Artist's concept of Space Exploration Rovers and Portable Habitat at the moon's South Pole. Image Credit/NASA
Stretched across much of northern Arizona, the Black Point Lava Flow resembles an alien landscape on Earth, the perfect place for NASA to test rovers, habitats, space suits and the other equipment that future astronauts will need when they explore the moon, the asteroids as well as Mars and the moons of the Red Planet.
Starting Aug. 31, more than 100 engineers, scientist and astronauts will gather for 15 days on the high altitude lava flow for the 13th annual, NASA-hosted Desert Research and Technology Studies, an extended field test better known as Desert Rats.
As they gather to test the latest in high tech exploration hardware this year, policy makers are still debating NASA’s future exploration goals.
The White House would like to cancel NASA’s six-year-old, lunar-oriented Constellation Program and focus on the development of commercial space transportation systems while preparing for a 2025 human mission to an asteroid. The House would prefer to preserve much of Constellation. The Senate would like for NASA to prepare for undesignated deep space missions by 2016. All envision Mars as an ultimate destination.
This year’s Desert Rats is intended to help prepare NASA for any destinations that policy makers ultimately settle on.
Joe Kosmo, Desert Rats mission manager Photo Credit/NASA
“None of the systems (we test) will be flight hardware, obviously,” explained Joe Kosmo, NASA’s Desert Rats mission manager. “What they represent are prototypes that allow the young engineers to build and test something so you can really flush out realistic requirements.” Kosmo and his preparation team offered a recent opportunity to look at the equipment they plan to test before it was shipped by tractor-trailer from NASA’s Johnson Space Center to northern Arizona.
The equipment includes two battery-powered Space Exploration Vehicles, each serving as a mobile habitat for an astronaut and field geologist and a Habitat Demonstration Unit configured as a Pressurized Excursion Module. During Desert Rats, the rover crews will assess the productivity of two exploration strategies, a lead and trail approach that keeps the two vehicles close together and a second strategy in which the vehicles would follow more independent courses across an alien landscape.
Space Exploration Vehicle Photo Credit/NASA
The participants will evaluate two strategies for communicating with the Earth, a continuous dialogue approach and a constrained daily scheduled exchange of information with Earth.
The SEVs will traverse the mountainous Arizona terrain without airlocks this year. Instead, the vehicles are equipped with suit ports, which allow the rover crews to step directly into space suits stored on the outside of the rovers.
“This approach allows you to get in and out of the suits in minutes,” said Bill Bluethmann, who supervised the rover preparations as deputy chief of NASA’s robotics systems technology branch at Johnson. “That really changes the way you explore. Instead of being out for six to eight hours, you can do multiple short spacewalks, of one to two hours each.”
The rovers will rendezvous and dock with the HDU/PEM on day six-seven of the Desert Rats field testing to re-charge batteries and change crews.
The circular habitat features a glove box for the enclosed evaluation of rocks and soil samples, a medical station to support emergency as well as standard crew medical needs as well as work benches for space suit and tool maintenance.
A new addition this year adds an electrostatic barrier to the rover docking ports on the habitat that can be activated by the SEV crews with a handheld remote. The electrostatic field is design to reject dust that would otherwise make its way into the habitat.
One change under study for next year would add a second story inflatable module to the HDU/PEM for habitation. The change would tailor a habitat once suited for lunar exploration into a shelter tailored for a mission to an asteroid without rovers, said Terry Tri, NASA Johnson’s HDU test operations manager.
“Most of that feeds right in,” said Tri of Desert RAT’s ability to pivot from Constellation to new mission requirements. “Almost everything we do in technology can be easily vectored for different high level goals the agency sets.”