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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 37 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2010

Analysis and Testing of a LIDAR-Based Approach to Terrain Relative Navigation for Precise Lunar Landing

Capability for precise lunar landing is the goal for future NASA missions. A LIDAR-based terrain relative navigation (TRN) approach lets us achieve this goal and also land under any illumination conditions. Results from field test data showed that the LIDAR TRN algorithm obtained position estimates with mean error of about 20 meters and standard deviations of about 10 meters. Moreover, the algorithm was capable of providing 99 percent correct estimates by assessing the local terrain relief in the data. Also, the algorithm was able to handle initial position uncertainty of up to 1.6 kilometers without performance degradation.

laser altimeter↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Advanced Materials Testing for Lunar Landing & Launch Pad Construction

Five candidate lunar landing and launch pad candidate materials were evaluated in relevant Oxygen/Methane rocket engine plume environment exposure tests. The performance trends were modeled, observed, measured (to the extent possible), and testing results were evaluated. A total of fifteen high temperature plume tests were performed in two test campaigns: five in December 2020 and ten in March 2021. The results indicate that several of the selected materials are promising for future consideration in designing and building lunar landing and launch pads, although further development work is needed for all of them.

landing pad↗
NASA NTRS1987

Proposal for a lunar landing pod for SKITTER

The purpose of this project is to design a lunar landing module for the SKITTER vehicle. SKITTER is a three-legged mobile lunar transport and work platform. This lunar landing module must be able to bring SKITTER, with attached crane, from a lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon. This propulsion system is entirely self-contained and removable after touchdown. SKITTER is unmanned and must be able to touch down on the lunar surface and perform assigned tasks independently of other space or lunar vehicles. The propulsion system is designed to ensure that the vehicle will make a lunar landing within the expected velocity range. A landing gear configuration is presented to safely dissipate landing forces on lunar impact and be removed from the SKITTER structure after touchdown. The overall engineering analysis was conducted to determine an economical design to land SKITTER safely on the Moon. SKITTER will perform various tasks on the surface of the Moon. The completion of this project will determine the feasibility of landing SKITTER with the attached crane safely on the lunar surface.

Herman, David↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

End-to-End Performance Optimization of a Crewed Lunar Landing Mission Staged from a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit

A crewed lunar landing mission staged from a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) presents a unique set of challenges not considered before for the Apollo-type direct missions. The NRHO does not have a fixed orbital plane and its period also changes with time, due to which the mission performance is very sensitive to the timing and location of the NRHO departure and arrival burns for a near-polar surface landing site. For such type of mission staged from the NRHO, an end-to-end optimization approach for the entire mission, from the NRHO departure to surface landing and from surface lift-off to the NRHO insertion, is well-suited for extracting the maximum performance out of this design. In this paper, an integrated approach for performing end-to-end optimization of a NRHO-staged crewed lunar landing mission is proposed that optimizes the in-space and powered flight segments simultaneously using Copernicus trajectory optimization tool. Copernicus is augmented with analytical approximations for the in-space, powered descent, and powered ascent segments in this work to improve the convergence of its multiple-shooting based direct optimization method. New analytical solutions are derived for the different phases of the powered flight segments by solving associated guidance problems. These analytical solutions act as initial guesses for starting the numerical optimization of the integrated mission in Copernicus. An example lunar landing mission is simulated to validate the proposed end-to-end optimization approach and the results are compared with the conventional patched trajectory approach.

Bharat Mahajan↗