Robust Orion Escape Rocket Tested

Orion Launch Abort System jettison motor test.

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NASA successfully tested the Launch Abort System jettison motor, the first full-scale test for the Constellation Program's Orion crew exploration vehicle. The jettison motor is a solid rocket motor designed to separate the Launch Abort System from the crew module on a normal launch and to safely propel the abort system away from the crew module during an emergency.

The static test firing was conducted by Aerojet Corporation in Sacramento, Calif. NASA has partnered with Lockheed Martin Corporation, Orbital Sciences Corporation, and Aerojet Corporation to supply the jettison motor.

"This was a major success for the Orion Launch Abort System team," said Mark Cooper, NASA's integrated product team lead for LAS Propulsion at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "The test provided valuable data on motor performance that will allow design and analytical refinements by our contactor team. The test is the culmination of intense and focused work by the entire jettison motor team."

Demonstrating the jettison motor performance is critical to the development of the crew module's launch abort system, which will offer a safe escape in the event of an emergency on the launch pad or during the climb to a low Earth orbit. The jettison motor test was a critical demonstration milestone in the Orion Project’s preparations for the first of a series of flight tests of the Launch Abort System currently scheduled for late 2008.

NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., manages the launch abort system design and development effort with partners and team members from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. Langley's Launch Abort System Office performs this function as part of the Orion Project Office located at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston. The abort system is a key element in NASA's continuing efforts to improve safety as the agency develops the next generation of spacecraft to return humans to the moon.

Read the NASA press release HERE.

Holy Family grad discusses NASA job

Julie Blum
Columbus Telegram

Another NASA Learn to Earn prepares for the Moon and beyond...today

While working on the lunar lander project has continued to be challenging and exciting, Nienaber said the most rewarding projects he has been a part of occurred after the Space Shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry in 2003. He worked on a team that created tools and techniques to repair the Shuttle’s thermal protection system while in orbit.

Nienaber said he has “one of the coolest jobs” he could imagine, and wanted to share his enthusiasm for his profession to Lindsay Holy Family students. He wanted to get the students excited about science, technology and engineering.

“Most importantly, students in rural America need to hear from people that have these jobs and believe that they really can do anything they set their minds to,” Nienaber said. “I didn’t consider myself an exceptional student, and I’m not sure I really did believe when I was in school that my career could have led to involvement in developing a lunar lander. So it is all about giving them ideas on what they could do.”

Read the story HERE.

NASA Team Demonstrates Robot Technology for Moon Exploration

CLEVELAND, Feb 27, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- During the 3rd Space Exploration Conference Feb. 26-28 in Denver, NASA will exhibit a robot rover equipped with a drill designed to find water and oxygen-rich soil on the moon.

"Resources are the key to sustainable outposts on the moon and Mars," said Bill Larson, deputy manager of the In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) project. "It's too expensive to bring everything from Earth. This is the first step toward understanding the potential for lunar resources and developing the knowledge needed to extract them economically."

The engineering challenge was daunting. A robot rover designed for prospecting within lunar craters has to operate in continual darkness at extremely cold temperatures with little power. The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable. Lunar soil, known as regolith, is abrasive and compact, so if a drill strikes ice, it likely will have the consistency of concrete.

Meeting these challenges in one system took ingenuity and teamwork. Engineers demonstrated a drill capable of digging samples of regolith in Pittsburgh last December. The demonstration used a laser light camera to select a site for drilling then commanded the four-wheeled rover to lower the drill and collect three-foot samples of soil and rock.

"These are tasks that have never been done and are really difficult to do on the moon," said John Caruso, demonstration integration lead for ISRU and Human Robotics Systems at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

In 2008, the team plans to equip the rover with ISRU's Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction experiment, known as RESOLVE. Led by engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., the RESOLVE experiment package will add the ability to crush a regolith sample into small, uniform pieces and heat them.

The process will release gases deposited on the moon's surface during billions of years of exposure to the solar wind and bombardment by asteroids and comets. Hydrogen is used to draw oxygen out of iron oxides in the regolith to form water. The water then can be electrolyzed to split it back into pure hydrogen and oxygen, a process tested earlier this year by engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"We're taking hardware from two different technology programs within NASA and combining them to demonstrate a capability that might be used on the moon," said Gerald Sanders, manager of the ISRU project. "And even if the exact technologies are not used on the moon, the lessons learned and the relationships formed will influence the next generation of hardware."

Engineers participated in the ground-based rover concept demonstration from four NASA centers, the Canadian Space Agency, the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology in Sudbury, Ontario, and Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Mellon was responsible for the robot's design and testing, and the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology built the drilling system. Glenn contributed the rover's power management system. NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., built a system that navigates the rover in the dark. The Canadian Space Agency funded a Neptec camera that builds three-dimensional images of terrain using laser light.

All the elements together represent a collaboration of the Human Robotic Systems and ISRU projects at Johnson. These projects are part of the Exploration Technology Development Program, which is managed by NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

To view images of the rover in development, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/lunar_truck.html

For more information about NASA's exploration plans to the moon and beyond, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration

SOURCE NASA