NASA announced that it will test a new precision automatic landing system for the first time during the upcoming Blue Origin reusable suborbital rocket New Shepard mission , which is designed for landing on the harsh terrain of the moon and Mars And design.
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This system is called “Safety and Precision Landing-Integrated Capability Evolution System” (SPLICE). It consists of multiple lasers, an optical camera and a computer. It can acquire all the data collected by the sensor and process it using advanced algorithms. , Its working principle is to discover potential hazards and dynamically adjust landing parameters to ensure a safe landing.
During the relatively fast New Shepard rocket mission, SPLICE will conduct real tests on three of its four main subsystems. The space company founded by Jeff Bezos usually sends the first stage booster back to Earth after going to the edge of space, but in this SPLICE test, NASA’s automatic landing technology will Approaching the surface of the moon or Mars to run on the spacecraft.
The test elements will include “terrain relative navigation”, Doppler radar and SPLICE landing and landing computers, while the fourth major system (hazard detection based on lidar) will be tested in future planned flights.
At present, NASA has used self-landing robotic probes on the surface of other planets, including Perseverance to Mars. However, in order to ensure a safe landing, a lot of work needs to be done to select a landing zone with unobstructed ground and no potential hazards. The existing system can make some adjustments, but its capabilities in this regard are relatively limited.
SPLICE is designed to achieve more accurate landings and to handle more nearby dangerous landings, so as to be able to conduct exploration in areas that were previously considered to be landing restricted areas. This may greatly expand our ability to gain more knowledge and better understand the Moon and Mars, which is especially important as we continue to work towards more human exploration and even potential colonization.
The lidar system is a key new component in the SPLICE test, because we don’t actually know how well lidar performs on Mars and the Moon, where the reflectivity may be very different from that on Earth. Nevertheless, NASA believes that the system should provide higher accuracy than methods based solely on radar, and can be used for surface mapping and feature detection.
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