Student team's lunar landing site could help NASA astronauts avoid risky moon landings
When NASA first sent humans to the moon, astronauts often made risky blind landings on the lunar surface due to billowing clouds of dust that rose during their descent. Astronauts could avoid repeating these harrowing experiences on future missions to the moon with a 3D printed lunar landing pad designed by a NASA student team.
Designed by students from 10 American universities and colleges, the landing site is shaped to minimize lunar dust clouds caused by rockets and could eventually be made from regolith found on the moon. A prototype launch pad is slated to launch in early March at Camp Swift, Texas, under the watchful eye of NASA students and engineers, to test the rocket with hot fire.
“We have shown that we can 3D print the structure using our existing prototype,” says Helen Carson, a student of materials science and engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle and principal investigator of the Lunar PAD team. "So far, we have a lot of flexibility with different directions that we can take depending on how the materials are evolving."
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The concept of a 3D printed site could ultimately prove useful for future missions to Mars and other planets. Such launch pad designs need to account for some differences in atmosphere and gravity on rocket plumes and dust clouds, not to mention factors such as electrostatically charged dust particles from the Moon and Martian dust storms. However, the team designed the site to potentially work outside of the moon landing scenarios.
“Our goal was to build a reusable site for all extraterrestrial environments,” says Murai.