Tag: Mars

It might look like the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity, but the vehicle seen above (in an artist’s impression) is in fact the Mars 2020 rover that is due to be launched on its way to the red planet in July of this year to arrive in early 2021.

Based on the chassis, body and power plant used by Curiosity, the 2020 rover is a very different vehicle that is tasked with very different roles. And now the 2020 rover has a name as well: Perseverance.

The name was selected following a US national competition in which K-12 students (kindergarten through to 17-19 years of age) were invited to suggest a name for the rover in essay form ( a practice NASA has taken with a number of missions to Mars, including the MER rovers Spirit and Opportunity and with Curiosity). From the initial entries received, NASA narrowed the choice down to nine possible names, with the public asked to cast their vote for their favourite – although the final decision on any name remained with NASA management. Those nine names were: Clarity, Courage, Endurance, Fortitude, Ingenuity, Perseverance, Promise, Tenacity and Vision, with each name identified by a single essay selected by NASA as best representing the goals of the pace agency.

The final choice of name, based on a combination of votes for the nine and an internal decision at NASA, was made by the agency’s associate administrator for science missions, Thomas Zurbuchen, who selected the name Perseverance based on an essay by 13-year-old Alexander Mather of Virginia. The formal announcement of the name was made by Zurbuchen at a special event at Alexander’s school on Friday, March 5th.

In making the announcement, Zurbuchen made note of the fact that Curiosity actually started its journey to Mars when Alexander and many of the other competition entrants were babies – or had yet to be born – citing their involvement in the competition as an example of the innate curiosity that draws us to want to explore the planets and stars around us. He also noted why he felt Perseverance was a particularly apt name for the new rover.

Yes, it’s curiosity that pulls us out there, but it’s perseverance that does not let us give up. There’s no exploration without perseverance.

Alex’s entry captured the spirit of exploration. Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it’s going to make amazing discoveries. It’s already surmounted many obstacles to get us to the point where we are today – processing for launch. Alex and his classmates are the Artemis generation, and they’re going to be taking the next steps into space that lead to Mars. That inspiring work will always require perseverance. We can’t wait to see that nameplate on Mars.

– Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science missions

As noted above, Perseverance may look like Curiosity, but it is a very different vehicle in terms of mission and capabilities.

In terms of overall science mission, Curiosity was tasked with identifying conditions and finding evidence that show that Mars may have once been capable of supporting life on its surface – a primary mission it actually achieved within three months of arriving on Mars. However, it was not actually capable of identifying whether any of that life – and we’re talking microbial life here – may still be present, or of what it might have been. Perseverance will take the next logical step in the process:  it will look for actual signs of past life, or biosignatures, capturing samples of rocks and soil that could be retrieved by future missions and returned to Earth for in-depth study.

To achieve this, Perseverance will carry a host of new science instruments and more advanced versions of some of the systems found on Curiosity, together with additional enhancements born of lessons learned in operating the MSL rover on Mars for the past 8 years.

This means that the rover is slightly larger than Curiosity somewhat heavier, massing just over a metric tonne compared to Curiosity’s 899 kg. Part of this extra weight is accounted for by the systems that allow it to obtain samples of sub-surface material and seal them in containers for possible later retrieval by sample return missions. These include a larger, more robust drilling system mounted on the “turret” at the end of the rover’s robot arm, which also in part accounts for the increase in weight of that unit from 30 kg to 45 kg.

Also, while Curiosity is equipped with 17 camera systems, with only four of them colour imagers. Perseverance has 23 cameras, the majority of which are colour imaging systems. These include a suite of 7 cameras that will provide unique views of the rover’s descent and landing, including views of the parachute deployment and views of it being winched to the ground by its hovering “skyhook” platform It also has a pair of “ears” – microphones that, if they work (NASA’s past attempts to operate microphones on Mars haven’t been successful), will allow us to hear the Red Planet for the first time.

Two further key differences between the two rovers are that Perseverance has a different set of wheels that are larger and designed to better handle Martian terrain, which has taken its toll on Curiosity’s six wheels. Perseverance’s steering  has been updated to give it better manoeuvring capabilities, while the second major difference is that Perseverance has a massively updated self-driving capability. These updates mean that Perseverance will be able to map its route far better than Curiosity, calculating route options five times faster than the older rover. This will eventually seen the time required to map and plan each stage in the rover’s drive route reduced from around a day to about 5 hours. In turn, this means that while Perseverance will travel at the same speed as Curiosity, it will be able to cover more ground in the same time periods, and gather more samples over the course of its prime mission.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: Mars rovers, molecules & 1.8 billion pixels” →

On Thursday, November 28th, 2019, European Space Agency (ESA) members agreed to a record €14.4 billion, promising to maintain Europe’s place at the top table alongside NASA and China. The four largest contributors to the budget are Germany (€3.3 billion); France (€2.7 billion), Italy (€2.3 billion) and the United Kingdom (€1.7 billion – ESA is not an EU organisation, so the UK’s involvement will remain unchanged when / if Brexit occurs, although EU funding of UK science and technology projects will be impacted).

The funding will allow ESA to move forward on a number of fronts in space exploration and technology development, including:

• The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) – the first space-based gravitational wave observatory, comprising three spacecraft placed in a triangular formation 2.5 million km apart and following the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. LISA will launch in the early 2030s.
• Transitioning ESA to the next generation of launchers: Ariane 6 and Vega-C.
• Continued support of the International Space Station, including continued participation in crew missions.
• Direct involvement in NASA’s Artemis lunar programme, including technology for the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G) and crewed missions.
• A joint Mars sample-return mission with NASA.
• Development of flexible satellite systems integrated with 5G networks, as well as next-generation optical technology for a fibre-like ‘network in the sky.’
• The development of a European reusable space vehicle: Space RIDER.

Space RIDER (Reusable Integrated Demonstrator for Europe Return) is a project I first wrote about in 2015, when ESA flew the European Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV). An uncrewed vehicle weighing just under 2 tonnes, it had the primary objective to research the re-entry and flight characteristics of a lifting body type of vehicle and test the re-entry shielding technologies for such a vehicle.

IXV paved the way for the initial development for Space RIDER, which will be an uncrewed cargo vehicle designed to be launched by the Vega rocket and capable of carrying up to 800 Kg of payload into orbit. All Space RIDER vehicles will be able to carry out around 5 flights apiece, reducing the overall cost of placing payloads into orbit. Following re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, the vehicle will descend to Earth under a parasail, allowing it to glide to a nominated landing zone.

As well as being suitable for launching space payloads into orbit, Space RIDER will itself be a technology development vehicle for possible larger reusable vehicles using similar lifting body technology.

Space RIDER will largely be developed by Italy and the first flight is due to take place in 2022.

Happy Anniversary, InSight

On Monday, November 26th, 2018, NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander, built with international cooperation, arrived on the surface of Mars. The focus of the mission is to probe the Red Planet’s interior – its crust, mantle and core in order to answer key questions about the early formation of the rocky planets in our inner solar system – Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars – more than 4 billion years ago.

Since that landing, the year has been an eventful one for InSight, the lander’s super-sensitive seismometer suite has detected more than 150 vibration events to date, about two dozen of which are confirmed marsquakes. However, and I’ve I’ve reported a number of times in these pages, InSight’s other primary science instrument, a burrowing heat probe called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP³), has had tougher time.

The self-propelled “mole” probe designed to burrow down into the Martian sub-surface having been stuck for most of the year after only penetrating a few centimetres into the ground. Those operations only resumed in October 2019, and were short-lived after the probe inexplicably “bounced” its way almost completely out of the hole it had burrowed, leaving scientists and engineers still trying to work out what happened.

The solar-powered InSight is scheduled to operate for at least two Earth years.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: budgets, space planes, landers, oxygen and dust” →

On Tuesday, March 26th, Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to accelerate plans to send humans back to the Moon, moving the planned first landing from 2028 to 2024. That presents an incredibly short time frame for the US space agency, given all that needs to be done.

Rather than going to the Moon directly – as with Apollo in the 1960 through 1972  – NASA’s plans for a return to the Moon require the establishment of an orbital facility around the Moon – the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway – plus the development of the vehicle to get to and from it (the Orion MPCV), and a vehicle to get from it to the surface of the Moon and back. This, coupled with trying to develop a completely new and complex launch vehicle – the Space Launch System – capable of putting all this hardware where it needs to be, means NASA has a huge mountain to climb to achieve their goal and maintain things like operating the International Space Station – and will need a lot of funding to achieve it, something which doesn’t as yet seem to be forthcoming.

As it is, the SLS, as recently noted in these pages, has yet to fly, and has seen a number of programmatic changes in order to try to meet a time frame that was already tight before Pence give his March directive. Following the announcement of the shift to a 2024 landing, NASA actually wavered over using it, mulling the idea of using a commercial launch system instead (the Delta IV Heavy is capable of launching the Orion, for example) before deciding they would push to use SLS. However, in doing to, the agency then suggested they could cut the “green run” test of the SLS first stage, potentially shaving 6 months from the development / flight schedule for the first launch.

Viewed as a crucial pre-flight test, the “green run” would see the completed first stage shipped from the Michoud Assembly Facility, Louisiana, to the Stennis Space Centre, Mississippi, where its four RS-25 engines would be fired for eight minutes, simulating the actual flight of the vehicle prior to upper stage separation. It has been regarded as a crucial test, intended expose the untried first stage to the full force of a simulated launch to gather vital data on the stage performance and to see how the entire assembly stands up the rigours of launch and what might need to be re-worked, etc. The suggestion was that NASA skip it in favour of individual tests of the four RS-25 motors – potentially shaving 6 months off the SLS development schedule.

But on April 25th, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) met to discuss this idea and strongly advised NASA not to avoid the “green run”.

There is no other test approach that will gather the critical full-scale integrated propulsion system operational data required to ensure safe operations. Shorter-duration engine firings at the launch pad will not achieve an understanding of the operational margins, and could result in severe consequences. I cannot emphasize more strongly that we advise NASA to retain this test … as NASA evaluates different paths to potentially accelerate the EM-1 flight, it cannot lose sight that the ultimate objective of that flight is to mitigate risk and provide a clear understanding of the risk posture prior to the first crew flight.

– Patricia Sanders, ASAP Chair

NASA has yet to formally respond to the recommendation, but it would seem unlikely they’d go against the ASAP. This potentially means that SLS will be unlikely to make its first uncrewed flight – Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1) in 2020, and the ripples may spread further, affecting the time line for the first crewed test of SLS and Orion, and on onwards towards affecting the 2024 goal.

Another issue is that of how NASA will actually get to and from the Moon’s surface. Originally, the agency planned a “two-step” approach to lunar lander development: issue a procurement notice for the development of a lunar lander ascent vehicle, designed to lift a crew off of the Moon tat the end of their say, and a second notice for the transfer and descent stages of the vehicle – presumably allowing different companies to work on the various elements.

However, on April 26th, NASA altered the procurement notice to seek proposals for a fully integrated lander vehicle. The idea is to speed-up the lander’s design and development and potentially reduce issues of integration of elements built by different contractors.

Certainly, one company that could benefit from this switch is Lockheed Martin, prime contractors for the Orion vehicle, and potential major supplier of the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G), the lunar space station seen as a pre-requisite to any crewed landings on the Moon. They first  announced their concept for a fully integrated lunar lander in October 2018, and on April 10th, 2019, the company outlined changes to both their lunar lunar and LOP-G designs in response to the push for s 2024 landing.

Under their October 2018 plans for a lunar lander, Lockheed Martin proposed building a single, fully reusable vehicle, a 62 tonne (when fully fuelled) behemoth capable of taking 3 or 4 astronauts and a tonne of equipment to / from the lunar surface (by comparison, the Apollo lunar module weighed 16.4 tonnes fully fuelled).

This giant vehicle would support stays of up to 14 or 15 days on the lunar surface, prior to the entire vehicle returning to the LOP-G where the crew would use the Orion to fly back to Earth, while the lander refuelled itself from supplies shipped to the LOP-G and stored there.

However, such a vehicle presupposes the availability of a fully operational LOP-G, and there is simply no way such a facility could be designed, built, launched, assembled in lunar orbit and tested ready for operational use by 2024. This being the case, Lockheed Martin is now proposing a semi-reusable 2-stage lunar lander modelled along the same lines as the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module – although again, much larger.

In the revised design, the new lander would comprise a large descent and landing stage, only carrying sufficient fuel to get the complete vehicle onto the surface of the Moon and carrying various equipment lockers and bins. This would be topped by a combined command / ascent module that will would employ a modified version of the European-built Orion Service Module, complete with main motor and power generation systems, as its lower half. This would serve to propel the module and crew back up to the LOP-G at the end of a surface mission. The command section at the top of the module would include elements from the Orion vehicle for flight control, a dedicate lunar surface command deck and the necessary living space for a crew of around 3 for 14-15 days on the Moon.

Making the lander semi-re-usable means the Lockheed Martin do not need a fully operational LOP-G to support the fully re-usable version of their lander. Instead, a “bare necessities” LOP-G could be placed in orbit around the Moon  – little more than a propulsion / power module and a docking adaptor – in order for lunar missions to commence. These could then proceed whilst the LOP-G is itself built-out to accommodate more advanced missions.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: Moon, Mars, and abort systems” →