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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Mineralogical Trends Over the Clay-Sulfate Transition in Gale Crater from the Mars Science Laboratory CheMin Instrument

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover landed in Gale crater in 2012 to explore a sedimentary sequence in lower Aeolis Mons (informally known as Mount Sharp)that shows changes in mineralogy from orbital visible/near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy[1]. Sedimentary layers with spectral signatures of hydrated Mg sulfate overly layers with signatures of Fe/Mg smectite, a mineralogical stratigraphy that is seen in other ancient sedimentary rocks across Mars[e.g., 2-4]. Curiosity recently completed its campaign in a valley with a strong orbital signature of smectite, named Glen Torridon. Mineralogical measurements by the CheMin X-ray diffractometer(XRD), complemented by evolved gas analyses by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite, allowed the identification of abundant Fe3+-bearing dioctahedral smectite (i.e., nontronite) in Glen Torridon [5-6]. Curiosity left Glen Torridon in February 2021 and began traversing through a “clay-sulfate transition” zone on the way to the pediment and the sulfate unit[e.g., 7]. This clay-sulfate transition is defined in orbital reflectance spectroscopy as having a weak signature of hydrated Mg sulfate. Curiosity has drilled five outcrops over the traverse through the clay-sulfate transition and delivered the rock powders to CheMin for mineralogical analysis. Here, we report on the mineral assemblages of those five targets derived from CheMin XRD patterns and discuss mineralogical trends as the rover approaches the sulfate unit.

Mars↗
NASA NTRS2005

Afterbody Heating Predictions for a Mars Science Laboratory Entry Vehicle

The Mars Science Laboratory mission intends to deliver a large rover to the Martian surface within 10 km of its target site. One candidate entry vehicle aeroshell consists of a 3.75-m diameter, 70-deg sphere-cone forebody and a biconic afterbody similar to that of Viking. This paper presents computational fluid dynamics predictions of laminar afterbody heating rates for this configuration and a 2010 arrival at Mars. Computational solutions at flight conditions used an 8-species Mars gas model in chemical and thermal non-equilibrium. A grid resolution study examined the effects of mesh spacing on afterbody heating rates and resulted in grids used for heating predictions on a reference entry trajectory. Afterbody heating rate reaches its maximum value near 0.6 W/sq cm on the first windward afterbody cone at the time of peak freestream dynamic pressure. Predicted afterbody heating rates generally are below 3% of the forebody laminar nose cap heating rate throughout the design trajectory. The heating rates integrated over time provide total heat load during entry, which drives thermal protection material thickness.

Edquist, Karl T.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Development of a Tool to Recreate the Mars Science Laboratory Aerothermal Environment

The Mars Science Laboratory will enter the Martian atmosphere in 2012 with multiple char depth sensors and in-depth thermocouples in its heatshield. The aerothermal environment experienced by MSL may be computationally recreated using the data from the sensors and a material response program, such as the Fully Implicit Ablation and Thermal (FIAT) response program, through the matching of the char depth and thermocouple predictions of the material response program to the sensor data. A tool, CHanging Inputs from the Environment of FIAT (CHIEF), was developed to iteratively change different environmental conditions such that FIAT predictions match within certain criteria applied to an external data set. The computational environment is changed by iterating on the enthalpy, pressure, or heat transfer coefficient at certain times in the trajectory. CHIEF was initially compared against arc-jet test data from the development of the MSL heatshield and then against simulated sensor data derived from design trajectories for MSL. CHIEF was able to match char depth and in-depth thermocouple temperatures within the bounds placed upon it for these cases. Further refinement of CHIEF to compare multiple time points and assign convergence criteria may improve accuracy.

Beerman, A. F.↗
NASA NTRS2012

Mass Property Measurements of the Mars Science Laboratory Rover

The NASA/JPL Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft mass properties were measured on a spin balance table prior to launch. This paper discusses the requirements and issues encountered with the setup, qualification, and testing using the spin balance table, and the idiosyncrasies encountered with the test system. The final mass measurements were made in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF) at Kennedy Space Center on the fully assembled and fueled spacecraft. This set of environmental tests required that the control system for the spin balance machine be at a remote location, which posed additional challenges to the operation of the machine

rover↗
NASA NTRS2011

Mars Science Laboratory Boot Robustness Testing

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is one of the most complex spacecrafts in the history of mankind. Due to the nature of its complexity, a large number of flight software (FSW) requirements have been written for implementation. In practice, these requirements necessitate very complex and very precise flight software with no room for error. One of flight software's responsibilities is to be able to boot up and check the state of all devices on the spacecraft after the wake up process. This boot up and initialization is crucial to the mission success since any misbehavior of different devices needs to be handled through the flight software. I have created a test toolkit that allows the FSW team to exhaustively test the flight software under variety of different unexpected scenarios and validate that flight software can handle any situation after booting up. The test includes initializing different devices on spacecraft to different configurations and validate at the end of the flight software boot up that the flight software has initialized those devices to what they are suppose to be in that particular scenario.

mission phases↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Mineralogy of the Greenheugh Pediment and Underlying Murray Formation from the Mars Science Laboratory CheMin Instrument

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover has been investigating a sequence of ancient fluvio-lacustrine and eolian units in Gale crater. For much of the mission, Curiosity has studied the fluvio-lacustrine deposits of the Murray formation. Curiosity has also studied the ancient eolian Stimson formation in a few locations, which unconformably overlies the Murray fm. The Stimson formation was previously studied at the Naukluft and Emerson Plateaus and recently studied at the Greenheugh pediment capping unit. The Curiosity science team also investigated the Murray formation directly underlying the pediment. Curiosity drilled the “Edinburgh” target within the pediment capping unit and the “Hutton” target in the Murray formation near the contact with the pediment and delivered these materials to the CheMin X-ray diffractometer to characterize bulk mineralogy. Edinburgh contains abundant plagioclase, pyroxene, magnetite, olivine, and X-ray amorphous materials, with 10 wt.% smectite and minor sanidine. The mineralogy of the Stimson at Greenheugh is distinct from the mineralogy of the Stimson at Naukluft and Emerson because previous Stimson targets did not contain olivine or clay minerals. This suggests sediments in the pediment may have a different source and/or different aqueous alteration history than those from Naukluft and Emerson. Hutton contains abundant plagioclase, pyroxene, magnetite, and X-ray amorphous materials, 6 wt.% smectite, and minor cristobalite, opal-CT, sanidine, hematite, fluorapatite, and anhydrite. Other Murray targets in the surrounding Glen Torridon region that are farther from the pediment contact contain ~30 wt.% smectite and lack cristobalite and opal-CT. Cristobalite and/or opal-CT are present in a few other targets elsewhere along the traverse, including the top of the nearby Vera Rubin ridge and the top of the Pahrump Hills outcrop. Stimson overlies the Pahrump Hills, and, based on projections of the pediment slope, the Stimson may have overlain Vera Rubin ridge. The proximity of the low-smectite and cristobalite- and/or opal-CT-bearing outcrops to the contact between the Murray and Stimson suggests the contact provided a conduit for diagenetic fluids that altered clay minerals and formed crystalline and paracrystalline silica.

E. B. Rampe↗
NASA NTRS2018

Traction Control Design and Integration Onboard the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover experienced increasing wheel damage beginning in October 2013. While the wheels were designed to operate with considerable damage, the rate at which damage was occurring was unexpected and raised concerns regarding wheel lifetime. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has now developed and deployed new software on Curiosity that reduces the forces acting on the wheels. Our new Traction Control algorithm adapts each wheel’s speed to fit the terrain it drives over. It does not rely on any a priori knowledge of the terrain, and instead leverages the rover’s measured attitude rates and suspension angles, together with a rigid-body kinematics model, to estimate the real-time wheel-terrain contact angles and ideal, no-slip wheel angular rates. In addition, free-floating “wheelies” are detected and autonomously corrected. In this paper, we describe the algorithm, its ground testing campaign and associated challenges, and finally its validation and performance in flight. Ground test data demonstrates reductions in the forces acting on the wheels and validates the wheelie-damping capability. Secondary benefits in some terrains include a reduction in heading deviations while climbing rocks, with a reduction in slip in certain sandy terrains. Preliminary validation from flight data confirms these findings.

Maimone, Mark↗
NASA NTRS2003

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) : the US 2009 Mars rover mission

The Mars Science Laboratory mission is the 2009 United States Mars Exploration Program rover mission. The MSL Project expects to complete its pre-Phase A definition activity this fiscal year (FY2003), investigations in mid-March 2004, launch in 2009, arrive at Mars in 2010 during Northern hemisphere summer and then complete a full 687 day Mars year of surface exploration. MSL will assess the potential for habitability (past and present) of a carefully selected landing region on Mars by exploring for the chemical building blocks of life, and seeking to understand quantitatively the chemical and physical environment with which these components have interacted over the geologic history of the planet. Thus, MSL will advance substantially our understanding of the history of Mars and potentially, its capacity to sustain life.

planetary rovers↗
NASA NTRS2011

Mars Science Laboratory Entry Guidance Improvements for Mars 2018 (DRAFT)

In 2011, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) will be launched in a mission to deliver the largest and most capable rover to date to the surface of Mars. A follow on MSL-derived mission, referred to as Mars 2018, is planned for 2018. Mars 2018 goals include performance enhancements of the Entry, Descent and Landing over that of its predecessor MSL mission of 2011. This paper will discuss the main elements of the modified 2018 EDL preliminary design that will increase performance on the entry phase of the mission. In particular, these elements will increase the parachute deploy altitude to allow for more time margin during the subsequent descent and landing phases and reduce the delivery ellipse size at parachute deploy through modifications in the entry reference trajectory design, guidance trigger logic design, and the effect of additional navigation hardware.

Garcia-Llama, Eduardo↗
NASA NTRS2012

Mars Science Laboratory Engineering Cameras

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Rover, which launched to Mars in 2011, is equipped with a set of 12 engineering cameras. These cameras are build-to-print copies of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) cameras, which were sent to Mars in 2003. The engineering cameras weigh less than 300 grams each and use less than 3 W of power. Images returned from the engineering cameras are used to navigate the rover on the Martian surface, deploy the rover robotic arm, and ingest samples into the rover sample processing system. The navigation cameras (Navcams) are mounted to a pan/tilt mast and have a 45-degree square field of view (FOV) with a pixel scale of 0.82 mrad/pixel. The hazard avoidance cameras (Haz - cams) are body-mounted to the rover chassis in the front and rear of the vehicle and have a 124-degree square FOV with a pixel scale of 2.1 mrad/pixel. All of the cameras utilize a frame-transfer CCD (charge-coupled device) with a 1024x1024 imaging region and red/near IR bandpass filters centered at 650 nm. The MSL engineering cameras are grouped into two sets of six: one set of cameras is connected to rover computer A and the other set is connected to rover computer B. The MSL rover carries 8 Hazcams and 4 Navcams.

Maki, Justin N.↗
NASA NTRS2013

Mars Science Laboratory Interplanetary Navigation Performance

The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, carrying the Curiosity rover to Mars, hit the top of the Martian atmosphere just 200 meters from where it had been predicted more than six days earlier, and 2.6 million kilometers away. This un-expected level of accuracy was achieved by a combination of factors including: spacecraft performance, tracking data processing, dynamical modeling choices, and navigation filter setup. This paper will describe our best understanding of what were the factors that contributed to this excellent interplanetary trajectory prediction performance. The accurate interplanetary navigation contributed to the very precise landing performance, and to the overall success of the mission.

Martin-Mur, Tomas J.↗
NASA NTRS2013

Mars Science Laboratory Cruise Propulsion Maneuvering Operations

Mars Science Laboratory "Curiosity" is NASA's most recent mission to Mars, launched in November 2011, and landed in August 2012. It is a subcompact car-sized nuclear powered rover designed for a long duration mission, with an extensive suite of science instruments. Entry, descent and landing used a unique "skycrane" concept. This report describes the propulsive maneuvering operations during cruise from Earth to Mars, to control attitudes and to target the vehicle for entry. The propulsion subsystem, mission operations, and flight performance are discussed. All trajectory control maneuvers were well within accuracy requirements, and all turns and spin corrections were nominal.

Baker, Raymond S.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Mars Science Laboratory thermal control architecture

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission to land a large rover on Mars is being planned for launch in 2009. This paper will describe the basic architecture of the thermal control system, the challenges and the methods used to overcome them by the use of an innovative architecture to maximize the use of heritage from past projects while meeting the requirements for the design.

radioisotope↗
NASA NTRS2013

Accuracy Analysis and Validation of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Robotic Arm

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity Rover is currently exploring the surface of Mars with a suite of tools and instruments mounted to the end of a five degree-of-freedom robotic arm. To verify and meet a set of end-to-end system level accuracy requirements, a detailed positioning uncertainty model of the arm was developed and exercised over the arm operational workspace. Error sources at each link in the arm kinematic chain were estimated and their effects propagated to the tool frames.A rigorous test and measurement program was developed and implemented to collect data to characterize and calibrate the kinematic and stiffness parameters of the arm. Numerous absolute and relative accuracy and repeatability requirements were validated with a combination of analysis and test data extrapolated to the Mars gravity and thermal environment. Initial results of arm accuracy and repeatability on Mars demonstrate the effectiveness of the modeling and test program as the rover continues to explore the foothills of Mount Sharp.

rovers↗
NASA NTRS2018

Volatile Detections in Gale Crater Sediment and Sedimentary Rock: Results from the Mars Science Laboratory's Sample Analysis at Mars Instrument

This chapter discusses the detection of evolved gases from Gale crater sedimentary rock and eolian sediment by the Mars Science Laboratory rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. An overview is presented of the SAM instrument along with summary of key results from previous evolved gas analyses conducted at the Viking and Phoenix landing sites. The SAM measurements of evolved water, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, oxygen, and nitrous oxide from Gale crater samples are presented. The phases responsible for the evolved gas detections and the implications for their presence are then evaluated. The water deuterium to hydrogen (D/H) ratio is discussed in context of understanding the degree of water loss from Mars. In the introduction of this book, we briefly explored the history of the exploration of Mars, where we discussed a major shift in the scientific thinking and public perception of the nature of the surface of Mars as new missions explored the Red Planet. The first observations of the surface sparked speculations of Mars being inhabited by intelligent beings, inspiring fantasy, science fiction, and, of course, further exploration. The turn came when Mariner 4 returned images of a lunar-like landscape, a monotonous basaltic world with many impact craters but no water, and therefore no prospects for life to find a habitable niche. The authors of the chapters of this book show how different our understanding of Mars is today from the historical Mariner 4 perspective!

Sutter, Brad↗
NASA NTRS2011

Detection Limit of Smectite by Chemin IV Laboratory Instrument: Preliminary Implications for Chemin on the Mars Science Laboratory Mission

The CheMin instrument on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is an miniature X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) instrument capable of detecting the mineralogical and elemental compositions of rocks, outcrops and soils on the surface of Mars. CheMin uses a microfocus-source Co X-ray tube, a transmission sample cell, and an energy-discriminating X-ray sensitive CCD to produce simultaneous 2-D XRD patterns and energy-dispersive X-ray histograms from powdered samples. CRISM and OMEGA have identified the presence of phyllosilicates at several locations on Mars including the four candidate MSL landing sites. The objective of this study was to conduct preliminary studies to determine the CheMin detection limit of smectite in a smectite/olivine mixed mineral system.

Archilles, Cherie↗
NASA NTRS2011

Mars Science Laboratory Interplanetary Navigation Analysis

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a NASA rover mission that will be launched in late 2011 and will land on Mars in August of 2012. This paper describes the analyses performed to validate the navigation system for launch, interplanetary cruise, and approach. MSL will use guidance during its descent into Mars in order to minimize landing dispersions, and therefore will be able to use smaller landing zones that are closer to terrain of high scientific interest. This will require a more accurate delivery of the spacecraft to the atmospheric entry interface, and a late update of the state of the spacecraft at entry. During cruise and approach the spacecraft may perform up to six trajectory correction maneuvers (TCMs), to target to the desired landing site with the required flight path angle at entry. Approach orbit determination covariance analyses have been performed to evaluate the accuracy that can be achieved in delivering the spacecraft to the entry interface point, and to determine how accurately the state of the spacecraft can be predicted to initialize the guidance algorithm. In addition, a sensitivity analysis has been performed to evaluate which factors most contribute to the improvement or degradation of the navigation performance, for both entry flight path angle delivery and entry state knowledge.

orbit determination↗