A combination of laser sensors, a camera, a high-speed computer, and complicated algorithms will give the spacecraft synthetic eyes and analytical ability to locate a designated landing area, identify potential hazards, and adjust course at the safest landing site. of the Assignment of Safe and Accurate Landing – Evolution of Integrated Capabilities (SPLICE) as a component of the Game Change Development program of the Space Technology Mission Directorate will eventually allow spacecraft to avoid rocks, craters and more in landing zones, a component of the length of a football box targeted as safe.
Three of SPLICE’s 4 main subsystems will perform their first verification flight built into a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket on a long-duration mission. When the rocket propellant returns to the ground, after reaching the boundary between the environment and Earth’s space, relative navigation of the SPLICE terrain, the Navigation Doppler lidar and the descent and contact pc will act on board the propeller. Each of them will serve in the same way as it will when it reaches the surface of the Moon.
The fourth main component of SPLICE, a hazard detection lidar, will be tested for long-term floor and flight testing.
Follow Ariane’s thread
When you select a site for exploration, the care component is to ensure enough domain for a domain to land. The length of the domain, called the landing ellipse, shows the erroneous nature of legacy landing technology. in 1968 approximately 11 miles to 3 miles, and astronauts blew up the air module. Post-Mars robot missions were designed for autonomous landings. Viking arrived on the red planet 10 years later with a target ellipse of 174 miles to 62 miles.
The technology has advanced and the following autonomous contact spaces have decreased in size. In 2012, the Curiosity rover’s contact-taking ellipse was reduced to 12 miles across four miles.
Being able to locate a contact site will help long-running missions target spaces for new clinical scans in places that were once considered too harmful to unmanned contact. Miles.
Each planetary framework has its own unique conditions. That’s why “SPLICE is designed to be compatible with any spacecraft landing on a planet or moon,” said assignment manager Ron Sostaric. Based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Sostaric said the assignment encompasses several of the agency’s centers.
“What we are building is a complete descent and contact formula that will serve Artemis’s long-term missions to the Moon and can be adapted to Mars,” he said. “Our task is to unite the individual parts and make sure it looks like a functional formula. “
Atmospheric situations may vary, however, the descent and contact procedure is the same. The SPLICE computer is programmed to enable navigation on the ground several kilometers above the ground. The on-board camera photographs the surface, taking up to 10 photos consistent with the second. These are frequently introduced into the computer, which is preloaded with satellite photographs of the landing site and a database of known landmarks.
Algorithms look for real-time photographs to understand the characteristics of the spacecraft’s location and securely direct it to its intended landing point. It is similar to navigating through landmarks, such as buildings, rather than street names.
Similarly, terrain navigation identifies where the spacecraft is and sends this data to the address and PC, which is to blame for running the flight trail to the surface. corded crumbs were placed and then attached to them to the final destination.
This procedure continues up to approximately 4 miles above the surface.
Laser navigation
Knowing the precise position of a spacecraft is essential for the calculations needed to plan and execute a motorized descent for a quick landing. On the descent, the computer turns on the Doppler navigation lidar to measure speed and distance measurements that load more to accurate navigation data from Lidar terrain navigation (soft detection and telemetry) works in the same way as a radar but uses soft waves instead of radio waves. Three laser beams, as narrow as a pencil, point to the ground. of those rays bounces off the surface, reflecting onto the spacecraft.
The time and wavelength of this soft reflected are used to calculate how far the ship is from the ground, in which direction it moves and how fast it moves. These calculations are consistent with formed 20 times consistent with the moment for the 3 laser beams and brought to the senior computer.
Doppler lidar works effectively on Earth; However, Farzin Amzajerdian, co-inventor of the generation and lead researcher at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is tasked with addressing demanding space use situations.
“There are still unknowns about the number of signals coming from the surface of the Moon and Mars,” he said. If the on the ground is not very reflective, the signal returned to the sensors will be weaker. But Amzajerdian is convinced that the lidar will outperform radar generation because the laser frequency is an order of magnitude greater than radio waves, resulting in much higher accuracy and more effective detection.
The workhorse to manage all this knowledge is the descent and landing computer. Navigation knowledge of sensor systems is transmitted to on-board algorithms, which calculate new routes for accurate landing.
Computer station
The descent and contact computer synchronizes the purposes and knowledge control of SPLICE components. It will also have to integrate seamlessly with the other systems of any spacecraft. Therefore, this small computer power station prevents precision contact technologies from overloading the main flight computer.
The PC wishes known from the beginning obviously showed that existing PCs were inadequate. NASA’s high-functional area flight computing processor would meet demand, but there are still several years to complete. with Blue Origin on its new Shepard rocket. The new computer’s functionality data will help shape its eventual replacement.
John Carson, head of technical integration for precision touchdown, explained that “the replacement computer has a very processing technology, which informs both the long-term design of the high-speed computer and the long-term efforts to integrate the descent and touchdown pc. “
In the future, verification missions like these will help configure contacting systems for NASA missions and advertising providers on the surface of the Moon and other bodies of the solar system.