Quote:
Originally Posted by cooker52
Very impressive. Will it be more controllable than the MER on the landing?
|
Yes, we'll have more control, but we're still not to the point where we can drop a lander right where we want to. There is a program based at JSC called ALHAT (Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology) that is looking at ways to autonomously land a spacecraft fairly close to a pre-determined location. One of the problems that my group is working on (with folks at Goddard) is providing the computational throughput needed to calculate a safe path to the landing area. Looking at the current algorithms, we think we'll need a computer(s) that can provide a sustained throughput of a few hundred billion calculations per second, which is a few orders of magnitude faster than current flight-qualified CPUs.
-Kevin