Augmented Reality Speeds Spacecraft Construction at NASA Goddard

• Augmented reality tools have helped technicians improve accuracy and save time on fit checks for the Roman Space Telescope being assembled at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
• In one instance, manipulating a digital model of Roman’s propulsion system into the real telescope structure revealed the planned design would not fit around existing wiring. The finding helped avoid a need to rebuild any components.
• The R&D team at Goddard working on this AR project suggests broader adoption in the future could potentially save weeks of construction time and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Technicians armed with advanced measuring equipment, augmented reality headsets, and QR codes virtually checked the fit of some Roman Space Telescope structures before building or moving them through facilities at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“We’ve been able to place sensors, mounting interfaces, and other spacecraft hardware in 3D space faster and more accurately than previous techniques,” said NASA Goddard engineer Ron Glenn. “That could be a huge benefit to any program’s cost and schedule.” 

Projecting digital models onto the real world allows the technicians to align parts and look for potential interference among them. The AR heads-up display also enables precise positioning of flight hardware for assembly with accuracy down to thousandths of an inch.

Using NASA’s Internal Research and Development program, Glenn said his team keeps finding new ways to improve how NASA builds spacecraft with AR technology in a project aiding Roman’s construction at NASA Goddard. 

Glenn said the team has achieved far more than they originally sought to prove. “The original project goal was to develop enhanced assembly solutions utilizing AR and find out if we could eliminate costly fabrication time,” he said. “We found the team could do so much more.”

For instance, engineers using a robotic arm for precision measuring and 3D laser scanning mapped Roman’s complex wiring harness and the volume within the spacecraft structure.  

“Manipulating the virtual model of Roman’s propulsion assembly into that frame, we found places where it interfered with the existing wiring harness, team engineer Eric Brune said. “Adjusting the propulsion assembly before building it allowed the mission to avoid costly and time-consuming delays.”

Roman’s propulsion system was successfully integrated earlier this year.

Considering the time it takes to design, build, move, redesign, and rebuild, Brune added, their work saved many workdays by multiple engineers and technicians.

“We have identified many additional benefits to these combinations of technologies,” team engineer Aaron Sanford said. “Partners at other locations can collaborate directly through the technicians’ point of view. Using QR codes for metadata storage and document transfer adds another layer of efficiency, enabling quick access to relevant information right at your fingertips. Developing AR techniques for reverse engineering and advanced structures opens many possibilities such as training and documentation.” 

The technologies allow 3D designs of parts and assemblies to be shared or virtually handed off from remote locations. They also enable dry runs of moving and installing structures as well as help capture precise measurements after parts are built to compare to their designs. 

Adding a precision laser tracker to the mix can also eliminate the need to create elaborate physical templates to ensure components are accurately mounted in precise positions and orientations, Sanford said. Even details such as whether a technician can physically extend an arm inside a structure to turn a bolt or manipulate a part can be worked out in augmented reality before construction. 

During construction, an engineer wearing a headset can reference vital information, like the torque specifications for individual bolts, using a hand gesture. In fact, the engineer could achieve this without having to pause and find the information on another device or in paper documents.  

In the future, the team hopes to help integrate various components, conduct inspections, and document final construction. Sanford said, “it’s a cultural shift. It takes time to adopt these new tools.”  

“It will help us rapidly produce spacecraft and instruments, saving weeks and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Glenn said. “That allows us to return resources to the agency to develop new missions.” 

This project is part of NASA’s Center Innovation Fund portfolio for fiscal year 2024 at Goddard. The Center Innovation Fund, within the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, stimulates and encourages creativity and innovation at NASA centers while addressing the technology needs of NASA and the nation.

To learn more, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/center-innovation-fund/

By Karl B. Hille
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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Karl B. Hille

Why Scientists Are Intrigued by Air in NASA’s Mars Sample Tubes

Tucked away with each rock and soil sample collected by the agency’s Perseverance rover is a potential boon for atmospheric scientists.

Atmospheric scientists get a little more excited with every rock core NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover seals in its titanium sample tubes, which are being gathered for eventual delivery to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. Twenty-four have been taken so far.

Most of those samples consist of rock cores or regolith (broken rock and dust) that might reveal important information about the history of the planet and whether microbial life was present billions of years ago. But some scientists are just as thrilled at the prospect of studying the “headspace,” or air in the extra room around the rocky material, in the tubes.

They want to learn more about the Martian atmosphere, which is composed mostly of carbon dioxide but could also include trace amounts of other gases that may have been around since the planet’s formation.

“The air samples from Mars would tell us not just about the current climate and atmosphere, but how it’s changed over time,” said Brandi Carrier, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It will help us understand how climates different from our own evolve.”

The Value of Headspace

Among the samples that could be brought to Earth is one tube filled solely with gas deposited on the Martian surface as part of a sample depot. But far more of the gas in the rover’s collection is within the headspace of rock samples. These are unique because the gas will be interacting with rocky material inside the tubes for years before the samples can be opened and analyzed in laboratories on Earth. What scientists glean from them will lend insight into how much water vapor hovers near the Martian surface, one factor that determines why ice forms where it does on the planet and how Mars’ water cycle has evolved over time.

Scientists also want a better understanding of trace gases in the air at Mars. Most scientifically tantalizing would be the detection of noble gases (such as neon, argon, and xenon), which are so nonreactive that they may have been around, unchanged in the atmosphere, since forming billions of years ago. If captured, those gases could reveal whether Mars started with an atmosphere. (Ancient Mars had a much thicker atmosphere than it does today, but scientists aren’t sure whether it was always there or whether it developed later). There are also big questions about how the planet’s ancient atmosphere compared with early Earth’s.

The headspace would additionally provide a chance to assess the size and toxicity of dust particles — information that will help future astronauts on Mars.

“The gas samples have a lot to offer Mars scientists,” said Justin Simon, a geochemist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, who is part of a group of over a dozen international experts that helps decide which samples the rover should collect. “Even scientists who don’t study Mars would be interested because it will shed light on how planets form and evolve.”

Apollo’s Air Samples

In 2021, a group of planetary researchers, including scientists from NASA, studied the air brought back from the Moon in a steel container by Apollo 17 astronauts some 50 years earlier.

“People think of the Moon as airless, but it has a very tenuous atmosphere that interacts with the lunar surface rocks over time,” said Simon, who studies a variety of planetary samples at Johnson. “That includes noble gases leaking out of the Moon’s interior and collecting at the lunar surface.”

The way Simon’s team extracted the gas for study is similar to what could be done with Perseverance’s air samples. First, they put the previously unopened container into an airtight enclosure. Then they pierced the steel with a needle to extract the gas into a cold trap — essentially a U-shaped pipe that extends into a liquid, like nitrogen, with a low freezing point. By changing the temperature of the liquid, scientists captured some of the gases with lower freezing points at the bottom of the cold trap.

“There’s maybe 25 labs in the world that manipulate gas in this way,” Simon said. Besides being used to study the origin of planetary materials, this approach can be applied to gases from hot springs and those emitted from the walls of active volcanoes, he added.

Of course, those sources provide much more gas than Perseverance has in its sample tubes. But if a single tube doesn’t carry enough gas for a particular experiment, Mars scientists could combine gases from multiple tubes to get a larger aggregate sample — one more way the headspace offers a bonus opportunity for science.

More About the Mission

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover is also characterizing the planet’s geology and past climate, which paves the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

News Media Contacts

Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Charles Blue
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-285-1600 / 202-802-5345
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / charles.e.blue@nasa.gov

2024-087

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NASA CubeSats Loaded for Launch

Eight CubeSats that are part of NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative have been integrated into Firefly Aerospace’s deployment hardware and are ready to be encapsulated into the payload fairing of Firefly’s Alpha rocket. The launch, named “Noise of Summer,” will lift off early this summer from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. 

University students from several schools, along with some technicians from NASA, brought their small satellites to Firefly for integration with the rocket. The satellites are designed to perform a range of scientific experiments and technical demonstrations including high-speed communications, cosmic ray detection, climate monitoring, and new de-orbiting techniques. 

The CubeSats on the ELaNa 43 (Educational Launch of a Nanosatellite) manifest are: 

• CatSat – University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 
• KUbe-Sat-1 – University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 
• MESAT1 – University of Maine, Orono, Maine 
• R5-S4 – NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas 
• R5-S2-2.0 – NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston 
• SOC-i – University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 
• TechEdSat-11 – NASA’s Ames Research Center, California’s Silicon Valley 
• Serenity – Teachers in Space  

Students are heavily involved in all aspects of their mission from developing, assembling, and testing payloads to working with NASA and the launch vehicle integration teams. The CubeSats are held to rigorous standards like that of the primary spacecraft.  

Firefly Aerospace is one of three companies selected under NASA’s Launch Services Program Venture-Class Launch Services Demonstration 2 (VCLS Demo 2) contract awarded in December 2020. These VCLS Demo 2 missions can tolerate a higher level of risk and help create opportunities for new launch vehicles, helping grow the launch vehicle market while increasing access to space for small spacecraft and science missions. 

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Laura Aguiar

Giant Batteries Deliver Renewable Energy When It’s Needed

Solar power is abundant – when the Sun is shining. Wind power is steady – when the wind is blowing. However, creating a steady electricity supply from intermittent power sources is a challenge. NASA was focused on this problem more than 45 years ago when the agency designed a new type of liquid battery during the energy price shocks of the 1970s. While engineers continued over the following decades to develop flow batteries, as they’re now called, the technology has drawn even more attention in recent years, with the urgency of climate change powering a larger-scale transition to renewables like solar and wind.

It’s fair to say that flow batteries today owe something to the major push the technology received in the 1970s when a NASA team of chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineers developed an iron-chromium flow battery at Lewis Research Center – now Glenn Research Center – in Cleveland.

The NASA system involved two tanks of liquid electrolyte solutions, one infused with iron chloride and the other with chromium chloride. These electrolytes were pumped through the battery cell, triggering a chemical reaction through a membrane that separated the two solutions inside the battery. During charge, electrical energy was converted to chemical energy and stored in the electrolyte liquid. To discharge the energy, the process was reversed.

Wilsonville, Oregon-based ESS Inc. built on NASA’s early work as the company developed its own flow batteries using only iron, salt, and water.  When the ESS team began developing its battery in 2011, the company founders wanted to use iron as NASA had. They found they could pair iron with a simple salt solution, which was cheaper to obtain and easier to work with than the chromium mixture NASA had used.

ESS flow batteries are designed for power grids that are increasingly powered by intermittent wind and solar generation. The company’s systems store up to 12 hours of energy and are used to provide backup power to critical community facilities.

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A Bright New Abrasion

Last week, Perseverance arrived at the long-awaited site of Bright Angel, named for being a light-toned rock that stands out in orbital data. The unique color here, as well as the surface characteristics and location on the edge of the ancient river channel Neretva Vallis, made Bright Angel a location of interest for the Mars 2020 Science Team.

After capturing some stunning long-distance images of Bright Angel, Perseverance made the approach to the rocks. Closer camera images, Mastcam-Z, and SuperCam data showed intriguing surface textures on these light-toned rocks that the Science Team is actively working to understand.

After a few days to process the beautiful images and exciting location, Perseverance executed a planned abrasion on the rocks in front of the rover, which can be seen in the above image if you look closely underneath the rover’s arm. This abrasion patch is named “Walhalla Glades” after an ancient archeological site in the Grand Canyon along the Colorado River, a tribute to Bright Angel’s location on the edge of the ancient Neretva Vallis river channel.

Proximity science instruments were deployed to look at the abrasion patch in detail and provide high-resolution geochemical data of these rocks. In the Hazard Avoidance Camera image above, the PIXL instrument is pointed down at the abrasion patch on the rock surface as it performs a scan.

The Science Team will take time to understand all the new data obtained at Bright Angel, comparing it to the past rocks Perseverance has investigated and determining if the area should be included in the sample cache onboard Perseverance. Characterizing the rocks of Bright Angel, connecting them to the surrounding rocks and sediment of Neretva Vallis, and placing them in context with the Crater Rim and Margin units should write an exciting chapter of the history of Jezero crater!

Written by Eleanor Moreland, Ph.D. Student Collaborator at Rice University

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