Scientists Developing Ways to Mitigate Dust for Future Explorers
Engineers Test Rotor Landing for Capsule
A team of researchers
brought a pair of scale model space capsules to the Vehicle Assembly Building
at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to try out a rotor system that could
be used in place of parachutes on returning spacecraft.
The design would give a capsule the stability and control of a helicopter, but would not be powered. Instead, the wind passing over the rotors as the capsule descends would make the blades turn, a process called auto-rotation that has been proven repeatedly on helicopters but never tried on spacecraft.
"The purpose of the testing we're doing here is to study how to get the rotor starting to spin," said Jeff Hagen, an engineer at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We're trying to build as much of that story as we can."
With team members spread out at different levels of the VAB, Jim Meehan stood at the 16th level of the cavernous VAB, about halfway up to where the two-pound model capsule hung on a line 480 feet above the concrete floor. Holding a helicopter radio-control unit, he remotely changed the rotors' pitch and slowed the fall four times as the unpowered craft landed on a stack of foam.
"It's like running four separate tests in one drop," said Meehan, an engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
The intent is to give real spacecraft a soft landing with enough control that they could touch down anywhere in the world, whether it be a runway or the top of a building. In other words, wherever a helicopter could land, a spacecraft could land, too.
"You can land gently and you can land where you want, you don't have to land out in the ocean," Meehan said. "Compared to a parachute, you get a soft landing and you get a targeted landing."
The rotor concept also fits nicely with spent rocket boosters, Hagen said. Instead of throwing away the stage and its valuable engines, rotors could be built into the booster frame and unfurled as the stage descends to Earth. Just as with the capsule, the stage would be controllable the whole way down and would land softly to save the all-important engines. Read More
New Book ....
"Breaking the Mishap Chain: Human Factors Lessons Learned from Aerospace Accidents and Incidents in Research, Flight Test, and Development"
By Peter W. Merlin, Gregg A. Bendrick, and Dwight A. Holland
This volume contains a collection of case studies of mishaps involving experimental aircraft, aerospace vehicles, and spacecraft in which human factors played a significant role. In all cases the engineers involved, the leaders and managers, and the operators (i.e., pilots and astronauts) were supremely qualified and by all accounts superior performers. Such accidents and incidents rarely resulted from a single cause but were the outcome of a chain of events in which altering at least one element might have prevented disaster. As such, this work is most certainly not an anthology of blame. It is offered as a learning tool so that future organizations, programs, and projects may not be destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. These lessons were learned at high material and personal costs and should not be lost to the pages of history.
NASA's trio of mobile launcher platforms (MLP) are being revamped to serve a variety of next-generation launch vehicles. The huge steel structures, which acted as launch bases for the Apollo/Saturn program and every space shuttle mission, will serve as the platforms that launch the next American-made vehicles to space.
Essentially a large steel box measuring 160 by 135 feet, a platform's surface features wide openings that align with a space-bound vehicle's engines and direct the blast into the flame trench below. Propellant lines and other utilities run throughout the structure. The two-story interior contains a variety of communications devices, control cabinets and other ground support equipment.
Throughout the past year, Kennedy Space Center's Ground Systems Development and Operations (GSDO) program has overseen the removal of much of the hardware used to support shuttle launches, making it available to the new 355-foot-tall mobile launcher in development for the agency's Space Launch System (SLS), a rocket that will launch NASA's Orion spacecraft and provide an entirely new capability for human exploration beyond Earth orbit.
"We're removing a lot of components -- cryogenic, pneumatic, mechanical, electrical, controls-type stuff for reuse on the new SLS mobile launcher as a cost savings," explained John Rigney, GSDO lead architect. "But at the same time, we wanted to keep the MLPs ready for any commercial entities that want to use them."
To accomplish this, the program carefully decided what hardware should be removed from the platforms in order to ensure two would remain available. Read More
One of the challenges in
exploring the moon or planets is dust kicked up by engines during landing or
activity on these distant worlds. Scientists in the Electrostatics and Surface
Physics Laboratory at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida are developing
ways to mitigate this problem.
Electrodynamic dust shield, or EDS, technology is based on concepts originally developed by NASA as early as 1967 and later by the University of Tokyo. In 2003, NASA, in collaboration with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, started development of the EDS for dust particle removal from solar panels to be used on future missions to Mars.
Dr. Carlos Calle, lead scientist in Kennedy's Electrostatics and Surface Physics Lab, is developing instrumentation to deal with the problem of electrostatic dust phenomena during future planetary exploration missions.
"Our laboratory is now developing an electrodynamic dust shield to prevent debris from accumulating on various surfaces," Calle said.
Long-term testing is planned for an experiment being developed for launch to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Dragon resupply mission in 2015. Read More
Electrodynamic dust shield, or EDS, technology is based on concepts originally developed by NASA as early as 1967 and later by the University of Tokyo. In 2003, NASA, in collaboration with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, started development of the EDS for dust particle removal from solar panels to be used on future missions to Mars.
Dr. Carlos Calle, lead scientist in Kennedy's Electrostatics and Surface Physics Lab, is developing instrumentation to deal with the problem of electrostatic dust phenomena during future planetary exploration missions.
"Our laboratory is now developing an electrodynamic dust shield to prevent debris from accumulating on various surfaces," Calle said.
Long-term testing is planned for an experiment being developed for launch to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Dragon resupply mission in 2015. Read More
A team of researchers
brought a pair of scale model space capsules to the Vehicle Assembly Building
at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to try out a rotor system that could
be used in place of parachutes on returning spacecraft.The design would give a capsule the stability and control of a helicopter, but would not be powered. Instead, the wind passing over the rotors as the capsule descends would make the blades turn, a process called auto-rotation that has been proven repeatedly on helicopters but never tried on spacecraft.
"The purpose of the testing we're doing here is to study how to get the rotor starting to spin," said Jeff Hagen, an engineer at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We're trying to build as much of that story as we can."
With team members spread out at different levels of the VAB, Jim Meehan stood at the 16th level of the cavernous VAB, about halfway up to where the two-pound model capsule hung on a line 480 feet above the concrete floor. Holding a helicopter radio-control unit, he remotely changed the rotors' pitch and slowed the fall four times as the unpowered craft landed on a stack of foam.
"It's like running four separate tests in one drop," said Meehan, an engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
The intent is to give real spacecraft a soft landing with enough control that they could touch down anywhere in the world, whether it be a runway or the top of a building. In other words, wherever a helicopter could land, a spacecraft could land, too.
"You can land gently and you can land where you want, you don't have to land out in the ocean," Meehan said. "Compared to a parachute, you get a soft landing and you get a targeted landing."
The rotor concept also fits nicely with spent rocket boosters, Hagen said. Instead of throwing away the stage and its valuable engines, rotors could be built into the booster frame and unfurled as the stage descends to Earth. Just as with the capsule, the stage would be controllable the whole way down and would land softly to save the all-important engines. Read More
New Book ....
"Breaking the Mishap Chain: Human Factors Lessons Learned from Aerospace Accidents and Incidents in Research, Flight Test, and Development"
By Peter W. Merlin, Gregg A. Bendrick, and Dwight A. Holland
This volume contains a collection of case studies of mishaps involving experimental aircraft, aerospace vehicles, and spacecraft in which human factors played a significant role. In all cases the engineers involved, the leaders and managers, and the operators (i.e., pilots and astronauts) were supremely qualified and by all accounts superior performers. Such accidents and incidents rarely resulted from a single cause but were the outcome of a chain of events in which altering at least one element might have prevented disaster. As such, this work is most certainly not an anthology of blame. It is offered as a learning tool so that future organizations, programs, and projects may not be destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. These lessons were learned at high material and personal costs and should not be lost to the pages of history.
NASA's trio of mobile launcher platforms (MLP) are being revamped to serve a variety of next-generation launch vehicles. The huge steel structures, which acted as launch bases for the Apollo/Saturn program and every space shuttle mission, will serve as the platforms that launch the next American-made vehicles to space.Essentially a large steel box measuring 160 by 135 feet, a platform's surface features wide openings that align with a space-bound vehicle's engines and direct the blast into the flame trench below. Propellant lines and other utilities run throughout the structure. The two-story interior contains a variety of communications devices, control cabinets and other ground support equipment.
Throughout the past year, Kennedy Space Center's Ground Systems Development and Operations (GSDO) program has overseen the removal of much of the hardware used to support shuttle launches, making it available to the new 355-foot-tall mobile launcher in development for the agency's Space Launch System (SLS), a rocket that will launch NASA's Orion spacecraft and provide an entirely new capability for human exploration beyond Earth orbit.
"We're removing a lot of components -- cryogenic, pneumatic, mechanical, electrical, controls-type stuff for reuse on the new SLS mobile launcher as a cost savings," explained John Rigney, GSDO lead architect. "But at the same time, we wanted to keep the MLPs ready for any commercial entities that want to use them."
To accomplish this, the program carefully decided what hardware should be removed from the platforms in order to ensure two would remain available. Read More
Proton returns to flight with successful Intelsat launch
Oct 15 6:22 AM ET (1022 GMT) - 
Two months after a launch failure, the Proton rocket returned to flight Sunday with the successful launch of a communications satellite for Intelsat. The Proton M rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 4:37 am EDT (0837 GMT, 2:37 pm local time) Sunday carrying the Intelsat 23 satellite. The rocket's Breeze M upper stage released the satellite into a near-geosynchronous orbit nine and a half hours later. Intelsat 23, built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, weighed 2,700 kilograms at launch and carries a payload of C and Ku-band transponders. Intelsat will use the spacecraft to replace the aging Intelsat 707 spacecraft at 53 degrees west in GEO. The launch was the first for the Proton since the August 6 failure of a Russian government Proton launch carrying Russian and Indonesian satellites; a problem with the Breeze M upper stage placed the satellites into the wrong orbits. Related Links: Spaceflight Now article
Two months after a launch failure, the Proton rocket returned to flight Sunday with the successful launch of a communications satellite for Intelsat. The Proton M rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 4:37 am EDT (0837 GMT, 2:37 pm local time) Sunday carrying the Intelsat 23 satellite. The rocket's Breeze M upper stage released the satellite into a near-geosynchronous orbit nine and a half hours later. Intelsat 23, built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, weighed 2,700 kilograms at launch and carries a payload of C and Ku-band transponders. Intelsat will use the spacecraft to replace the aging Intelsat 707 spacecraft at 53 degrees west in GEO. The launch was the first for the Proton since the August 6 failure of a Russian government Proton launch carrying Russian and Indonesian satellites; a problem with the Breeze M upper stage placed the satellites into the wrong orbits. Related Links: Spaceflight Now article
