A drone has completed simulated lunar descent and landing maneuvers while carrying a navigation system NASA is developing to help spacecraft find safer places to touch down. The flight was an engineering demonstration: it tested the Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) payload aboard an Alta-X drone, not a landing by a spacecraft on the Moon.
NASA reported that the drone flew the maneuvers on Aug. 27 at Rogers Dry Lake, near the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. During the tests, SPLICE mapped terrain and assessed possible landing areas. The system generates high-resolution digital elevation maps using light-detection and sensor data. If it judges the targeted area unsafe, it can divert the drone to a safer location, the report said.
The challenge for a landing system is to guide a vehicle toward a selected site while accounting for hazards in the terrain. NASA says SPLICE is designed to help spacecraft land precisely and detect and avoid potential hazards, a capability it considers critical for missions to the Moon and Mars. The agency’s report does not provide measurements of the system’s mapping accuracy or its success in avoiding particular hazards, so the drone test should be understood as a step in technology development rather than proof of performance in a space landing.
Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center developed the payload. Specialists at NASA Armstrong worked with them to integrate, test and fly it on the drone. NASA said tests in June and July checked communication between the payload and aircraft, as well as data handling, telemetry, and command-and-control performance. Those checks were intended to prepare for a full-scale test at Voyager Technologies in Mojave, California, which the report said was planned for later in November.
The agency described the flight test as raising SPLICE’s technology readiness for possible integration into future robotic and crewed lunar flights. NASA project manager Davis Adams also said the guidance and navigation systems could apply to descent and landing on Earth, the Moon and Mars. These are stated areas of potential application; the report does not describe a completed lunar or Martian landing using SPLICE.
NASA has worked with commercial lunar-lander providers on iterations of the system for their platforms. The report says some landers planned for upcoming Moon Base missions draw on data collected by NASA through development of systems such as SPLICE. It also says companies are evaluating the system’s navigation capabilities for precision landing and possible future use in autonomous surface mobility. Those evaluations do not establish that the system is already deployed across those missions.
The drone work builds on earlier flight testing supported by NASA’s Flight Opportunities project. NASA reported that tests in 2019 included a descent altitude and landing trajectory similar to what is expected on a lunar mission, and that two NASA-developed precision-landing sensor systems were demonstrated in 2020. Together, these steps show a staged effort to advance landing technology before its potential use in missions beyond Earth.
<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/armstrong/nasa-navigation-experiment-shows-promise-for-planetary-landings/">Source: NASA’s report on the SPLICE flight test</a>