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Overview of NASA Gateway Lunar Dust Mitigation and Contamination Modeling and Analysis

The planned NASA Artemis campaign has several lunar surface missions in which the NASA Gateway is the waypoint between lunar orbit and the lunar surface for Human Lander System (HLS). Each of these missions is an opportunity for lunar dust to be introduced into the Gateway environment, post surface mission, potentially causing end of life (EOL) performance degradation due to lunar dust contamination of sensitive hardware and systems on the exterior of Gateway and Visiting Vehicles. The Gateway Systems Engineering and Integration (SE&I) and Induced Environments teams are addressing the challenge of lunar dust with a two-pronged approach. Characterization of the lunar dust induced environment around Gateway and contamination risk is accomplished with a comprehensive physics-based framework, the Gateway On-orbit Lunar Dust Modeling and Analysis Program (GOLDMAP), which is currently in development. Analysis results from GOLDMAP define Gateway-level induced environments requirements and are flowed to elements and subsystems. In parallel, a dust mitigation strategy is being developed with a focus on lunar dust protection, dust mitigation technologies, mitigation and testing guidance, and cross-program coordination and is informed by outputs from GOLDMAP analyses. Activities supporting both components include hardware susceptibility assessments and testing, and scientific experiments on lunar regolith.

Gateway↗

Gateway Induced Environments Overview

Gateway will be a long duration space station orbiting the Moon in support of NASA’s Artemis campaign. Over its lifetime, Gateway will be exposed to a variety of induced environments, including materials outgassing, chemical and electric thruster plumes, vacuum vents, and lunar dust transport (from the Human Lander System, HLS). Induced Environments can impact vehicle performance and mission success. The multidisciplinary Gateway Induced Environments Team has developed requirements and methodologies to address the complex challenge of integrating multiple elements and visiting vehicles while maintaining the Gateway induced environments within prescribed limits. The Gateway Induced Environments requirements are summarized along with the integration / verification process and preliminary system analysis results.

Gateway↗

Gateway Induced Environments Overview

Gateway will be a long duration space station orbiting the Moon in support of NASA’s Artemis campaign. Over its lifetime, Gateway will be exposed to a variety of induced environments, including materials outgassing, chemical and electric thruster plumes, vacuum vents, and lunar dust transport (from the Human Lander System, HLS). Induced Environments can impact vehicle performance and mission success. The multidisciplinary Gateway Induced Environments Team has developed requirements and methodologies to address the complex challenge of integrating multiple elements and visiting vehicles while maintaining the Gateway induced environments within prescribed limits. The Gateway Induced Environments requirements are summarized along with the integration / verification process and preliminary system analysis results.

Gateway↗

Durability of Geopolymer Lunar Concrete From Exposure in Low Earth Orbit

Constructing infrastructure autonomously with concrete materials through additive manufacturing techniques on the lunar surface is a feasible option. The environmental and exposure conditions that the lunar concrete material will undergo are more extreme than on Earth and studying the durability aspect is important to scaling up the implementation of such materials. Conditions that the material will be exposed to include a hard vacuum, extreme temperatures, and ultraviolet radiation. To that end, geopolymer lunar concrete and ordinary portland cement paste samples were placed outside the International Space Station (ISS) for an approximate six-month exposure period. The samples were part of the 15th Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE-15) mission and were mounted in the zenith direction. After the exposure time, results for the samples exhibited discoloration, microstructural cracking, and an overall reduction in volume compared to data collected beforehand. The intent of this work was to characterize geopolymer lunar concrete durability in terms of the lunar environmental conditions in LEO and potential exposure scenarios from a simulated subscale rocket engine plume. To understand the durability of samples in space environment conditions, samples were placed outside the International Space Station (ISS) for a six-month period on the MISSE-FF. Additionally, to test the material's durability if implemented for use in a landing pad, samples were created for an experiment that mimics the exposure of the material to a rocket engine associated with the human lander system. This work is essential to progressing and scaling up geopolymer lunar concrete for implementation as the material's durability is assessed.

Peter J Collins↗

Handheld Universal Lunar Camera

The Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC) project is a proposed project to fly a commercial off the Shelf (COTS) unit to be used in all aspects of the Artemis Program. This will include use on Orion, Gateway, Human Lander, and on EVA operations at all locations, which will include lunar surface use. The HULC is planned to be COTS with minimal modification; extensive testing must be done to ensure usability in lunar environments.

Jacob Trull↗

System Analysis Applied to Autonomy: Application to Human-Rated Lunar/Mars Landers

System analysis is an essential technical discipline for the modern design of spacecraft and their associated missions. Specifically, system analysis is a powerful aid in identifying and prioritizing the required technologies needed for mission and/or vehicle development efforts. Maturation of intelligent systems technologies, and their incorporation into spacecraft systems, are dictating the development of new analysis tools, and incorporation of such tools into existing system analysis methodologies, in order to fully capture the trade-offs of autonomy on vehicle and mission success. A "system analysis of autonomy" methodology will be outlined and applied to a set of notional human-rated lunar/Mars lander missions toward answering these questions: 1. what is the optimum level of vehicle autonomy and intelligence required? and 2. what are the specific attributes of an autonomous system implementation essential for a given surface lander mission/application in order to maximize mission success? Future human-rated lunar/Mars landers, though nominally under the control of their crew, will, nonetheless, be highly automated systems. These automated systems will range from mission/flight control functions, to vehicle health monitoring and prognostication, to life-support and other "housekeeping" functions. The optimum degree of autonomy afforded to these spacecraft systems/functions has profound implications from an exploration system architecture standpoint.

Young, Larry A.↗

An Altair Overview: Designing a Lunar Lander for 21st Century Human Space Exploration

Altair, the lunar lander element of NASA's Constellation program, was conducted in a different design environment than many other NASA projects of similar scope. Because of this relatively unique approach, there are a number of significant success stories that should be considered during the development of any future lunar landers or human spacecraft. This paper is divided into two separate themes; the first is the approach used during the conceptual design studies, including the systematic analysis cycles and the decision making process associated with each: and the second is a summary of the resulting lessons learned that were compiled after looking back at the lifetime of the Project. Altair was terminated before entering Phase B of its design, and was often criticized for being a very heavy and very large vehicle. While there was specific rationale for all of the decisions that led up to that configuration, future design cycles were specifically planned to re-address the mass challenge. Had the project continued, the deliberate, stepwise design process would have converged on an optimized lander design that balanced mass, risk, cost and capabilities. Some of the specific items that will be addressed in this paper include project development strategy, organizational approach and team dynamics, risk-informed design process, mission architecture constraints, mission key driving requirements, model-based systems engineering process, configuration studies, contingency considerations, subsystem overviews and key trade studies. The paper will conclude with a summary of the lessons identified during the Altair project and make suggestions for application to future studies.

Brown, Kendall K.↗

Closed-Loop Simulations of Human-Scale Mars Lander Descent Trajectories on Frontier

A computational campaign was performed to run high-fidelity, free-flight simulations of a human-scale Mars lander concept vehicle decelerating under retropropulsion through the Martian atmosphere with closed-loop flight control. A novel approach is used to couple computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software with a mature flight mechanics package, where the two applications communicate in real-time across two geographically-dispersed computational facilities. The CFD is performed on the Frontier exascale system located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the flight mechanics are executed on a system located at NASA Langley Research Center. In the current campaign, CFD is performed using finite-rate chemistry to account for the interactions between the LOXCH 4 engines and the CO 2 Martian atmosphere. A simulation of a closed-loop main engine throttling and RCS actuation is presented, demonstrating that the vehicle and model are able to maintain stability in a long-duration CFD-in-the-loop flight simulation. Comparisons are made to a reduced order model ignoring aero-propulsive interactions.

CFD↗

How the Allocation of Lander Functions Impacts Human Lunar Exploration Architecture Propellant Demands

As NASA looks to the moon as a proving ground for the technologies required to conduct the first human exploration campaign of Mars, this study assesses the potential propellant demands that a sustained human lunar presence would require. In particular, this study evaluates how the allocation and distribution of vehicle functions to a different number of vehicles can impact the propellant required to conduct a human lunar exploration mission. Four different transportation architectures for human lunar exploration and three different refueling assumptions were defined. The impact on the propellant required for a mission was assessed for all architectures and refueling assumptions for ranges of crew payload mass, vehicle inert mass fraction, and a sensitivity to the mission maneuver velocity magnitudes. The results of this analysis show that aggregating vehicle functions to a single-stage lander vehicle can have a positive impact on the architecture's level of vehicle reusability and that an increase in the number of refueling opportunities reduces the mass of the vehicles and of the propellant required per mission.

Matteo A. Clark↗

Analysis of Alternative Architectures for Cargo Lunar Landers

NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) program has been working with commercial partners to develop human-class lunar landers to return the first American woman and next American man to the lunar surface in the mid 2020’s. In an effort to expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit, NASA’s Artemis program aims to facilitate a sustainable, long-term human presence in cis-lunar space. A component of this will require significant infrastructure to be delivered to the lunar surface. Delivering this infrastructure will require a significant lander capability that has yet to be developed. A thorough understanding of cargo lunar lander architectures is required such that select alternatives can be identified that best support the Artemis program’s objective of sustainability. The goal of this study is to aid NASA and its partners in the understanding of the cargo lunar lander trades space, as well as identify potential robust alternatives. The results will support NASA as it moves forward with key activities such as requirements formulation, agency strategic planning, and potential cargo lunar lander procurements. The study builds off of recent work performed by the Human Landing System program’s Architecture and Systems Analysis group to encompass a broad trade space of cargo lunar lander architecture alternatives. The current trade space as depicted by the morphological matrix and mission graph in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, respectively, includes key alternative options that have become highly relevant due to current HLS activities and include on-orbit refueling, active cryogenic fluid management, Earth orbit aggregation, and global lunar access. The authors believe that there is also a statistically relevant impact of lander-payload configuration on the primary structure of the vehicle that could greatly impact alternative selection. Because of this, several conceptual lander-payload configurations will be evaluated to determine the level of impact. The current set of conceptual configurations are shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. To aid the conceptual evaluation of these configurations, a catalogue of notional payloads has been developed that represent a wide range of masses and volumes that are expected to be delivered in support of a sustained human lunar presence, including pressurized and unpressurized rovers, surface habitats, power systems, and other support infrastructure. In order to execute this study in a timely fashion, a similar approach to that utilized in a similar 2019 study focused on 2024 human lunar sorties will be employed [1]. The team utilized a novel architecture synthesis framework currently being developed by NASA/MSFC to evaluate over 600,000 lunar lander architectures over a two month time frame [2]. From this large data set, varying ground rules and assumptions were applied as filters to explore the trade space to identify alternatives which exhibited robustness, as measured by launch vehicle payload margin, to absorb the natural growth that occurs during design maturation. The set of Earth-Moon system Delta-Vs assumed from the 2019 study, shown in Fig. 5, will be repurposed to accelerate model formulation for this effort. Additionally, current efforts in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Aerospace System Design Lab will be integrated to provide probabilistic modeling of the cargo lunar lander architectures to aid in identifying robust design alternatives [3]. The approach will help minimize potential impacts due to large levels of uncertainty inherent to pre phase-A conceptual design. By leveraging these past and present studies and partnerships, a highly detailed set of data can be generated in a short time period to aid NASA in the coming years to support the goal of a sustained human lunar presence.

Architectures↗

Plume-Surface Interaction Modeling for a Human-Scale Mars Lander

Landing vehicles impart thermal and strain energy onto the landing site from the retrorocket exhaust. Depending on the design of the vehicle, the energy may be great enough to cause spallation at the landing site. This damage may be minor and repairable in the case of landing on a terrestrial landing pad. For missions to other planetary bodies, the spallation may cause the landing site to become uneven and unstable, as well as damage. Simulating this phenomenon in a laboratory or computationally would require a significant amount of time and other resources. These resources typically are not available during the design phase of a mission. This paper presents a computationally-efficient model for the temperature and stress distributions that arise during landing. These quantities can be used along with existing failure criteria, such as the Hoek-Brown criterion for geological materials, to quickly determine whether spallation will occur. The stress and temperature distributions at the landing site are inherently 3D; however, there is a plane of symmetry and in that plane the distributions are 2D. Both quantities are modeled using series solutions to their governing partial differential equations (PDEs). The stress is modeled using the Airy stress potential function and its governing PDE is the biharmonic equation. The temperature is governed by Fourier's law. The models assume that stress due to gravity can be neglected, the points in the plane do not accelerate, and that the material properties are constant.

Hart, Kenneth↗

Feasibility of a Dragon-Derived Mars Lander for Scientific and Human-Precursor Missions

A minimally-modified SpaceX Dragon capsule launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket presents the possibility of a new low-cost, high-capacity Mars lander for robotic missions. We have been evaluating such a "Red Dragon" platform as an option for the Icebreaker Discovery Program mission concept. Dragon is currently in service ferrying cargo to and from the International Space Station, and a crew transport version is in development. The upcoming version, unlike other Earth-return vehicles, exhibits most of the capabilities necessary to land on Mars. In particular, it has a set of high-thrust, throttleable, storable bi-propellant "SuperDraco" engines integrated directly into the capsule that are intended for launch abort and powered landings on Earth. These thrusters provide the possibility of a parachute-free, fully-propulsive deceleration at Mars from supersonic speeds to the surface, a descent approach which would also scale well to larger future human landers. We will discuss the motivations for exploring a Red Dragon lander, the current results of our analysis of its feasibility and capabilities, and the implications of the platform for the Icebreaker mission concept. In particular, we will examine entry, descent, and landing (EDL) in detail. We will also describe the modifications to Dragon necessary for interplanetary cruise, EDL, and operations on the Martian surface. Our analysis to date indicates that a Red Dragon lander is feasible and that it would be capable of delivering more than 1000 kg of payload to sites at elevations three kilometers below the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) reference, which includes sites throughout most of the northern plains and Hellas.

Karcz, John S.↗

Altair Lunar Lander Development Status: Enabling Human Lunar Exploration

As a critical part of the NASA Constellation Program lunar transportation architecture, the Altair lunar lander will return humans to the moon and enable a sustained program of lunar exploration. The Altair is to deliver up to four crew to the surface of the moon and return them to low lunar orbit at the completion of their mission. Altair will also be used to deliver large cargo elements to the lunar surface, enabling the buildup of an outpost. The Altair Project initialized its design using a minimum functionality approach that identified critical functionality required to meet a minimum set of Altair requirements. The Altair team then performed several analysis cycles using risk-informed design to selectively add back components and functionality to increase the vehicles safety and reliability. The analysis cycle results were captured in a reference Altair design. This design was reviewed at the Constellation Lunar Capabilities Concept Review, a Mission Concept Review, where key driving requirements were confirmed and the Altair Project was given authorization to begin Phase A project formulation. A key objective of Phase A is to revisit the Altair vehicle configuration, to better optimize it to complete its broad range of crew and cargo delivery missions. Industry was invited to partner with NASA early in the design to provide their insights regarding Altair configuration and key engineering challenges. A blended NASA-industry team will continue to refine the lander configuration and mature the vehicle design over the next few years. This paper will update the international community on the status of the Altair Project as it addresses the challenges of project formulation, including optimizing a vehicle configuration based on the work of the NASA Altair Project team, industry inputs and the plans going forward in designing the Altair lunar lander.

Laurini, Kathleen C.↗

Global Exploration Roadmap Derived Concept for Human Exploration of the Moon

Taking advantage of the development of Mars-forward assets in cislunar space, a human lunar surface concept is proposed to maximize value for both lunar exploration and future deep space missions. The human lunar surface missions will be designed to build upon the cislunar activities that precede them, providing experience in planetary surface operations that cannot be obtained in cislunar space. To enable a five-mission limited campaign to the surface of the Moon, two new elements are required: a human lunar lander and a mobile surface habitat. The human lunar lander will have been developed throughout the cislunar phase from a subscale demonstrator and will consist of a descent module alongside a reusable ascent module. The reusable ascent module will be used for all five human lunar surface missions. Surface habitation, in the form of two small pressurized rovers, will enable 4 crew to spend up to 42 days on the lunar surface.

Whitley, Ryan↗

Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program (EHP) Exploration EVA (xEVA) System Compatibility Standards

Extravehicular Activity (EVA) is a significant capability for Artemis Systems which includes Gateway Program (modules), Human Landing System (HLS) Program (Integrated Lander and Human Class Delivery Lander), Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), Pressurized Rover (PR), Payloads, and any other future lunar surface assets that will be utilized for exploration or science. The EVA and Human Surface Mobility Program (EHP) will provide the following: Exploration EVA (xEVA) suits, xEVA tools and crew aids along with vehicle integration/support hardware, LTV, and PR. Being a distributed and dynamic capability (moving components), xEVA System hardware will interface with almost all elements of the Artemis architecture. As such, it is important to document a singular set of EVA compatibility standards at the programmatic level to articulate “how to interface with xEVA suit hardware” and “how to design hardware that EVA crewmembers will access and manipulate.”

Exploration↗