Astrobotic's Autonomous Landing System Tested
Astrobotic’s Autonomous Landing System Tested in Masten’s Xombie Flight, SpaceRef Business
“Astrobotic Technology’s newly developed autonomous landing system was put to the test recently when it controlled Masten Space Systems’ XA-0.1B Xombie suborbital technology demonstration rocket during a flight test at the Mojave Air and Space Port.”
Related: NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate Flight Opportunities Program.
Now Xombie can choose its own landing place on the Moon. I suspect this will apply to any landers Masten Space Systems design in the future, such as Xeus.
NASA’s Morpheus lander can also do this using a rival design.
Two big problems remain – space rating the hardware and getting them to lunar orbit.
[d’ohh… wrong post]
Nice! Autonomy and space are a match made in heaven. Do more! Fund computer science, software, robotics for space applications. Get universities involved. Morpheus gets me excited since I see it as an open(?) software package that could be tuned for and used on different hardware as needed. Build landers that send somewhat standardized data to the brain, tweak the brain for the hardware and mission, and let it do the decision making. Hell, make it learn with learning algorithms too. Learning lander! Of course if it’s a Moon lander, it can’t go full-on learn mode on first go, but let it learn on the job with the pre-programmed autonomous functionality doing the work at first.