UC Irvine Receives NASA/JPL Contract to Pinpoint Mars Landings within 100 Meters
UC Irvine today
announced that a researcher within The Henry Samueli School of
Engineering has been awarded a contract with NASA, through the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to develop guidance algorithms aimed at
pinpointing future Mars landers within 100 meters of the desired site.
Kenneth Mease, a professor of mechanical and aerospace
engineering, is the principal investigator for the 3-year project, a
collaborative effort involving his research group and researchers at
JPL.
“Pinpointing a Mars landing to within 100 meters enables science
instruments to be delivered close to gullies, rock outcrops or canyon
walls. Without pinpoint accuracy, landing near such scientifically
interesting objects would be too risky,” said Mease. “Mars missions to
date have at best been capable of landing within 20-30 kilometers of a
target site. Achieving pinpoint accuracy requires automated on-board
guidance during the atmospheric flight and the terminal powered
descent.”
Mease’s team will be developing an algorithm to control a Mars
lander’s flight during the “hypersonic entry phase” to compensate for
variations in atmospheric conditions and vehicle performance, and
deliver the vehicle with pinpoint accuracy to the parachute deployment
point. He is also developing a guidance algorithm that will steer the
lander during the “powered-descent phase” to compensate for wind drift
during the parachute phase. Comprehensive real-time simulation testing
of the algorithms in flight-like processors will be conducted at JPL.
The first demonstration of pinpoint landing is under consideration for
a Mars mission in 2011.
The total contract value is $679,000.
More information, along with a graphic of the entry phase can be
found at:
http://marstech.jpl.nasa.gov/content/detail.cfm?Cat=base&subCat=AEDL&T
askID=2270. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted
into your Internet browser’s address field. Remove the extra space if
one exists.)
About The Henry Samueli School of Engineering
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine numbers
nearly 3,000 students and 95 faculty members across five academic
departments: biomedical engineering, chemical engineering and
materials science, civil and environmental engineering, electrical
engineering and computer science, and mechanical and aerospace
engineering. The school is home to numerous research centers,
including the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing, the
Integrated Nanosystems Research Facility, the National Fuel Cell
Research Center and the Center for Biomedical Engineering. It is a
major participant in the California Institute for Telecommunications
and Information Technology, Cal-IT(2). For more information, please
visit www.eng.uci.edu.
Contact:
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, UC Irvine
Lisa Briggs, 949-824-3088
lbriggs@uci.edu
