Emily Lakdawalla - The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job
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This book describes the most complex machine ever sent to another planet: Curiosity. It is a one-ton robot with two brains, seventeen cameras, six wheels, nuclear power, and a laser beam on its head. No one human understands how all of its systems and instruments work. This essential reference to the Curiosity mission explains the engineering behind every system on the rover, from its rocket-powered jetpack to its radioisotope thermoelectric generator to its fiendishly complex sample handling system.Its lavishly illustrated text explains how all the instruments work its cameras, spectrometers, sample-cooking oven, and weather station and describes the instruments abilities and limitations. It tells you how the systems have functioned on Mars, and how scientists and engineers have worked around problems developed on a faraway planet: holey wheels and broken focus lasers. And it explains the grueling mission operations schedule that keeps the rover working day in and day out
Emily Lakdawalla: author's other books
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Charles J. Byrne
Ivan Divliansky (editor)
Kaufman
Marc Kaufman
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Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
Emily Lakdawalla The Design and Engineering of Curiosity Springer Praxis Books1. Mars Science Laboratory
Emily Lakdawalla 1
(1)
The Planetary Society, Pasadena, CA, USA
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Curiosity began in the wreckage of NASAs Mars hopes. Two spacecraft launched to Mars in 1998. Neither survived arrival. The twin disasters could have doomed NASAs Mars program again. But the American public enthusiastically supported a NASA search for Martian life following the announcement of possible fossils in a Mars meteorite recovered from Antarctica.
NASA had enjoyed early success at Mars with the Mariners and Vikings, though the Viking landers powerful (and expensive) life-detection experiments had failed to reveal signs of biologic activity on Mars. A lengthy hiatus in Mars exploration followed Viking in the 1980s, and the 1990s were mostly cruel to Mars missions. NASAs Mars Observer, launched in 1992, failed just days before arrival. Mars 96, a Russian mission, failed to leave Earth parking orbit. But things had been looking up at the end of the decade. Mars Global Surveyor successfully entered orbit in 1997 and began its mapping mission in 1999. And the world fell in love with a little six-wheeled robot named Sojourner that had trundled around NASAs Pathfinder lander for three months in the summer of 1997, sharing daily reports and Mars photos on the new medium of the Internet. The American public was willing to support another try at Mars.
A year after Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter failed, NASA announced a reformulated Mars program. Their goal: to search Mars geologic present and past for the kinds of environments that could support life. The search would require a sustained presence in orbit around Mars and on the surface with long-duration exploration. Joining Mars Global Surveyor in orbit would be two orbiters, 2001 Mars Odyssey (to be launched in 2001) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (2005). NASA also announced two rover missions: the twin Mars Exploration Rovers (2003) and a mobile science laboratory, to be launched as early as 2007, which would eventually become Mars Science Laboratory, or MSL.
From the start, MSL was an ambitious mission. It would deliver a Viking-sized suite of science instruments to the surface of Mars. But that huge science capability could move around the surface on wheels. NASA promised a precision landing, close to a very interesting geologic site on the surface of Mars. They also proposed a lifetime of two Earth years, much longer than the proposed one-month life for Pathfinder or three months for the Mars Exploration Rovers. Finally, the intent to carry analytical laboratory instruments that could ingest Martian rock required entirely new sample handling technology.
MSL occupies a pivotal position in NASAs Mars Exploration program. An advisory group stated in 2003 that MSL both concludes the currently planned missions andinitiates the paths of exploration in the next decade. Mindful of the number of Mars missions that would be active in the years prior to its landing, NASA tasked the project with being able to respond to discoveries made while the spacecraft was being prepared for launch. To be so flexible, the mission had to be able to achieve success at a wide variety of landing site locations: from equatorial sites to near-polar ones, and from sites where ancient geology and hard rocks would be the target, to sites where it might be possible to sample ice and search for recently habitable zones. This wide envelope of possibility meant that the spacecraft and landing system that were ultimately built had capabilities that were never used.
MSL would eventually become the most complex mission ever launched beyond Earth. Its development required a gargantuan effort spanning more than a decade. Its success depended on the invention of new technologies. Challenges in the development program forced NASA to delay the launch, at great financial cost. Originally proposed for the 2007 launch opportunity, MSL would finally depart for Mars in November, 2011.
1.2 DESIGNING A BIGGER LANDER (20002003)
1.2.1 Rover on a Rope
Chief engineer Rob Manning traces the origin of MSLs landing system to the terrible failures of 1999, particularly Mars Polar Lander. We came to realize that we did not know how to land anything on Mars reliably, let alone something large, he wrote in a 2014 mission memoir. NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which had built Mars Polar Lander, formed a team to identify the technology they needed to develop in order to be able to precisely land a large rover on Mars. They began work in early 2000.
Mars is one of the hardest places in the solar system to land. The problem is its atmosphere: there is too much to ignore, and too little to slow a spacecraft for a safe landing. On bodies lacking atmospheres, like the Moon or an asteroid, spacecraft land using rockets alone. On Earth, Venus, or Titan, which have dense atmospheres, a spacecraft decelerates from supersonic speeds with a blunt-nosed heat shield, and then drops speed nearly to zero with a parachute. On Mars, a spacecraft needs all three: heat shield for high-speed entry, parachute for slowing during descent, and rockets for landing. The entire procedure required to land on Mars is referred to as Entry, Descent, and Landing, or EDL for short. (Engineers delight in abbreviating frequently-used phrases into acronyms and initialisms, turning their writing into alphabet soup. In this book I refrain from using most such abbreviations for clarity.)
All Mars landers to date have used a capsule, also known as an aeroshell, to shelter the lander during entry; the capsule is a clamshell that consists of a heat shield and a backshell. The design is similar to the capsules used by Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts to return to Earth. Astronauts in capsules usually used maneuvering rockets to guide the capsules during entry, steering them toward a landing zone where they could be picked up quickly. Mars landers, lacking human pilots, passively fell through the Martian atmosphere on a ballistic entry, like meteors. The lack of human guidance led to large uncertainty about where the spacecraft would end up landing. Achieving a precision landing required guidance, but Mars is too far away for humans on Earth to steer in real time.
To make a precision landing possible, Manning and his teammates advanced an idea that JPL had been developing since the 1990s: autonomous guidance for a Mars entry vehicle. The capsule could use accelerometers and gyroscopes to determine its position relative to its intended target as it flew. Software would command banking turns to fly the aeroshell closer to the target. Guided entry could dramatically shrink the size of a Mars landing ellipse, placing a rover closer to interesting geology.
The descent phase begins when the spacecraft has been slowed to something close to twice the speed of sound. All Mars landers have deployed a parachute for descent. Supersonic parachutes for Mars were first developed in the early 1970s for Viking, with expensive high-altitude tests. As long as the mass of a Mars lander could be kept similar to or less than that of Viking, they could stick with the same parachute design for the descent phase without performing new, expensive tests.
For the final, landing phase, JPL had successfully used two different approaches. The Vikings employed retrorockets that slowed the descent to a near-standstill, and then the spacecraft dropped to a hard landing atop three legs that crushed to absorb some of the force of the impact. Pathfinder (and, later, the Mars Exploration Rovers) worked differently (Figure ). The triangular lander was folded into a tetrahedral shape and the outside of the tetrahedron fitted with airbags. This contraption dangled on a rope beneath a rocket pack that was itself connected to the parachute. At the last possible moment, a mere 100 meters above the ground, the airbags inflated, the rocket jetpack fired to zero out the downward velocity, and the rope tether cut. The lander dropped and bounced repeatedly, rolling nearly a kilometer inside its airbags, before finally coming to a rest.
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