“Real life can always throw you curve balls. She’ll be at Mission Control for the landing, monitoring the health of the system every step of the way. The helicopter flight provided a final check on over six-years of multiple field tests.īut Mohan pointed out that even with these successful demonstrations, there will be more work to do to ensure a safe landing. In 2019, a copy of that system flew on one more helicopter demonstration in Death Valley, California, facilitated by NASA’s Technology Demonstration Missions program. With the technology accepted for Mars 2020, the mission team began to build the final version of LVS that would fly on Perseverance. For LVS, those rocket flights were the capstone of our technology development effort.”
“But it’s proven so valuable that it’s now becoming expected to do these types of flight tests. “The testing that Flight Opportunities is set up to provide was really unprecedented within NASA at the time,” said Johnson. Johnson added that the suborbital testing in fact increased the technology readiness level to get the final green light of acceptance into the Mars 2020 mission. “It was then that we knew LVS would work during the high-speed vertical descent typical of Mars landings.” “Testing on the rocket laid pretty much all remaining doubts to rest and answered a critical question for the LVS operation affirmatively,” said JPL’s Nikolas Trawny, a payload and pointing control systems engineer who worked closely with Masten on the 2014 field tests.
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Earlier flights on Masten’s VTVL system also helped validate algorithms and software used to calculate fuel-optimal trajectories for planetary landings. The flight tests demonstrated LVS’s ability to direct Xombie to autonomously change course and avoid hazards on descent by adopting a newly calculated path to a safe landing site. That need was met by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, which facilitated two 2014 flights in the Mojave Desert on Masten Space Systems’ Xombie – a vertical takeoff and vertical landing (VTVL) system that functions similarly to a lander. “There was also a need to demonstrate LVS on a rocket.”
“That got us to a certain level of technical readiness because the system could monitor a wide range of terrain, but it didn’t have the same kind of descent that Perseverance will have,” said Johnson. For LVS’s early flight tests, Johnson and team mounted the LVS to a helicopter and used it to estimate the vehicle’s position automatically as it was flying. “Then with simulation, we model various scenarios that the software algorithms may encounter on Mars – a too-sunny day, very dark day, windy day – and we make sure the system behaves as expected regardless of those conditions.”īut the third piece of the trifecta – the field tests – require actual flights to put the lab results through further rigor and provide a high level of technical readiness for NASA missions. Vacuum, vibration, temperature, electrical compatibility – we put the hardware through its paces,” said Mohan. “That’s where we test every condition and variable we can. Mohan said that the first two testing areas – hardware and simulation – were done in a lab.