primary phases: sample collection with the Mars2020 rover, retrieval with the Sample Return Lander (SRL) and Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), and then return to Earth with the Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) and Capture, Containment, and Return System (CCRS) [1]. The final sequence in the Earth return phase is the delivery and entry of the Earth Entry System (EES) sample return capsule. Due to unprecedented planetary protection concerns, the sample return capsule is subject to strict reliability requirements. To this end, the MSR-EES aerothermal team has implemented a flexible aerothermal database architecture capable of integration with state-of-the-art trajectory codes to provide a more rigorous aerothermal reliability analysis. The EES database enables the generation of environments at any location on the heatshield and can incorporate trajectory uncertainties to both statistically quantify aerothermal environments for arcjet testing and produce material response boundary conditions to rigorously select thermal protection system (TPS) sizing environments. This poster will not discuss the fundamental modeling assumptions included in the database, and will instead focus on the downstream reliability analyses that can be performed with a database of this architecture.

MSR-EES↗
NASA NTRS2023

Mars Sample Return and The Capture, Containment, and Return System New Design and Path To 2027 Launch

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign is one of the most ambitious and complex exoplanet scientific exploration missions currently underway. With the participation of NASA, ESA, and a large number of industry partners, MSR aims to bring back Martian rock and atmosphere samples with the goal of answering key questions about Mars’ geological, climatological, and (potentially) biological evolution. To accomplish this ambitious goal, the campaign relies on three distinct flight elements and a ground element. The Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) mission that would host the Capture, Containment, and Return System (CCRS) is the last element of the trio. The mission would capture the orbiting sample in low Mars orbit (launched into orbit by another mission), contain it and return it to Earth, landing it at the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). The CCRS continues its development. Since its early architecture, several changes were adopted by the project in order to improve overall payload efficiency and reduce mass. CCRS is currently on track to achieve the next milestone, Critical Design Review, expected in late 2024. This paper will discuss the CCRS design, how the current architecture contributes to an improved mission baseline, and the next critical steps of the mission towards its launch.

Mars mission↗