The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center’s engineers have commenced phase one of the integrated system tests on a new robotic lander prototype.
This is being carried out in the US Army Redstone Arsenal’s propulsion test facility located in the Redstone Test Center in Huntsville. These tests are being carried out to design and develop a new generation of smart, compact and versatile robotic landers, which have the capacity to perform exploration research on the moon’s surface or on any other airless body and also near-Earth asteroids.
NASA robotic lander
The initial Strap down testing phase would permit the engineering team to completely test out the integrated lander prototype and then later proceed to the complex free flight testing. The engineering team would strap down or secure the prototype when the hot fire tests are done, to verify the response shown by the propulsion system to the navigation, flight guidance, flight software and control algorithms all before the autonomous free flight testing is done. The Marshall Center’s Robotic Lunar Lander Development Project Manager Test Director, Larry Hill has stated that moving the testing of the robotic lander to the Redstone Test Center facility was a good illustration of intergovernmental collaboration. According to him, technicians and engineers from the Army, NASA and from their support contractor, Teledyne Brown Engineering had worked industriously and diligently during the last month for altering the test facility, which was formerly used for missile testing.
Julie Bassler, who is the Robotic Lunar Lander Development Project Manager, has commented that their team was working strictly according to the design and development schedule, for delivering the robotic lander prototype to the testing site. She further mentioned that they had successfully designed and built and tested the new prototype in just 17 months, with the help of an internal NASA Marshall team along with others from the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation and John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory of Laurel. The testing would be carried out in three phases, which would culminate in free flight testing for time periods of 60 seconds in the summer of 2011.