Mission design for safe traverse of planetary hoppers

Planetary hoppers are a new class of vehicle being developed that will provide planetary surface mobility by reusing the landing platform and its actuators to propulsively ascend, translate, and descend to new landing points on the surface of a planetary body. Hoppers enhance regional exploration, with the capability of rapid traverse over hundreds to thousands of meters, traverse over hazardous terrain, and exploration of cliffs and craters. These planetary mobility vehicles are fuel limited and as a result are enabled by carrying sensor payloads that require low mass, low volume, and low onboard computational resources. This thesis describes methods for hoppers to traverse and land safely in this constrained environment. The key questions of this research are: - What types of missions will hoppers perform and how does a hopper traverse as part of these missions? - How does a hopper traverse from its current location to a new landing site safely? This thesis: - describes various hopper mission scenarios and considerations for their mission designs. - creates an operational concept for safe landing for the traverse hop mission scenario. - develops a method that can be used to rapidly and safely detect landing areas at long ranges and low path angles. - develops a method to do fine detection of hazards once at the landing area.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Cohanim, Babak, 1980-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jeffrey A. Hoffman.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82476

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/82476