Project Morpheus methane Hot Fire Test #5

Evan Ackerman
IEEE Spectrum

Project Morpheus used to be called Project M, and it was an ambitious plan to send a Robonaut to the moon in under 1,000 days by embracing efficiency and cooperation while avoiding bureaucracy as much as possible. We've been huge, huge fans of the project ever since its manager, Matt Ondler, defended the idea to a seemingly uninterested NASA in an impassioned blog post that ended with "we will continue to push back the darkness until they chain the doors and take away our hacksaws."

We were completely sold, of course.

That was back in July of 2010, and since then Robonaut has ended up on the International Space Station, and Project M has (for better or worse) morphed into Project Morpheus, a vehicle designed to transport a robot (or anything else) to the lunar surface. Just two days ago, Morpheus underwent a test firing of its brand new engine.

Original Article HERE - YouTube video and Flickr views of Morpheus Hot Fire Test 5, Monday, February 27.

Related Post:
Morpheus lunar lander in tethered flight tests (May 7, 2011)

Analysis of on-board hazard detection and avoidance for safe lunar landing

Johnson, Huertas, Werner & Montgomery, JPL
2008 IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky

"Landing hazard detection and avoidance technology is being pursued within NASA to improve landing safety and increase access to sites of interest on the lunar surface. The performance of a hazard detection and avoidance system depends on properties of the terrain, sensor performance, algorithm design, vehicle characteristics and the overall all guidance navigation and control architecture. This paper analyzes the size of the region that must be imaged, sensor performance parameters and the impact of trajectory angle on hazard detection performance. The analysis shows that vehicle hazard tolerance is the driving parameter for hazard detection system design."

Review the Conference Paper, HERE.

Carnegie Mellon's Lunar X Prize team

Photo: Bill Cramer/Wonderful Machine

Astrobotic team members [from left] Nisarg Kothari,
James Lee, Ross Finman [in foreground], Ethan Minogue, and
Charlie Munoz gather for a test run of the Red Rover.

Prachi Patel (Part of IEEE Spectrum's Special Report: Why Mars? Why Now?) "The rover has gone blind. It had been running all night, its two mast-mounted cameras capturing high-resolution stereo images of its surroundings. Now it’s sitting idly in the middle of the room. Fixing the thing is not how Ross Finman had planned to start his day at the lab.

Finman, a 19-year-old undergraduate wearing wrinkled black trousers and an old brown leather jacket, uses a laptop to log on wirelessly to the rover’s computer. ”That’s weird,” he says, and tries to restart the cameras. Still no go. Definitely not a good day.

”Who touched it?” he says.

”I did,” a student nearby shouts back. ”That’s why it shouldn’t be broken.”

Finman summons Michael Furlong, a grad student and the camera wizard around here. Furlong pulls up a diagnostics screen on the laptop. Some log files had grown excessively large, eating up CPU cycles. He deletes the files and reboots the computer. Seconds later, the rover can see again.

”Mike is the man,” Finman says, grinning at Furlong, who doesn’t take his eyes off the screen.

It’s just another day at the Field Robotics Center, part of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, in Pittsburgh."

Read the Article HERE.