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JPL and Autodesk Design Spider-Like Interplanetary Lander

posted by martyb on Thursday November 15 2018, @12:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the 'shadow'-of-things-to-come? dept.

takyon writes:

AI software helped NASA dream up this spider-like interplanetary lander

Using an AI design process, engineers at software company Autodesk and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory came up with a new interplanetary lander concept that could explore distant moons like Europa and Enceladus. Its slim design weighs less than most of the landers that NASA has already sent to other planets and moons.

Autodesk announced its new innovative lander design today at the company's conference in Las Vegas — revealing a spacecraft that looks like a spider woven from metal. The company says the idea to create the vehicle was sparked when Autodesk approached NASA to validate a lander prototype it had been working on. After looking at Autodesk's work, JPL and the company decided to form a design team — comprised of five engineers from Autodesk and five from JPL — to come up with a new way to design landers.

See also: These Organic-Inspired Planetary Landers Could Help NASA Reach Other Worlds

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday November 15 2018, @01:10AM (3 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday November 15 2018, @01:10AM (#761997) Homepage Journal

    The original design for the Lunar Lander came out twice as heavy as NASA had budgeted for it. Designing the too-heavy model had taken up some precious time - they took JFK's "Before The Decade Is Out" challenge seriously. NASA proceeded with SWIP.

    They did such things as determine how many layers of aluminized mylar insulation were _really_ necessary. The cut down everything they could.

    We can see that SWIP actually worked. Has Google a link?

    https://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-4205/ch7-3.html [nasa.gov]

    Actually it was Grumman that initiated SWIP, they also had something called Scrape. I clearly remember the book I read said the original design was 2X too heavy, but the article doesn't seem to say that. Now this is really cool:

    Arnold Whitaker described how the fabrication group was caught in the squeeze between manufacturing requirements and schedule pressures. At a program management meeting he said that "one of the fellows in manufacturing came in [with] a light cardboard box. . . . He said, 'I'll show you why everything's late.' And he dumped out a whole box of machined parts . . . , very complex fittings [too thin to be even] reasonably heavy sheet metal - but it wasn't any sheet metal, it was a complex machined fitting. And he said 'Man, we never built parts like this before in any quantity like this and every fitting on the LEM looks like this.' "

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday November 15 2018, @07:16AM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 15 2018, @07:16AM (#762083) Journal
    It's worth noting here with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, one doesn't need to SWIP (Super Weight Improvement Program) as hard. That saves a lot of cost since you're not optimizing weight of the vehicle as much at the expense of cost.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 15 2018, @07:41AM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday November 15 2018, @07:41AM (#762087) Journal

      BFR will dial that up a notch.

      However, if you do optimize weight, you can launch the object at a higher velocity, or perhaps put more of them on one vehicle and send them in different directions.

      One of the supposed reasons for launching Europa Clipper on the SLS is to ensure that it can get to Jupiter faster.

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:23PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:23PM (#762161) Journal

        However, if you do optimize weight, you can launch the object at a higher velocity, or perhaps put more of them on one vehicle and send them in different directions.

        Or simply launch less stuff at a time.