NASA Weighs, Balances Orion For Ascent Abort Test

Brothers Bring Curious Minds, Sharp Questions to Langley

One brother is a facts-and-figures guy, the other an adventurer.

They're both deeply fascinated by all things space.

Mikey and Robbie Rouse, 15 and 16, are from Salem, Virginia, and both have Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a progressive condition that affects nearly all their voluntary muscles.

On a recent trip to Hampton, Virginia, they visited one of the birthplaces of the American space program — NASA's Langley Research Center.

Mikey, the adventurer, wants to be the first wheelchair astronaut. "And I want to go to Mars," he said during his visit.

Robbie, the facts-and-figures guy, is always thinking of safety first — a quality held sacred by all at NASA.

The brothers' visit to Langley included a tour of the center's hangar, a stop at the Flight Mission Support Center for the ozone-monitoring Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III, and presentations on the Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, autonomous technologies, and tests at the Landing and Impact Research Facility.

Deputy Center Director Clayton Turner and Associate Director Cathy Mangum presented Mikey and Robbie with commemorative coins and copies of "A Century at Langley," a pictoral history of the center.

No subject raised during the visit failed to spark the boys' curiosity.

Steve Velotas, associate director for intelligent flight systems, talked with Mikey and Robbie about the ways in which Langley researchers are studying autonmous technologies. Autonomous systems could be used in unmanned aerial vehicles, in-space assembly robots, or even wheelchairs to help those with disabilities navigate more easily.

"I don't trust robots completely," Mikey said.

"We don't either," said Velotas, who then explained that part of the reason Langley scientists are studying autonomous systems is to make sure they work like people want them to.

Evan Horowitz, structures and mechanical systems airworthiness engineer, showed the brothers Langley's historic hangar and talked about some of the past and present missions the facility has supported.

Gemini and Apollo astronauts trained in the hangar's Rendezvous Docking Simulator, and aircraft used for airborne science studies and autonomous flight research are based there.

Mikey and Robbie peppered Horowitz, who often takes tour groups through the hangar, with questions about air pollution and habitable exoplanets.

"This is great," said Horowitz. "Best interaction I've had in months."

The previous day, Mikey and Robbie visited the Virginia Air & Space Center, Langley's official visitors center.

The brothers live with their great-grandmother in Salem and receive daily assistance from a nonprofit called Lutheran Family Services of Virginia. The trip to Hampton was organized by Julie's Abundance Project, a program of Lutheran Family Services of Virginia.

Image Credits: NASA/David C. Bowman

Joe AtkinsonJoe Atkinson NASA Langley Research Center

Orion Launch Abort System Motor Gets Fired-up About the Journey to Mars

Applause resounded from NASA and its partners as they watched Orion’s jettison motor generate 40,000 pounds of thrust in just a blink of an eye, preparing the spacecraft for its first integrated mission with the Space Launch System rocket.  

Onlookers had just witnessed a 1.5-second jettison motor test firing at Aerojet Rocketdyne’s facility in Sacramento, California.

The Orion launch abort system (LAS) is designed to protect astronauts in the unlikely event there is an issue during launch by pulling the spacecraft away from the rocket during a mission. The jettison motor is activated during ascent to separate the launch abort system from the spacecraft after it is no longer needed during a mission.

“This test showed us that the jettison motor can quickly generate the amount of thrust needed to pull the LAS away during an Orion mission,” said Tim Larson, jettison motor principle engineer for Lockheed Martin who has been with the project since inception. “I’m very pleased with how the test went.”

The fifth firing

The jettison motor has now undergone five tests, including two test flights. Each test in the series builds upon each other, moving the nation forward on its journey to Mars.

The motor used for the fifth test was rebuilt from a previous test motor.

“We were able to recycle some of the parts from the second ground test and use it for this test,” said NASA LAS project manager Robert Decoursey. “We not only went green, but we also saved money.”

Inside and around the test motor were instruments that included strain gauges, accelerometers and pressure transducers, which feed engineers high-quality data that show whether the motor design is ready for upcoming flight tests and missions. This motor had more instruments and produced more data than any of the previous tests.

“There are many intricate details in the jettison motor design that are not obvious from the outside, and the consistent orchestration of those details are most important to obtain predictable performance,” said NASA LAS deputy project manager Deborah Crane. “Aerojet Rocketdyne has done an excellent job executing this test on schedule.”

The jettison motor bakery

Creating a jettison motor is like baking two big cakes and making enough batter for some leftover cupcakes, according to Tim Warner, NASA LAS business manager.

The jettison motor being tested in the photo above would be activated during ascent to separate the launch abort system from the spacecraft after it is no longer needed during a mission.Credits: Aerojet Rocketdyne

What’s most exciting for the team, besides the successful test, are the latest upgrades to their baking and mixing tools.

“We were using two mixing batches to make just one motor, but have recently upgraded to a larger mixing bowl, saving us time and money,” Decoursey said.

The new mixing bowl can hold up to 450 whopping gallons of cake batter, or in NASA terms, motor propellant.

The team mixes up the batter in this large mixing bowl and evenly splits the batter into two pots for a perfectly sculpted jettison motor.

Any leftover propellant is used to make small test motors. The smaller motors are used to check the propellant’s combustion capabilities before the motors are accepted for test or flight.

What’s next?

NASA and its partners are expected to perform the last flight test of the launch abort system in 2019 before they begin sending crew to deep space aboard Orion. During the final test, an uncrewed Orion capsule will launch from a modified Peacekeeper missile and demonstrate a successful abort under the highest aerodynamic loads it could experience during a mission.

The jettison motor will be used during Orion’s first integrated mission with SLS, known as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) in late 2018. The mission will be the second test flight for Orion, and the first for SLS. EM-1 will send Orion on a three-week journey approximately 40,000 miles beyond the moon. The test will demonstrate the integrated performance of the rocket and spacecraft before their second test flight together, Exploration Mission-2, which will carry crew.

The LAS is led out NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia in collaboration with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

Sasha Ellis

NASA Langley Research Center

The Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) is one of the largest buildings in the world (525 ft 10 in tall, 716 ft long, and 518 ft wide) . It was originally built for assembly of Apollo/Saturn vehicles and was later modified to support Space Shuttle operations and now, Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for Exploration Mission 1.

In this view looking up from the floor of the VAB at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, four levels of new work platforms are now installed on the north and south sides of High Bay 3. The G-level work platforms were most recently installed, at about the 14th floor level. Below them are the H, J and K level platforms.

The G-level work platforms are the fourth of 10 levels of work platforms that will surround and provide access to SLS. The Ground Systems Development and Operations Program is overseeing upgrades and modifications to VAB High Bay 3, including installation of the new work platforms, to prepare for NASA’s journey to Mars.

Just me meeting my hero Katherine Johnson after interviewing her in the newsroom for another article I’m writing. nbd ((VERY BIG DEAL)) •🚀•🚀• Katherine G. Johnson is a pioneer in American space history. A NASA mathematician, Johnson’s computations have influenced every major space program from Mercury through the Shuttle. She even calculated the flight path for the first American mission space. In 1953, Johnson was contracted as a research mathematician at the Langley Research Center with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the agency that preceded NASA. She worked in a pool of women performing math calculations until she was temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team, and wound up staying there. Johnson’s specialty was calculating the trajectories for space shots which determined the timing for launches, including the Mercury mission and Apollo 11, the mission to the moon. (at NASA Langley Research Center)

For the first time, Kepler measured the “shock breakout” of a star, the early flash from the shockwave of a dying red supergiant. The flash comes from a type II supernova, KSN 2011d. Read more

Pluto ‘Paints’ its Largest Moon Red

In June 2015, when the cameras on NASA’s approaching New Horizons spacecraft first spotted the large reddish polar region on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, mission scientists knew two things: they’d never seen anything like it elsewhere in our solar system, and they couldn’t wait to get the story behind it.

Over the past year, after analyzing the images and other data that New Horizons has sent back from its historic July 2015 flight through the Pluto system, the scientists think they’ve solved the mystery. As they detail this week in the international scientific journal Nature, Charon’s polar coloring comes from Pluto itself – as methane gas that escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere and becomes “trapped” by the moon’s gravity and freezes to the cold, icy surface at Charon’s pole. This is followed by chemical processing by ultraviolet light from the sun that transforms the methane into heavier hydrocarbons and eventually into reddish organic materials called tholins.

"Who would have thought that Pluto is a graffiti artist, spray-painting its companion with a reddish stain that covers an area the size of New Mexico?" asked Will Grundy, a New Horizons co-investigator from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and lead author of the paper. "Every time we explore, we find surprises. Nature is amazingly inventive in using the basic laws of physics and chemistry to create spectacular landscapes."

The team combined analyses from detailed Charon images obtained by New Horizons with computer models of how ice evolves on Charon’s poles. Mission scientists had previously speculated that methane from Pluto’s atmosphere was trapped in Charon’s north pole and slowly converted into the reddish material, but had no models to support that theory.

The New Horizons team dug into the data to determine whether conditions on the Texas-sized moon (with a diameter of 753 miles or 1,212 kilometers) could allow the capture and processing of methane gas. The models using Pluto and Charon’s 248-year orbit around the sun show some extreme weather at Charon’s poles, where 100 years of continuous sunlight alternate with another century of continuous darkness. Surface temperatures during these long winters dip to -430 Fahrenheit (-257 Celsius), cold enough to freeze methane gas into a solid.

“The methane molecules bounce around on Charon's surface until they either escape back into space or land on the cold pole, where they freeze solid, forming a thin coating of methane ice that lasts until sunlight comes back in the spring,” Grundy said. But while the methane ice quickly sublimates away, the heavier hydrocarbons created from it remain on the surface.

The models also suggested that in Charon’s springtime the returning sunlight triggers conversion of the frozen methane back into gas. But while the methane ice quickly sublimates away, the heavier hydrocarbons created from this evaporative process remain on the surface.

Sunlight further irradiates those leftovers into reddish material – called tholins – that has slowly accumulated on Charon’s poles over millions of years. New Horizons’ observations of Charon’s other pole, currently in winter darkness – and seen by New Horizons only by light reflecting from Pluto, or “Pluto-shine” – confirmed that the same activity was occurring at both poles.

“This study solves one of the greatest mysteries we found on Charon, Pluto’s giant moon,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, and a study co-author. “And it opens up the possibility that other small planets in the Kuiper Belt with moons may create similar, or even more extensive ‘atmospheric transfer’ features on their moons.”

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Landing and Impact Research Facility

From enabling astronauts to practice moon landings to aircraft crash testing to drop tests for Orion, NASA's gantry has come full circle.

The gantry, a 240-foot high, 400-foot-long, 265-foot-wide A-frame steel structure located at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., was built in 1963 and was used to model lunar gravity. Originally named the Lunar Landing Research Facility (LLRF), the gantry became operational in 1965 and allowed astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin to train for Apollo 11's final 150 feet before landing on the moon.

Because the moon's gravity is only 1/6 as strong as Earth's, the gantry had a suspension system that supported 5/6 of the total weight of the Lunar Excursion Module Simulator (LEMS), the device the astronauts used to perform the tests. This supportive suspension system imitated the moon's gravitational environment. Additionally, many of the tests were conducted at night to recreate lighting conditions on the moon.

Neil Armstrong with the LEMS at the Lunar Landing Research Facility. This picture (below) was taken in February 1969 - just five months before Armstrong would become the first person to set foot on the surface of the moon.

Aircraft Crash Test Research

After the Apollo program concluded, a new purpose emerged for the gantry – aircraft crash testing. In 1972, the gantry was converted into the Impact Dynamics Research Facility (IDRF) and was used to investigate the crashworthiness of General Aviation (GA) aircraft and rotorcraft. The facility performed full-scale crash tests of GA aircraft and helicopters, system qualification tests of Army helicopters, vertical drop tests of Boeing 707 and composite fuselage sections and drop tests of the F-111 crew escape capsule.

The gantry was even used to complete a number of component tests in support of the Mars Sample Return Earth Entry Vehicle.

With features including a bridge and a 72-foot vertical drop tower, the gantry was able to support planes that weighed up to 30,000 pounds. Engineers lifted aircraft as high as 200 feet in the air and released them to determine how well the craft endured the crash. Data from the crash tests were used to define a typical acceleration for survivable crashes as well as to establish impact criteria for aircraft seats. The impact criteria are still used today as the Federal Aviation Administration standard for certification.

In 1985, the structure was named a National Historic Landmark based on its considerable contributions to the Apollo program.

Revitalized Space Mission

The gantry provides engineers and astronauts a means to prepare for Orion's return to Earth from such missions. With its new mission, the gantry also received a new name – the Landing and Impact Research (LandIR) Facility.

Although originally capable of supporting only 30,000 pounds, the new bridge can bear up to 64,000 pounds after the summer 2007 renovations. Other renovations include a new elevator, floor repairs and a parallel winch capability that allows an accurate adjustment of the pitch of the test article. The new parallel winch system increases the ability to accurately control impact pitch and pitching rotational rate. The gantry can also perform pendulum swings from as high as 200 feet with resultant velocities of over 70 miles per hour.

The gantry makes researching for the optimal landing alternative for NASA's first attempted, manned dry landing on Earth possible. Orion's return on land rather than water will facilitate reuse of the capsule. A water landing would make reuse difficult due to the corrosiveness of salt water.

The testing process involves lifting the test article by steel cables to a height between 40 and 60 feet and swinging it back to Earth. Although the airbags appear most promising, the gantry has the capability to perform different kinds of tests, including a retro rocket landing system and a scale-model, water landing test using a four-foot-deep circular pool. So far, three types of tests have been conducted in support of the Orion program, each progressing from the previous to more realistic features.

The first test consisted of dropping a boilerplate test article that was half the diameter of what Orion will be. For the second round of testing, engineers added a welded structure to the top, with a shape more comparable to Orion to examine the article's tendency to flip or remain upright.

Hydro-Impact

The on-going tests for Orion continue with impacts on water. This is to ensure astronaut safety during a return to Earth mission. Similar to the Apollo program, Orion will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at very high speeds and after slowing down, deploy parachutes to further slow the descent into the ocean. At NASA Langley Research Center, engineers use the hydro-impact research to determine the stresses on the vehicle and examine its behavior during a mock splashdown. 

At Hangar, Raptors Find Shelter from the Storm

As Tropical Storm Hermine charged up the East Coast Sept. 2, 2016, Langley Air Force Base reached out to the Research Services Directorate and NASA Langley Research Center hangar manager Dale Bowser to see if NASA Langley could store a few F-22 Raptors. Even though the hangar in Hampton, Virginia, already had a large visitor — a C-130 from the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore — the hangar was able to carefully sandwich in more than a dozen Air Force fighters and offer them protection from the wind. NASA Langley photographer David C. Bowman captured the image using a fish-eye lens and shooting down from the hangar's catwalk some 70 feet above the building's floor.

The hangar provides 85,200 square feet (7,915 square meters) of open space and large door dimensions that allow for entry of big aircraft such as Boeing 757s and other commercial or military transport-class planes. The hangar normally is home to 13 of NASA Langley's own research aircraft, when they are not out doing atmospheric science or aeronautics research. Still, there is enough space to share with neighboring Langley Air Force Base during emergencies. The facility is rated for at least a Category 2 hurricane. Built in the early 1950s, it was designed to fit a B-36. It can also accommodate the Super Guppy, which visited NASA Langley in 2014. 

Image credit: NASA/David C. Bowman

The Space Shuttle Endeavour, atop a NASA 747, flies over Texas near the Johnson Space Center, December 11, 2008. (NASA)