La o lună după zborul lui Bezos, Blue Origin lansează demonstrația tehnologică lunară NASA

Marca temporală: 26 august 2021 9:12
Nodul sursă: 1062697

NOTĂ EDITORULUI: Updated at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) after launch.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster lifts off Thursday from West Texas. Credit: Blue Origin

Blue Origin launched its reusable New Shepard booster from West Texas on a suborbital flight to the edge of space Thursday on the company’s first mission since founder Jeff Bezos and three crewmates rocketed to an altitude of 66 miles last month.

But this mission didn’t carry people. Instead, the single stage New Shepard booster launched Thursday flew a suite of research payloads, including some for NASA.

Blue Origin’s launch team loaded super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket early Thursday. Liftoff from Blue Origin’s test site north of Van Horn, Texas, occurred at 10:31 a.m. EDT (9:31 a.m. CDT; 1431 GMT) after a nearly one-hour hold.

The delay in the launch time Thursday was at least partially caused by a “payload readiness issue,” a Blue Origin official said in the company’s launch webcast. The company delayed the New Shepard launch from Wednesday for unspecified reasons.

The rocket’s BE-3 engine throttled up to generate 110,000 pounds of thrust to power the New Shepard booster off the ground. A crew capsule — without any passengers — was mounted on top of the rocket for the flight to space.

After firing more than two minutes, the main engine cut off and the crew capsule separated from the New Shepard booster after reaching a maximum speed of 2,229 mph (3,586 kilometers per hour). The capsule coasted to an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (105.6 kilometers), above the internationally-recognized boundary of space, before falling back to Earth.

The booster deployed air brakes and reignited its BE-3 engine to slow down for landing on a concrete pad a couple of miles north of its launch site. Moments later, the crew capsule deployed three main parachutes and fired its own small retrorockets for touchdown on the desert floor at Blue Origin’s sprawling 80,000-acre test facility.

A down-facing camera aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster captured this view of West Texas as it reached apogee Thursday. Credit: Blue Origin

The mission was be the 17th flight of a New Shepard booster, and the eighth launch of this particular reusable rocket, which is dedicated to flying research payloads, according to Blue Origin.

Compania are o a doua rachetă în inventarul său pentru lansări umane. Vehiculul a fost folosit pentru lansarea fondatorului Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, fratele său Mark, pionierul aviației Wally Funk și adolescentul olandez Oliver Daemen într-un zbor suborbital către spațiu, 20 iulie.

La acea vreme, oficialii Blue Origin au declarat că compania a planificat încă două misiuni New Shepard anul acesta, începând cu zborul de cercetare joi. O altă lansare cu pasageri este programată înainte de sfârșitul anului 2021.

Blue Origin a deschis vânzările de bilete pentru ca turiștii și oamenii de știință să plătească pentru a zbura în spațiu în viitoarele zboruri New Shepard. Dar compania nu a dezvăluit public un preț pe scaun.

The mission launched Thursday — designated New Shepard-17, or NS-17 — flew 18 commercial payloads inside the crew capsule, 11 of which are supported by NASA, according to Blue Origin.

On the exterior of the New Shepard booster, teams mounted a package of NASA-provided sensors to test precision landing technologies that could guide future robotic and crewed missions to landings on the moon.

Experimentul tehnologic face parte din demonstrația senzorului de debit, coborâre și aterizare a NASA, posibilă printr-un parteneriat „Tipping Point” între Blue Origin și Direcția Misiunii Tehnologice Spațiale a NASA.

Blue Origin flew the lunar landing sensors on the NS-13 mission last October. The company said the NS-17 mission was expected to “further test” the technology to “reduce risk and increase confidence for successful missions to the moon.”

The experiment was designed to test key components of NASA’s Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution, or SPLICE, technology suite. NASA says the SPLICE sensors “will enable safer and more accurate lunar landings than ever before.” The system’s algorithms and sensors could allow lunar landers to touch down in rugged regions with boulders and craters, places that were unreachable during the Apollo program.

The sensors are capable of identifying hazards such as steep slopes and boulders, allowing lunar landers to steer to the safest touchdown zone with a circular area around 330 feet, or 100 meters, in diameter. It’s part of NASA’s technology development initiatives for the agency’s Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface later this decade.

NASA a semnat un acord de 3 milioane de dolari cu Blue Origin în 2018 pentru a zbura o navigație relativă a terenului, un dopar de navigație lidar și alți senzori de altimetrie în misiunile New Shepard.

Before the mission, officials said the New Shepard flight would help validate the performance of a navigation doppler lidar and a terrain relative navigation camera attached to the upper portion of the New Shepard booster. On a lunar landing mission, the sensors would feed data about the spacecraft’s position and speed to the lander’s guidance computer.

Acest infografic ilustrează obiectivele experimentului de aterizare de precizie pe noul rapel Shepard de la Blue Origin. Credit: Blue Origin

On Thursday’s test flight, a descent and landing computer housed inside the New Shepard rocket was expected to receive and process the sensor data.

NASA spune că zborul senzorilor pe o rachetă suborbitală permite inginerilor să adune mai multe date despre sistem, dincolo de ceea ce este posibil în testele de laborator, elicopter și la altitudine mai mică.

Suita SPLICE va zbura spre Lună pe o pereche de aterizoare robotizate comerciale de la Mașinile Astrobotice și Intuitive, imediat ce anul viitor.

Blue Origin a declarat că lansarea NS-13 anul trecut „a informat o serie de îmbunătățiri esențiale ale lidarului de navigație dopar și computerului de aterizare a coborârii.

Datele brute din experimentul tehnic de aterizare lunară vor fi publicate pentru a fi utilizate de companiile americane care dezvoltă misiuni lunare.

Blue Origin își proiectează propriul aterizator de marfă și echipaj pentru misiuni lunare, dar NASA a selectat la începutul acestui an SpaceX pentru a dezvolta un aterizator lunar de rang uman pentru prima misiune de aterizare Artemis a agenției. Blue Origin a protestat împotriva alegerii către Biroul de Responsabilitate al Guvernului, dar GAO a confirmat decizia NASA.

La începutul acestei luni, Blue Origin a intentat o acțiune în legătură cu selectarea SpaceX de către NASA pentru sistemul de aterizare de rang uman.

Science payloads that flew in the New Shepard crew capsule Thursday included an experiment to evaluate methods of measuring propellant levels in spacecraft tanks, and an investigation looking how to transform trash into resources, such as water and propellant, that could be used on crews traveling in deep space.

Other experiments included an investigation from Southwest Research Institute to look at liquid and vapor interfaces in microgravity. Data from this experiment could help inform the design of rockets using long-term cryogenic propellant storage in space.

An investigation from the University of Florida was to use a fluorescence imaging system that enables biological research on suborbital missions.

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Sursa: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/08/26/ns-17-new-shepard-launch/

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