Manned Lunar Landing

Optimal Guidance for Lunar Module Soft Landing

In this paper, we consider an optimal control problem arising from the optimal guidance of a lunar module to achieving soft landing, where the description of the system dynamics is in a three-dimensional coordinate system. Our aim is to construct an optimal guidance law to realize the soft landing of the lunar module with the terminal attitude of the module to be within a small deviation from b...

From Bees’ surface following to Lunar landing

To better grasp the visuomotor control system underlying insects’ height and speed control (Srinivasan et al. 1996, Portelli et al. 2010a), we attempted to interfere with this system by producing a major perturbation on the free flying insect and observing the effect of this perturbation. Honeybees were trained to fly along a high-roofed tunnel, part of which was equipped with a moving floor. T...

Developing Lunar Access 1 Running head: SPACECRAFT DESIGN REQUIREMENTS VIA CONTENT ANALYSIS Developing Lunar Landing Vehicle Display Requirements through Content Analysis of Apollo Lunar Landing Voice Communications

The lengthy period since the Apollo landings limits present-day engineers attempting to draw from the experiences of veteran Apollo engineers and astronauts in the design of a new lunar lander. In order to circumvent these limitations, content analyses were performed on the voice transcripts of the Apollo lunar landing missions. The analyses highlighted numerous inefficiencies in the design of ...

Apollo 14 Visibility Tests: Visibility of Lunar Surface Features and Lunar Landing

A New Model for Determining Lunar Rock Abundance and Landing

Introduction: With NASA’s return to the Moon, the determination of safe landing sites for future robotic and human missions is crucial, and rock abundance will be important criteria for landing site selection. Thermal inertias derived from remote sensing in the thermal infrared is a powerful technique for assessing rock abundance for the purpose of landing site selection on Mars [1,2]. Rocks a ...