HAMPTON, Va. - It will be one of the first times the U.S. has landed on the lunar surface since the Apollo missions, NASA says, and technology developed by Hampton Roads engineers will be on board.
Monday, January 8, a company called Astrobotic will launch the Peregrine-1 lunar lander from Florida; the first of several missions in NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative to bring science and technology equipment to the Moon ahead of humanity's return with the Artemis missions.
Crucial in the lander's descent will be a device developed at NASA Langley Research Center called the National Doppler Lidar (NDL), which engineers showed off at the center on Thursday.
It uses a laser-based sensor to detect speed and altitude down to a few centimeters per second.
“To get [precise landings] we need precise measurements of the spacecraft, of the velocity it’s traveling, the direction it’s going, how far off the ground. That’s continuously being fed into the spacecraft so they’re using it to control the spacecraft," said Farzin Amzajerdian, Principal Investigator for the NDL project.
According to Amzajerdian, who's been working on NDL since 2006, precision is important as future spacecraft lands on more rugged terrain on the Moon's south pole and any other surfaces in space.
“We want to go to the challenging places. We want to go to the edge of a cliff (on the Moon), where we think there might be some water or ice down in a crater," he told News 3, adding that laser technology has earth-bound uses too, like in autonomous cars and trucks.
But members of the NDL team say they'll be watching monitors anxiously Monday, as the rocket carrying their work blasts off. The nerves are only expected to get worse as the lander descends next month and years of effort are put to the test.
A second NDL is also launching mid-February on a mission with company Intuitive Machines. It'll be joined by a second piece of Langley-engineered equipment called Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS).
SCALPSS engineers also showed off their work on Thursday — a system of cameras designed to capture images as rocket plumes hit the Moon's surface during descent.
They say those images will allow researchers to craft a 3-D model of the resulting crater's size and shape.
“Understanding these effects that the rocket plumes have on the ground is very important to us," said Olivia Tyrrell, a research engineer of SCALPSS. "They can eject a lot of dust outwards that could damage [equipment] that might be nearby. They could alter the terrain significantly enough for the vehicle to land at a tilt or unevenly, which could be dangerous.”
Dangerous for the equipment, and humans that will eventually be aboard a lunar lander in upcoming Artemis missions.
The cameras themselves are commercial-grade, Tyrrell says — meaning anyone can buy them — but the onboard storage unit for the images and the way the images will be used for research has taken years to get right.
From the outside, NDL and SCALPSS may not look like much, but local engineers say these small devices will make a big difference as humans explore the Moon and beyond.
