NASA Navigation Experiment Shows Promise for Planetary Landings

NASA has successfully demonstrated technology designed to help spacecraft autonomously navigate to safe landing sites on the Moon and on other planets. An Alta-X drone equipped with the agency's Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) payload completed simulated lunar descent and landing maneuvers on Aug. 27 at Rogers Dry Lake near NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. During the test flights, the SPLICE payload used an advanced guidance system to map terrain and assess potential landing areas. If the system determines that a targeted landing area is unsafe, it diverts the drone to a safer location. The system generates high-resolution digital elevation maps from light-detection and sensor data. Researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston developed the SPLICE payload and partnered with specialists at NASA Armstrong to integrate, test, and fly it aboard the Alta-X drone in June and July. Those earlier tests verified communications, data handling, telemetry, and command-and-control performance between the payload and the drone, in preparation for a full-scale test at Voyager Technologies in Mojave, California. Davis Adams, NASA project manager for SPLICE, described the flight as the culmination of nearly a decade of work on the project. He said the flight raised the technology readiness level, priming the system for integration into future robotic and crewed lunar flights, and that validation of the guidance and navigation systems applies to terrestrial, lunar, and Martian descent and landing missions. NASA has worked with a number of commercial lunar lander providers to implement iterations of SPLICE into their platforms. Several landers slated for upcoming Moon Base missions are expected to leverage data collected by NASA through the development of systems like SPLICE to execute soft touchdowns on the lunar surface. Adams said NASA is coordinating with industry on the use of the guidance system once it becomes available in the NASA software catalog, currently planned for this fall. He added that some companies are also evaluating the system's navigation capabilities for precision landing applications, as well as potential extensions for autonomous surface mobility. The agency's Flight Opportunities project, based at NASA Armstrong, enabled early flight testing of SPLICE that laid the foundation for its continued advancement. That testing included a descent altitude and landing trajectory in 2019 similar to what is expected on a lunar mission, as well as the 2020 demonstration of two NASA-developed precision landing sensor systems.