welcome everyone to the innovation and
opportunity conference
i'm michelle munk the system capability
leader for entry descent and landing and
precision landing
within the stmd strategic framework
entry descent and landing and precision
landing fell within the land
thrust some of our main outcomes there
are to enable lunar and mars global
access
with 20-ton payloads to support human
missions
and to land payloads within 50 meters
accuracy
while also avoiding local landing
hazards
which can mean either natural terrain or
pre-deployed assets so within that land
thrust is where all of our content
resides
this graphic shows you some of the main
things that we're working on within
entry descent and landing and precision
landing
and this will sort of serve as the
outline for this presentation
so within the artemis missions of nasa
we are moving from lunar capabilities
forward and looking to mars capabilities
within the lunar capabilities two of our
main areas are
precision landing and hazard avoidance
and also plume surface interaction
how the rocket thrusters interact with
the surface of the moon
and may cause damage to the lander or
things around the lander as we move
towards mars
we're going to be looking at larger
hypersonic deceleration systems
as well as supersonic retropropulsion to
help get large payloads
down to the surface and i'll talk about
that a bit more later
and then across both of these
initiatives and capabilities
we need to keep our eyes focused on
improving our models within the edl
disciplines
and validating those models through the
return of data
from ground and flight testing for entry
descent and landing in particular
it's nearly impossible to test our
systems
end to end on earth and so we rely
heavily on simulations
and that's what this area is all about
to kind of put this into words for you
i've listed some of the main challenges
within this thrust area
that we can see coming for the next 20
years
so as i've explained we're trying to
land precisely on the moon
first with small commercially provided
landers
and then human scale by 2024 as part of
the artemis mission
some of our challenges are lightweight
cost-effective sensors for precision
landing
plume surface interaction modeling and
integrated simulations for
assessing the land of performance all
the way down to
the safe landing
some of the other challenges that we
have within the edl
community focus on science missions
a major thrust of this decade and into
the next decade is returning a sample
from mars for study by scientists on
earth in their laboratories
some of our challenges here are to land
over a metric ton of payload precisely
the next lander with a rover on it to
fetch the samples that mars 2020
is going to cache when it gets to the
surface in 2021
also we need to autonomously launch a
rocket from mars to a target orbit
and so there are aerodynamic issues
associated with that
as well as plume issues and then we're
returning the samples to earth
via a capsule with a very low
probability of failure
and this high reliability system is
really driving our modeling
challenges for the coming decade
in addition we have challenging science
missions
to venus ice giants ocean worlds and
outer planets
those encompass rugged terrain unknown
atmospheres
high entry speeds and the potential for
using aerocapture
for enabling lower mass
systems to get out to the outer planets
and establish orbit
we're trying to across the board lower
the cost of exploration
by improving launch stage return
using aerodynamic acceleration systems
we want to enable entry descent and
landing
and orbit insertion for small spacecraft
and then of course as our far term goal
we want to land humans on mars
this is going to be a huge challenge
because of the high mass of the payloads
we have to land
reliably and the precision landing of
course
at mars as well as at the moon
so next i'll go through each of the
challenge areas in a little more depth
first is precision landing and hazard
avoidance and as i showed earlier
that pertains to the moon and it also
goes forward to mars
for the status quo of precision landing
we come in and do a blind soft landing
and we've done this pretty successfully
many times at mars
and we did this at the moon with apollo
of course
but we're trying to improve the
capabilities here
and land precisely either next to
scientifically interesting or
areas where there are resources or next
to pre-deployed assets that we've put
there to support
missions and infrastructure so right now
we come in using an inertial measurement
unit and an altimeter
and sometimes a radar velocimeter
as mars science laboratory did and mars
2020 will do
and we get within a landing a lift
that's defined by
the uncertainties that we have when we
reach the surface
in our new paradigm of precision landing
and hazard avoidance
we add sensors and information into the
navigation state
such as terrain relative navigation
which will be done on mars 2020
hazard detection and hazard relative
navigation
and all this improves our velocimetry
and ranging so that we know
our position and velocity relative to
our target much better
and we can navigate
relative to known surface
features so all these things at the
bottom allow us to
shrink our landing ellipse as well as
avoid
local hazards such as craters slopes and
rocks and boulders next let me talk
about plume surface interaction this is
a main challenge for us as we
start to land landers more frequently on
the surface of the moon
and next to pre-deployed assets we're
really concerned in three main areas
understanding the plume physics
understanding the site alteration
physics or what we're doing to the
surface
as we come down either in cratering or
scouring
and then what are the ejected dynamics
where does all that regulus go
how big is it and what velocity is it
traveling
uh close to our neighbors so we are
looking into all of these areas as a
main focus
for our near-term lunar missions so let
me
turn my attention to mars for a second
landing 20 tons on mars is going to be a
major challenge for us
especially the entry descent and landing
if you see on this graphic down here the
entry vehicles
we've sent to mars to date have been
limited by the size of the launch shroud
that were
of the rocket that we want them in and
so they're restricted to about four and
a half meters in diameter
this limits the amount of hypersonic
deceleration we can do
because of the thin mars atmosphere with
the low masses that we've landed so far
up to one metric ton we're able to use
parachutes or
retropropulsion in the term of
in the in the way of skycrane or airbags
or
propulsion under the lander to slow us
down and land us softly enough
but for humans we'll need a larger
decelerator
to take more advantage of the thin mars
atmosphere
so we're talking about decelerators that
might be on the order of 16 to 18 meters
in diameter
and then we're going to have to turn on
our engines a lot sooner in the
atmosphere
because parachutes will be ineffective
at these large scales and for these
large masses
and so these large decelerators and the
use of supersonic retropropulsion
will mean that we have a new edl
paradigm
and new systems to certify for landing
humans
and the payloads which are going to be
up to 20 metric tons
diving in a little bit on the supersonic
retropropulsion part of this
we're looking to conduct ground testing
right now we're conducting some wind
tunnel testing
in the supersonic regime and we're doing
computational fluid dynamics analysis
to see how well our models can predict
what we see
in the testing and this will help
establish the aerodynamic databases
that will be used in our end-to-end
simulations of these vehicles
we found though that running our cfp
codes
on just cpus is not adequate
and won't allow us to do the number and
types of analysis
we'll need to do to really design these
vehicles
so we're going to have to convert our
codes to gpu-based and other
architectures
to get the throughput we really need to
get these systems
designed in time for human march mission
and then finally let me talk about the
bottom part of that
graphic chart i showed you about data
return and model improvement
we have a portfolio of projects within
stmd
called entry systems modeling and we are
tackling
all of the most challenging modeling
problems within
our system capability we have an
area focused on predictive materials
modeling
from the micro to macro scale
and looking at the robustness and
reliability of materials
as i mentioned from mars sample return
this is a major challenge
of high reliability we're looking at
guidance navigation and control
particularly for
hypersonic entry and then
all the way down through the descent
portion
of the trajectory so that end-to-end
performance simulation
and how to make that more efficient and
quantify the uncertainties
then we have aerosciences and this is
all about
understanding the aerodynamics of
vehicles and deceleration
systems such as parachutes
wake flows behind vehicles are a big
challenge for us
as well as stability characteristics so
we have a lot of testing and ground
facilities here
as well and then shock layer kinetics
and radiation
applies to really all the destinations
especially those who were coming in at
high entry velocities
what does that shock layer do what are
the constituent
products in that shockware and how do
they react with the materials on the
vehicle
so again lots of modeling and lots of
ground testing
so we have many ground test diagnostic
needs
in these areas as well as uncertainty
quantification
needs so last let me give you a snapshot
of some of the capability
gaps in simple terms that we've
established to address all of these
challenge areas
that i've talked about we have lunar
focus gaps
mars focus gaps science mission focused
gaps
and then i made an area called called
cross cutting which really
contains all the modeling gaps and
knowledge return
and testing platforms and capabilities
that we'll need
in the future i hope that this has been
informative for you
and shown you a little bit about the
entry distance
descent and landing and precision
landing capabilities challenges
thank you