Project Morpheus Completes Another Successful Test Flight

 Space  

NASA's Project Morpheus team has successfully completed another test flight of the Morpheus Lander.  The vehicle flew its pre-planned trajectory flawlessly, reaching a max ascent velocity of 13 m/s, and landing approximately 10 inches from its intended target 79 seconds after launch.

The Morpheus Project has developed and tested a prototype planetary lander capable of vertical takeoff and landing for NASA. Designed to serve as a vertical testbed for advanced spacecraft technologies, the vehicle provides a platform for bringing technologies from the laboratory into an integrated flight system at relatively low cost. This allows individual technologies to mature into capabilities that can be incorporated into human exploration missions.

NASA's strategic goal of extending human presence across the solar system requires an integrated architecture. Such architecture would include advanced, robust space vehicles for a variety of lunar, asteroid, and planetary missions; automated hazard detection and avoidance technologies to reduce risks to crews, landers, and precursor robotic payloads; and in situ resource utilization to support crews during extended stays on extraterrestrial surfaces and to provide for their safe return to Earth.

Image Source - Wikipedia Commons

The Morpheus Project provides an autonomous, reusable, rocket-powered, terrestrial vertical take-off/vertical landing vehicle for testing integrated spacecraft and planetary lander technologies. The integrated vertical test bed (VTB) offers a platform to develop, mature, refine, and demonstrate advanced technologies that increase autonomy, reliability, safety, and reusability, and improve navigation and landing capabilities. Morpheus provides a way to help develop these technologies into systems that can be demonstrated and tested. Successfully implementing these capabilities will enable access to landing sites that were previously considered too hazardous to risk a robotic lander mission, much less a human mission.

The Morpheus vehicle is propelled by a liquid oxygen (LOX)/liquid methane propulsion system that can provide a specific impulse of up to 321 seconds during space flight, and these cryogenic propellants burn cleanly, are nontoxic, and can be stored easily in space. For future space missions, it may be possible to produce oxygen or methane on-site, that is to say on the moon or other body the vehicle happens to be on.

According to the researchers, oxygen is already a necessary and compatible commodity for life support systems in spacecraft, and oxygen/methane systems are being studied for power generation. LOX and methane are also readily available and relatively safe and easy to handle, permitting frequent, low-cost ground testing. These attributes and potential capabilities make propulsion with LOX/methane an attractive technology.

Related articles Deep Space Industries Enters The Asteroid Mining Business  Robots, Humans and the Future of Space Exploration  SpaceX's Grasshopper Rises and Lands 250m in Vertical Take-off and Landing Test

The multi-center Morpheus Team successfully completed it's eigth free flight at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Shuttle Landing Facility yesterday. The Bravo vehicle, flew to 467 feet (142m), altitude and then traversed 637 feet (194m) in 36 seconds, including diverting course mid-flight, before landing in the hazard field 56 feet (17m) from its original target.  (See video below).

According to NASA, initial data indicates a nominal flight meeting all test objectives. The vehicle flew its pre-planned trajectory flawlessly, reaching a max ascent velocity of 13 m/s, and landing approximately 10 inches from its intended target 79 seconds after launch.



SOURCE  Morpheus Lander

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square