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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 NTRS2023

Overview and Results From the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover's First Science Campaign on the Jezero Crater Floor

The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on 18 February 2021. After a 100-sol period of commissioning and the Ingenuity Helicopter technology demonstration, Perseverance began its first science campaign to explore the enigmatic Jezero crater floor, whose igneous or sedimentary origins have been much debated in the scientific community. This paper describes the campaign plan developed to explore the crater floor's Máaz and Séítah formations and summarizes the results of the campaign between sols 100–379. By the end of the campaign, Perseverance had traversed more than 5 km, created seven abrasion patches, and sealed nine samples and a witness tube. Analysis of remote and proximity science observations show that the Máaz and Séítah formations are igneous in origin and composed of five and two geologic members, respectively. The Séítah formation represents the olivine-rich cumulate formed from differentiation of a slowly cooling melt or magma body, and the Máaz formation likely represents a separate series of lava flows emplaced after Séítah. The Máaz and Séítah rocks also preserve evidence of multiple episodes of aqueous alteration in secondary minerals like carbonate, Fe/Mg phyllosilicates, sulfates, and perchlorate, and surficial coatings. Post-emplacement processes tilted the rocks near the Máaz-Séítah contact and substantial erosion modified the crater floor rocks to their present-day expressions. Results from this crater floor campaign, including those obtained upon return of the collected samples, will help to build the geologic history of events that occurred in Jezero crater and provide time constraints on the formation of the Jezero delta.

Mars 2020↗
NASA NTRS1990

Human-like robots for space and hazardous environments

The three year goal for this NASA Senior Design team is to design and build a walking autonomous robotic rover. The rover should be capable of rough terrain crossing, traversing human made obstacles (such as stairs and doors), and moving through human and robot occupied spaces without collision. The rover is also to evidence considerable decision making ability, navigation and path planning skills. These goals came from the concept that the robot should have the abilities of both a planetary rover and a hazardous waste site scout.

Cogley, Allen↗
NASA NTRS1994

Human-like robots for space and hazardous environments

The three year goal for the Kansas State USRA/NASA Senior Design team is to design and build a walking autonomous robotic rover. The rover should be capable of crossing rough terrain, traversing human made obstacles (such as stairs and doors), and moving through human and robot occupied spaces without collision. The rover is also to evidence considerable decision making ability, navigation, and path planning skills.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2016

Mars Surface System Common Capabilities and Challenges for Human Missions

NASA has begun a process to identify and evaluate candidate locations where humans could land, live and work on the martian surface. These locations are referred to as Exploration Zones (EZs). Given current mission concepts, an EZ is a collection of Regions of Interest (ROIs) that are located within approximately 100 kilometers of a centralized landing site. ROIs are areas that are relevant for scientific investigation and/or development/maturation of capabilities and resources necessary for a sustainable human presence. The EZ also contains a landing site and a habitation site that will be used by multiple human crews during missions to explore and utilize the ROIs within the EZ. In parallel with this process, NASA continues to make progress on the Evolvable Mars Campaign examining alternatives that can pioneer an extended human presence on Mars that is Earth independent. This involves ongoing assessments of surface systems and operations to enable a permanent, sustainable human presence. Because of the difficulty in getting equipment and supplies to the surface of Mars, part of these assessments involve identifying those systems and processes that can perform in multiple, sometimes completely unrelated, situations. These assessments have been performed in a very generic surface mission carried out at a very generic surface location. As specific candidate EZs are identified it becomes important to evaluate the current suite of surface systems and operations as they are likely to perform for the specific locations and for the types of operations - both scientific and development - that are proposed for these EZs. It is also important to evaluate the proposed EZs for their suitability to be explored or developed given the range of capabilities and constraints for the types of surface systems and operations being considered within the EMC. This means looking at setting up and operating a field station at a central location within the EZ as well as traversing to and exploring the scientific ROIs within the boundaries of the EZ. The proposed paper will describe the current status of common systems and operations as they can be applied to actual EZ locations on Mars. Initially these EZs will be the four locations identified MEPAG's Human Exploration of Mars Science Analysis Group (HEM‐SAG) that will be used as representative of the EZs that will emerge from the process that NASA has initiated. An example process that could be commonly applied is an approach for developing a field station site plan that would be demonstrated by applying this process to each of the four HEM‐SAG sites. Examples of common systems include (a) mobility systems that can be used to off‐load and move payloads to specific locations at the central field station location that could also be used to traverse long distances to reach some of the more remote ROIs or (b) robotic systems that can support various activities (such as system set up and maintenance) at the field station that could also be used to explore scientific ROIs and used to support site‐specific ISRU production activities.

Hoffman, Stephen J.↗
NASA NTRS2017

Scientific Investigations Associated with the Human Exploration of Mars in the Next 35 Years

A human mission to Mars would present an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the earliest history of the solar system. This history that has largely been overwritten on Earth by active geological processing throughout its history, but on Mars, large swaths of the ancient crust remain exposed at the surface, allowing us to investigate martian processes at the earliest time periods when life first appeared on the Earth. Mars' surface has been largely frozen in place for 4 billion years, and after losing its atmosphere and magnetic field what re-mains is an ancient landscape of former hydrothermal systems, river beds, volcanic eruptions, and impact craters. This allows us to investigate scientific questions ranging from the nature of the impact history of the solar system to the origins of life. We present here a summary of the findings of the Human Science Objectives Science Analysis Group, or HSO-SAG chartered by MEPAG in 2015 to address science objectives and landing site criteria for future human missions to Mars (Niles, Beaty et al. 2015). Currently, NASA's plan to land astronauts on Mars in the mid 2030's would allow for robust human exploration of the surface in the next 35 years. We expect that crews would be able to traverse to sites up to 100 km away from the original landing site using robust rovers. A habitat outfitted with state of the art laboratory facilities that could enable the astronauts to perform cutting edge science on the surface of Mars. Robotic/human partnership during exploration would further enhance the science return of the mission.

Niles, P. B.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Autonomous planetary rover at Carnegie Mellon

This report describes progress in research on an autonomous robot for planetary exploration. In 1989, the year covered by this report, a six-legged walking robot, the Ambler, was configured, designed, and constructed. This configuration was used to overcome shortcomings exhibited by existing wheeled and walking robot mechanisms. The fundamental advantage of the Ambler is that the actuators for body support are independent of those for propulsion; a subset of the planar joints propel the body, and the vertical actuators support and level the body over terrain. Models of the Ambler's dynamics were developed and the leveling control was studied. An integrated system capable of walking with a single leg over rugged terrain was implemented and tested. A prototype of an Ambler leg is suspended below a carriage that slides along rails. To walk, the system uses a laser scanner to find a clear, flat foothold, positions the leg above the foothold, contacts the terrain with the foot, and applies force enough to advance the carriage along the rails. Walking both forward and backward, the system has traversed hundreds of meters of rugged terrain including obstacles too tall to step over, trenches too deep to step in, closely spaced rocks, and sand hills. In addition, preliminary experiments were conducted with concurrent planning and execution, and a leg recovery planner that generates time and power efficient 3D trajectories using 2D search was developed. A Hero robot was used to demonstrate mobile manipulation. Indoor tasks include collecting cups from the lab floor, retrieving printer output, and recharging when its battery gets low. The robot monitors its environment, and handles exceptional conditions in a robust fashion, using vision to track the appearance and disappearance of cups, onboard sonars to detect imminent collisions, and monitors to detect the battery level.

Whittaker, William↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

2024 Nasa Lunabotics University Competition: Site Preparation With Bulk Regolith

Lunabotics provides accredited in-stitutions of higher learning students (vocational-technical, college, university) an opportunity to apply the NASA systems engineering process to design and build a prototype robot. This robot would be capable of performing the proposed operations on the Lunar sur-face in support of future Artemis mission goals. Lunabotics features a systems engineering design challenge to engage students in the next phase of hu-man space exploration supporting the Artemis missions. This two-semester event encourages students to design and build an autonomous or telerobotic robot designed to traverse the simulated Lunar surface and complete the assigned construction tasks. The number of teams accepted into this challenge is not predetermined but is based on the scores and overall quality of the Project Management Plans received and other factors.

Lunabotics↗
NASA NTRS1994

A genetic technique for planning a control sequence to navigate the state space with a quasi-minimum-cost output trajectory for a non-linear multi-dimnensional system

There are many multi-stage optimization problems that are not easily solved through any known direct method when the stages are coupled. For instance, we have investigated the problem of planning a vehicle's control sequence to negotiate obstacles and reach a goal in minimum time. The vehicle has a known mass, and the controlling forces have finite limits. We have developed a technique that finds admissible control trajectories which tend to minimize the vehicle's transit time through the obstacle field. The immediate applications is that of a space robot which must rapidly traverse around 2-or-3 dimensional structures via application of a rotating thruster or non-rotating on-off for such vehicles is located at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville Alabama. However, it appears that the development method is applicable to a general set of optimization problems in which the cost function and the multi-dimensional multi-state system can be any nonlinear functions, which are continuous in the operating regions. Other applications included the planning of optimal navigation pathways through a transversability graph; the planning of control input for under-water maneuvering vehicles which have complex control state-space relationships; the planning of control sequences for milling and manufacturing robots; the planning of control and trajectories for automated delivery vehicles; and the optimization and athletic training in slalom sports.

Hein, C.↗
NASA NTRS2011

Exploration Medical System Demonstration Project

A near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) mission will present significant new challenges including hazards to crew health created by exploring a beyond low earth orbit destination, traversing the terrain of asteroid surfaces, and the effects of variable gravity environments. Limited communications with ground-based personnel for diagnosis and consultation of medical events require increased crew autonomy when diagnosing conditions, creating treatment plans, and executing procedures. Scope: The Exploration Medical System Demonstration (EMSD) project will be a test bed on the International Space Station (ISS) to show an end-to-end medical system assisting the Crew Medical Officers (CMO) in optimizing medical care delivery and medical data management during a mission. NEA medical care challenges include resource and resupply constraints limiting the extent to which medical conditions can be treated, inability to evacuate to Earth during many mission phases, and rendering of medical care by a non-clinician. The system demonstrates the integration of medical technologies and medical informatics tools for managing evidence and decision making. Project Objectives: The objectives of the EMSD project are to: a) Reduce and possibly eliminate the time required for a crewmember and ground personnel to manage medical data from one application to another. b) Demonstrate crewmember's ability to access medical data/information via a software solution to assist/aid in the treatment of a medical condition. c) Develop a common data management architecture that can be ubiquitously used to automate repetitive data collection, management, and communications tasks for all crew health and life sciences activities. d) Develop a common data management architecture that allows for scalability, extensibility, and interoperability of data sources and data users. e) Lower total cost of ownership for development and sustainment of peripheral hardware and software that use EMSD for data management f) Provide better crew health via the reduction in crew errors, crew time, and ground time.

Chin, D. A.↗
NASA NTRS2008

Science Activity Planner for the MER Mission

The Maestro Science Activity Planner is a computer program that assists human users in planning operations of the Mars Explorer Rover (MER) mission and visualizing scientific data returned from the MER rovers. Relative to its predecessors, this program is more powerful and easier to use. This program is built on the Java Eclipse open-source platform around a Web-browser-based user-interface paradigm to provide an intuitive user interface to Mars rovers and landers. This program affords a combination of advanced display and simulation capabilities. For example, a map view of terrain can be generated from images acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Explorer instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft and overlaid with images from a navigation camera (more precisely, a stereoscopic pair of cameras) aboard a rover, and an interactive, annotated rover traverse path can be incorporated into the overlay. It is also possible to construct an overhead perspective mosaic image of terrain from navigation-camera images. This program can be adapted to similar use on other outer-space missions and is potentially adaptable to numerous terrestrial applications involving analysis of data, operations of robots, and planning of such operations for acquisition of scientific data.

Norris, Jeffrey S.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Vehicle path-planning in three dimensions using optics analogs for optimizing visibility and energy cost

Path planning is an important issue for space robotics. Finding safe and energy-efficient paths in the presence of obstacles and other constraints can be complex although important. High-level (large-scale) path planning for robotic vehicles was investigated in three-dimensional space with obstacles, accounting for: (1) energy costs proportional to path length; (2) turn costs where paths change trajectory abruptly; and (3) safety costs for the danger associated with traversing a particular path due to visibility or invisibility from a fixed set of observers. Paths optimal with respect to these cost factors are found. Autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles were considered operating either in a space environment around satellites and space platforms, or aircraft, spacecraft, or smart missiles operating just above lunar and planetary surfaces. One class of applications concerns minimizing detection, as for example determining the best way to make complex modifications to a satellite without being observed by hostile sensors; another example is verifying there are no paths (holes) through a space defense system. Another class of applications concerns maximizing detection, as finding a good trajectory between mountain ranges of a planet while staying reasonably close to the surface, or finding paths for a flight between two locations that maximize the average number of triangulation points available at any time along the path.

Rowe, Neil C.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Science Alert Demonstration with a Rover Traverse Science Data Analysis System

The Onboard Autonomous Science Investigation System (OASIS) evaluates geologic data gathered by a planetary rover. This analysis is used to prioritize the data for transmission, so that the data with the highest science value is transmitted to Earth. In addition, the onboard analysis results are used to identify science opportunities. A planning and scheduling component of the system enables the rover to take advantage of the identified science opportunity. OASIS is a NASA-funded research project that is currently being tested on the FIDO rover at JPL for the use on future missions.

Castano, R.↗
NASA NTRS2007

Extraterrestrial Moessbauer Spectroscopy: More than Three Years of Mars Exploration and Developments for Future Missions

The NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Spirit and Opportunity, landed on the Red Planet in January 2004. Both rovers are equipped with a miniaturized Moessbauer spectrometer MIMOS II. Designed for a three months mission, both rovers and both Moessbauer instruments are still working after more than three years of exploring the Martian surface. At the beginning of the mission, with a landed intensity of the Moessbauer source of 150 mCi, a 30 minute touch and go measurement produced scientifically valuable data while a good quality Moessbauer spectrum was obtained after approximately eight hours. Now, after about five halflives of the sources have passed, Moessbauer integrations are routinely planned to last approx.48 hours. Because of this and other age-related hardware degradations of the two rover systems, measurements now occur less frequently, but are still of outstanding quality and scientific importance. Summarizing important Moessbauer results, Spirit has traversed the plains from her landing site in Gusev crater and is now, for the greater part of the mission, investigating the stratigraphically older Columbia Hills. Olivine in rocks and soils in the plains suggests that physical rather than chemical processes are currently active.

Schroeder, Christian↗
NASA NTRS2015

Data-Driven Surface Traversability Analysis for Mars 2020 Landing Site Selection

The objective of this paper is three-fold: 1) to describe the engineering challenges in the surface mobility of the Mars 2020 Rover mission that are considered in the landing site selection processs, 2) to introduce new automated traversability analysis capabilities, and 3) to present the preliminary analysis results for top candidate landing sites. The analysis capabilities presented in this paper include automated terrain classification, automated rock detection, digital elevation model (DEM) generation, and multi-ROI (region of interest) route planning. These analysis capabilities enable to fully utilize the vast volume of high-resolution orbiter imagery, quantitatively evaluate surface mobility requirements for each candidate site, and reject subjectivity in the comparison between sites in terms of engineering considerations. The analysis results supported the discussion in the Second Landing Site Workshop held in August 2015, which resulted in selecting eight candidate sites that will be considered in the third workshop.

Ono, Masahiro↗
NASA NTRS2017

Simulation Based Studies of Low Latency Teleoperations for NASA Exploration Missions

Human exploration of Mars will involve both crewed and robotic systems. Many mission concepts involve the deployment and assembly of mission support assets prior to crew arrival on the surface. Some of these deployment and assembly activities will be performed autonomously while others will be performed using teleoperations. However, significant communications latencies between the Earth and Mars make teleoperations challenging. Alternatively, low latency teleoperations are possible from locations in Mars orbit like Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos. To explore these latency opportunities, NASA is conducting a series of studies to investigate the effects of latency on telerobotic deployment and assembly activities. These studies are being conducted in laboratory environments at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) at JSC and the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) underwater habitat off the coast of Florida. The studies involve two human-in-the-loop interactive simulations developed by the NASA Exploration Systems Simulations (NExSyS) team at JSC. The first simulation investigates manipulation related activities while the second simulation investigates mobility related activities. The first simulation provides a simple real-time operator interface with displays and controls for a simulated 6 degree of freedom end effector. The initial version of the simulation uses a simple control mode to decouple the robotic kinematic constraints and a communications delay to model latency effects. This provides the basis for early testing with more detailed manipulation simulations planned for the future. Subjects are tested using five operating latencies that represent teleoperation conditions from local surface operations to orbital operations at Phobos, Deimos and ultimately high Martian orbit. Subject performance is measured and correlated with three distance-to-target zones of interest. Each zone represents a target distance ranging from beyond 10m in Zone 1, through 1 cm to contact in Zone 5 with a step size factor of 10. Collected data consists of both objective simulation data (time, distance, hand controller inputs, velocity) and subjective questionnaire data. The second simulation provides a simple real-time operator interface with displays and control of a simulated surface rover. The rover traverses a synthetic Mars-like terrain and must be maneuvered to avoid obstacles while progressing to its destination. Like the manipulator simulation, subjects are tested using five operating latencies that represent teleoperation conditions from local surface operations to orbital operations at Phobos, Deimos and ultimately high Martian orbit. The rover is also operated at three different traverse speeds to assess the correlation between latency and speed. Collected data consisted of both objective simulation data (time, distance, hand controller inputs, braking) and subjective questionnaire data. These studies are exploring relationships between task complexity, operating speeds, operator efficiencies, and communications latencies for low latency teleoperations in support of human planetary exploration. This paper presents early results from these studies along with the current observations and conclusions. These and planned future studies will help to inform NASA on the potential for low latency teleoperations to support human exploration of Mars and inform the design of robotic systems and exploration missions.

Gernhardt, Michael L.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Effective Presentation of Metabolic Rate Information for Lunar Extravehicular Activity (EVA)

During human exploration of the lunar surface, a suited crewmember needs effective and accurate information about consumable levels remaining in their life support system. The information must be presented in a manner that supports real-time consumable monitoring and route planning. Since consumable usage is closely tied to metabolic rate, the lunar suit must estimate metabolic rate from life support sensors, such as oxygen tank pressures, carbon dioxide partial pressure, and cooling water inlet and outlet temperatures. To provide adequate warnings that account for traverse time for a crewmember to return to a safe haven, accurate forecasts of consumable depletion rates are required. The forecasts must be presented to the crewmember in a straightforward, effective manner. In order to evaluate methods for displaying consumable forecasts, a desktop-based simulation of a lunar Extravehicular Activity (EVA) has been developed for the Constellation lunar suite s life-support system. The program was used to compare the effectiveness of several different data presentation methods.

Mackin, Michael A.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Autonomy Software Architecture for LORAX (Life On ice Robotic Antarctic eXplorer)

LORAX is a robotic astrobiological study of the ice field surrounding the Carapace Nunatak near the Allan Hills in Antarctica. The study culminates in a l00km traverse, sampling the ice at various depths (from surface to 10cm) at over 100 sites to survey microbial ecology and to record environmental parameters. The autonomy requirements from LORAX are shared by many robotic exploration tasks. Consequently, the LORAX autonomy architecture is a general architecture for on-board planning and execution in environments where science return is to be maximized against resource limitations and other constraints.

Jonsson, Ari↗
NASA NTRS2017

Orbit Determination Adaptations for the Cassini Grand Finale

satellite encounters. Over this period, there have been several papers describing the orbit determination process and performance up through 2016 [1-5]. In April of 2017, Cassini will enter its Grand Finale mission phase when it will traverse the gap between the D-ring and the Saturn atmosphere twenty-two times before plunging deep into the atmosphere to end the mission. The lack of targeted satellite encounters during this period necessitates updates to the nominal Cassini Orbit Determination (OD) process. This paper describes these planned adaptations for the operation of the Grand Finale. During the Equinox and Solstice Mission Phase (2008-2016), navigation analysis has been divided into segments focused on two particular targeted satellite encounters, called an “arc”. Maneuvers in an arc were usually targeted to encounter B-plane position and time, so the OD state and covariance were mapped forward to the B-plane of the encounter within the arc. Trajectory dispersions during the Grand Finale need instead to be mapped to equator crossings and targeted Cartesian positions. In addition, trajectory arcs have typically covered a few orbital revolutions (~2-8 weeks), in order to span the time between two encounters. However, the Grand Finale will encompass five months of time without an encounter which necessitates an adjusted arc strategy. A modified arc strategy was developed based on OD behavior during long multi-rev periods between encounters in the year leading up to the Grand Finale. The OD covariance study conducted for the Grand Finale mission phase will also be examined.

Criddle, Kevin↗