According to Morpheus Ops Lead
Ian Young, “On a small project like
this that requires all those things, the
propulsion guys get a better feel and
understanding of what the structures
guys requires or what he needs and
vice-versa. Versus if you are working
on a bigger project, you’ve got a
propulsion team that has probably
50 people on it by itself, so you don’t
get outside of the propulsion area
to see how choices you make my
impact somebody else. Where as
in this, interacting on a daily basis
with just about everyone, there are
two or three propulsion guys and
two or three structure guys, so if the
propulsion guy has a problem, he’ll
Olansen adds “One of the hardest
a whole lot of money, to use assets
prototype. You don’t want to build
were conducted in 2011, and things
did not always go well.
You want to make sure you get as
much out of it as you can, but not
have so much sunk into it that you
the lander is suspended from a crane
and remains attached to the tether,
was supposed to be a 40 second
part of making sure we actually get
Another of the team’s high level
goals is education and outreach.
right up our alley with what we’ve
been doing since we started the
streamed live as part of that goal.
vehicle almost immediately pitched
over and the thrust termination
system ended the test.
Not deterred, the team analyzed
the data, made changes and was
A much better outcome resulted and
them on the right track.
better results. Much work was yet to
be done, many more tethered tests
and further development of the
lander was beginning to perform. A
performed before 2011 ended.
In March of 2012, the team rolled
out what was essentially a new
vehicle. While the structure and
were the same, the vehicle itself
understanding of our ability to control
the vehicle and allowed us to initially
characterize the performance of the
things to grow in an agency like
of people come in with discipline
about, propulsion engineering, you
like rockets, you want to design and
who understands across all of those
different systems and how they have
to integrate and helps integrate
involved in the project as co-ops or
interns over the last three and a half
years. We’ve had a couple of high
school students as interns as well.
We have partnerships with different
universities on different aspects of
the project. I just received an email
from Perdue University, their students
have actually built a rocket engine
aren’t that many opportunities to
something we will go advertise as
so this is another thing that this project
06
Morpheus at this time has a
new engine, new avionics, and
in preparations for the addition of its
Autonomous Landing and Hazard
system that will be added later. With
all these changes, more tethered tests
would need to be performed before
entertained. A total of 20 tethered
ready
06
said. “With that information we
were able to go back and design in
upgrades to improve performance
before the team would be ready to
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