The New Shepard booster lands after the vehicle's flight on Dec. 11, 2019. Credits: Blue Origin
While there won’t be humans on Blue Origin’s 17th New Shepard mission, the
fully reusable launch vehicle will carry technologies from NASA, industry, and
academia aboard. The agency’s Flight Opportunities program supports
six payload flight tests, which are slated for lift off no earlier than Aug. 26
from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas.
For some innovations, this is just one of several tests supported by NASA
on different flight vehicles. Iterative flight testing helps quickly ready
technologies that could eventually support deep space exploration.
NASA’s SPLICE descent
and landing computer (foreground) and navigation Doppler lidar engineering test
unit (background) undergo preparations for a suborbital flight test. Credits:
Blue Origin
Precision Landing Technologies for Safe Touchdown
One of the demonstrations taking flight is a precision landing
technology suite developed by NASA researchers under the
Safe and Precise Landing Integrated Capabilities
Evolution (SPLICE) project. SPLICE is
part of STMD’s Game Changing Development program.
The SPLICE navigation system consists of
a high-performance computer, lasers, a camera, and other sensors. It
is designed to help a lander determine its precise
location and velocity as it travels toward the surface of a
planetary body. Several SPLICE components flew aboard New Shepard in October 2020 as part of the
Tipping Point contract with Blue Origin.
Supplementing data from the first SPLICE flight test, the upcoming
flight will further mature the NASA-developed technologies for future lunar
demonstrations. In particular, SPLICE’s navigation Doppler
lidar developed
at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is slated for
future flights on two commercial robotic lunar landers through the agency’s Commercial
Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
This diagram illustrates Carthage College’s propellant mass gauging payload, which includes three propellant tanks, cameras, and an electronics deck. Credits: Carthage College
Propellant Gauging Innovation
The flight is also an important next step for principal investigator Dr.
Kevin Crosby and his team from Carthage College. They’ll build on
previous parabolic flight
campaigns to advance a propellant mass gauging technology.
Carthage researchers aim to increase the accuracy of measuring propellant
levels in space – a mission-critical need, especially during dynamic events
such as engine burns and in the latter stages of a mission. The flight will
enable the team to evaluate new propellant gauging methods that support the
mass measurement of fluid under varying pressures.
“We’ve successfully proven that our technology is superior to the
current state of the art in both lab tests and on parabolic flights facilitated
by Flight Opportunities,” said Crosby. “On the upcoming New Shepard flight,
we’re going to attempt to prove that we can achieve that same performance
during a simulation of on-orbit refueling – and we are much more confident we
will achieve our objectives because of our parabolic flight experience.”
Principal investigator Dr. Annie Meier and engineers Malay Shah and Jaime Toro assemble the flight hardware for NASA’s OSCAR trash-to-gas conversion system on Oct. 10, 2019, at Kennedy’s Space Station Processing Facility. Credits: NASA
Space-Based Trash Recycling Method
Early-career researchers from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida will
test spaceflight trash-to-gas conversion capabilities via the Orbital
Syngas/Commodity Augmentation Reactor (OSCAR).
OSCAR is designed to convert trash and metabolic waste into
a blend of useful gases, including carbon dioxide, water vapor,
and methane. Astronauts could vent the generated gas into space
or use it as building blocks for products such
as water, oxygen, or even spacecraft propellants.
This recycling technology could reduce the volume and mass of
trash on long-duration missions, minimize launch mass from Earth, and
promote sustainable human space exploration.
OSCAR’s first suborbital flight test gave the research
team data about how microgravity affects the thermal processes that
allow waste products to burn in the reactor. The upcoming rocket
flight will provide additional microgravity data
to help validate OSCAR’s conversion technologies.
Other Technologies Aboard
·
Large-scale liquid acquisition device:
Southwest Research Institute investigators will continue testing their device
designed to leverage surface tension for more efficient cryogenic transfer
operations.
·
Exploring electrostatic regolith interactions: This
University of Central Florida payload is designed to characterize regolith’s
electrostatic dynamics and behavior for enhanced safety on lunar missions.
·
Suborbital biological imaging: Building on 20 years of microgravity
plant research, University of Florida investigators are working to enable
autonomous, high-resolution image data collection for a variety of biological
payloads during transitions in gravity levels.
About Flight
Opportunities
The Flight Opportunities program is funded by STMD at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington and managed at NASA Armstrong. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley manages the solicitation and evaluation of technologies to be tested and demonstrated on commercial flight vehicles.
By Elizabeth DiVito
NASA’s
Flight Opportunities Program
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/features/nasa-tech-testing-on-blue-origin-shepard.html
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