The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, is NASA's  Exploration Systems Mission Directorate's (ESMD) first mission to extend human presence in the universe. Our Nation's return to the moon will enable the pursuit of scientific activities that address fundamental questions about the history of Earth, the solar system and the universe. Our return to the moon is allowing us to test technologies, systems, flight operations and exploration techniques to reduce risk and enable future exploration missions. LRO was launched on August 18th, 2009 on board an Atlas V launch vehicle and was successfully inserted into lunar orbit 5 days later on August 23rd. LRO was designed and built at NASA's  Goddard Space Flight Center for ESMD. It has returned exciting science from lunar orbit. For more information, please visitwww.nasa.gov/lro or lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov.

Constellation

Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) Project Orion
Orion, also known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), will take astronauts into space after the retirement of the Space Shuttle. ESP’s Orion Engineering Group contributes to several key areas of the Orion acquisition effort spanning development of the radio frequency (RF) subsystem and radiation analysis and parts testing.

The engineering team provides direct support to the CEV Project for a number of technical areas encompassing the S-band and Ka-band communications elements for Orion including antenna coverage analysis, communications link margins, RF interference assessment, and spacecraft tracking requirements. Support includes participation in overall architecture definition for the subsystem, review of various Constellation documents, and reviews of action items, as well as, subsystem and component technical specifications.

New satellite measurements for environmental radiation levels in space are being used to update models of radiation hazards that crew and hardware are likely to encounter. In addition, requirements for performance of radiation-sensitive components under consideration for use across the Constellation architecture are being reviewed in order to minimize risks of radiation-induced performance anomalies.

Altair Project
The Altair Project at JSC is the focus for building the nation’s next generation lunar lander. ESP supports the Altair nationwide team through systems engineering efforts and avionics development, as well as, flight software development. Goddard has had a major role in development of a minimum functional avionics architecture and flight software plan for Lunar Design Analysis Cycles (LDACs). LDACs are Constellation’s forums for developing the system specifications and requirements that will guide the development of the lunar lander. GSFC has supported the process in LDAC-1, LDAC-2, and will continue to support the development in LDAC-3.

The Altair Effort consists of developing a baseline design that supports three reference missions. The first reference mission is a crewed sortie mission, reminiscent of Apollo, where astronauts land on the moon perform extravehicular activities and return after about a week. The second reference mission is a crewed outpost mission where astronauts land on the moon and stay for long durations at a lunar outpost. The third reference mission is a robotic cargo mission that carries habitation modules and lunar surface systems to the moon. Goddard is also participating in the effort to define Altair system requirements and document requirements traceability in Cradle, an engineering requirements management system. Goddard is expected to take over as the avionics lead in the near future and is looking for additional areas to apply its proficiencies in robotic spacecraft development 

Integrated Lunar Information Architecture for Decision Support (ILIADS)

ILIADS is a lunar geospatial information system (GIS). Initially conceived at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in CY06, and prototyped with internal investment during FY07 – FY08. GSFC’s vision was to provide the Agency, and the Constellation Program (CxP) user community in particular, with a robust yet simple to use software application with which to readily locate, retrieve, quantitatively analyze, and display a wide variety of mapped lunar data sets that are stored in widely distributed lunar data archives. An ILIADS user (e.g., lunar mission planner, engineer, scientist) downloads the ILIADS client application to their desktop computer. Invoking the ILIADS software application provides the user with the ability to access, and perform “What if?” analyses of, historical lunar data sets (e.g., Clementine, Lunar Prospector, digitized Apollo imagery) and recently collected (e.g., Kaguya, LRO) mapped lunar mission data products available from the USGS and other lunar data repositories.

The ILIADS architecture is interoperable with, and it has been integrated with, other CxP information systems that are in development within the Agency. Under the Agency’s Innovative Partnership Program and other funding vehicles, GSFC has also demonstrated how ILIADS can be integrated with software applications and lunar information systems under development in the commercial sector and by other organizations. GSFC’s ILIADS software framework is distinctly unique: the flexible and extensible core architecture readily provides the means to evolve ILIADS core capabilities by interfacing it with COTS software products. Most significantly, custom algorithms, software applications, and lunar environmental models that have been developed and contributed by a large pool of scientific and engineering community domain experts can be “plugged into” the ILIADS core framework thus further extending is core suite of analysis tools. ILIADS makes it easy to locate and retrieve lunar data sets: it adheres to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGS) web mapping, web coverage, web feature services, and it implements the Geography Markup Language (GML) specification. ILIADS thus offers the CxP user community with unique values and benefits by taking full advantage of “best of breed” lunar data algorithms and applications, and ready access to a large repository of lunar data products.

For the near term ILIADS will be used as a desktop application in an office environment. However, the ILIADS architecture was designed with forethought for future deployment in the lunar environments:  within lunar outposts, habitats, landers, and it embedded into lunar rovers. ILIADS is thus fully capable of being used to support future real time lunar surface mission operations by providing a Common Operation Picture and a situational awareness capability that will ensure efficient  lunar surface mission operations and contribute to exploration crew and mission safety.

Subsequent to the design and development of the ILIADS core architecture, and a successful demonstration of the ILIADS proof-of-concept prototype application, Goddard was selected by the Lunar Mapping and Modeling Project (LMMP) and the Lunar Surface Operations Simulator (LSOS) project to design, develop, and integrate additional ILIADS features and analysis tools. For the LMMP (FY09 – FY11), Goddard is enhancing ILIADS to interface it with the LMMP’s lunar data portal and a back-end lunar data product server. LMMP will provide authorized  CxP users access to vetted mapped lunar data products and to provide ILIADS users with several on-the-fly analysis tools (e.g., terrain contouring, slope analysis, etc.).

ILIADS is the premier thick client software application for the LMMP. In FY09, with funding from the LSOS project office, Goddard enhanced ILIADS with two interactive analysis tools: a lunar surface traverse planning tool and a lunar surface communications coverage tool.

For further information contact Stephen Talabac, NASA/GSFC, ILIADS Project Manager, at 301-286-1452.