For the second time in less than a year, NASA technology designed to collect data on the interaction between a lunar lander’s rocket plume and the lunar surface has been extended to Earth’s closest celestial neighbor for the benefit of humanity. Ready to travel.
Developed at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) is an array of cameras placed around the base of the lunar lander during and after descent and touchdown. To collect images. Using a technique called stereophotogrammetry, Langley researchers will use overlapping images from Firefly’s Blue Ghost – SCALPSS 1.1 version of SCALPSS – to create a 3D view of the surface. An earlier version, SCALPSS 1.0, was aboard Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft that landed on the moon last February. Due to mission contingencies arising during landing, SCALPSS 1.0 was unable to collect plume-surface interaction imagery. However, the team was able to transit and maneuver the payload to the lunar surface after landing, giving them confidence in the 1.1’s hardware.
The SCALPSS 1.1 payload has two additional cameras – six total, compared to four on SCALPSS 1.0 – and begins taking images at higher altitudes, before the expected onset of plume-surface interaction, to provide more accurate progress. will After the competition.
These images of the lunar surface won’t just be a technological innovation. As trips to the moon increase and the number of payloads approaching each other increases, scientists and engineers need to be able to accurately predict the impact of landings.
How much will the surface change? As a lander descends, what happens to the lunar soil, or regolith, that is ejected? With limited data collected during descent and landing to date, SCALPSS will be the first dedicated instrument to measure the effects of plume-surface interactions on the Moon in real time and help answer these questions. .
“If we’re putting things – landers, habitats, etc. – close together, we’re sandblasting the thing next to us, so that it meets the protection requirements of other assets on the surface, which can increase mass, and that mass ripples through the architecture,” said Michel Munk, principal investigator of SCALPSS and acting chief architect of NASA’s Space Technology Mission. Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “It’s all part of an integrated engineering problem.”
Under the Artemis mission, the agency’s current lunar exploration approach, NASA is collaborating with commercial and international partners to establish the first long-term presence on the Moon. Delivering the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, which includes more than 200 pounds of NASA science experiments and technology demonstrations, SCALPSS 1.1 will begin imaging in advance of the lander’s plume landing. Begins interacting with the surface until completion.
The final images will be collected on a small onboard data storage unit before being sent to the lander for downlink back to Earth. The team will likely need at least two months.
Process images, verify data, and generate 3D digital elevation maps of the surface. The expected lander-induced erosion they reveal probably won’t be very deep—not this time, anyway.
“Even if you look at old Apollo photos — and the Apollo crew landers were bigger than these new robotic landers — you have to look really close to see where the erosion happened,” said Rob Maddock, SCALPSS. Project Manager at Langley. “We’re expecting something on the order of centimeters deep — maybe an inch. It really depends on the landing site and how deep the regolith is and where the bedrock is.”
But it’s an opportunity for researchers to see how well SCALPSS will work as the U.S. advances a human landing system as part of NASA’s plans to further explore the lunar surface.
“They’ll be even bigger than Apollo. They’re big engines, and they can potentially dig good-sized holes,” Maddock said. “So that’s what we’re doing. We’re collecting data that we can use to validate models that are predicting what will happen.
The SCALPSS 1.1 project is funded by the Space Technology Mission Directorate’s Game-Changing Development Program.
NASA is working with several U.S. companies to bring science and technology to the lunar surface under the CLPS initiative. Through this opportunity, various companies from a select group of vendors bid to deliver payloads for NASA, including payload integration and operations, from Earth launch and landing on the lunar surface.