One of the leading projects proposed by NASA for the agency’s next mission is the construction of a spacecraft which would hover above the far side of the moon in a location known as the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 2, an area where the combined gravities of the Earth and moon reach equilibrium. “Placing a spacecraft at the Earth-Moon Lagrange point [...]
Post Tagged with: “hover”
Mighty Eagle Gets Off the Ground in Untethered Test Flight
Source: NASA The “Mighty Eagle,” a NASA robotic prototype lander, is soaring high again for a series of tests being conducted at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Since its last round of tests in 2011, the Mighty Eagle team has made significant updates to the guidance controls on the lander’s camera, furthering its autonomous capabilities. The three-legged [...]
Crash and Burn for Morpheus Lander
In its first untethered test, the experimental lander Morpheus flopped on its head, crashed into its launch pad, and burst into flames before exploding. “No one was injured, and the resulting fire was extinguished by KSC fire personnel,” NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) said in a statement. ”Engineers are looking into the incident, and the agency will release information as it becomes [...]
The Value of Tests
On March 13, NASA recorded a hover test of Morpheus, a lander testbed used for assessing technologies that could be used in lunar, asteroidal, or Martian landings: The test was successful, unlike one from a year earlier provacatively labelled “This is Why We Test”: The video highlights the importance of remembering, in a time when cost savings drives further [...]
Armadillo Aerospace Performs Stig-A Hover Test
On November 22, Armadillo Aerospace performed a hover test on their tube rocket Stig-A. According to Armadillo, the goal was to simply keep the rocket upright during the test and Stig-A performed successfully, despite some visible side-to-side drift. The Stig rocket line is a Vertical Take- off Vertical Landing (VTVL) rocket. It is designed as a preliminary step towards a fully reusable [...]
