NASA MARS LANDING HOW TO
NASA MARS LANDING SOFTWARE

“If we were to run these studies on a conventional computing platform operating in a capacity environment, one simulation would require up to six months,” said Aaron Walden, a research computer scientist at NASA Langley, in a recent talk at GTC DC - the Washington edition of NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference. Hundreds of thousands of them will be run to test a range of possible conditions a vehicle could encounter during its descent to the Martian surface. Each simulation produces over 100 terabytes of output data, Nielsen said.

NASA MARS LANDING HOW TO

That’s why NASA relies on high-resolution simulations to plan how to control the speed and orientation of the vehicle under different landing conditions. Complex fluid dynamics will be at work, from tiny turbulent eddies just centimeters from the vehicle to larger airflow meters away. Firing a lander’s engines in the opposite direction of the planet’s surface at supersonic conditions will create an upward thrust that can slow down the heavy vehicle’s descent. NASA scientists and engineers are working with colleagues from Old Dominion University and NVIDIA to simulate a solution that uses retropropulsion. Mars’ atmosphere will absorb most of the vehicle’s kinetic energy as it hurtles down to the surface, but not nearly enough for a soft landing.

That’s 10x more than the Curiosity rover, NASA’s heaviest lander to reach the planet, which weighed about as much as a compact car. “That paradigm completely breaks down when we go to the vehicle size needed to support human missions,” said Eric Nielsen, a senior research scientist at NASA Langley.Ī manned vehicle will weigh tens of metric tons, at least. Past Mars trips have used landers that weigh around a ton, allowing space agencies to rely on air resistance and a parachute to safely get a vehicle through the atmosphere and to the Martian surface. Before a mission can launch in the 2030s, there’s a major challenge to solve: how to safely land heavy loads on the planet. While NASA has sent humans to the moon and rovers to Mars, a human mission to the Red Planet is more than a decade away. The data behind the simulation was crunched on the fastest supercomputer in the world, the NVIDIA GPU-powered Summit system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The underlying dataset is a 6-billion cell, unstructured mesh of tetrahedra, prisms and pyramids, making it the world’s largest interactive volume visualization. SC19 attendees can try out the interactive Mars lander visualization for themselves in NVIDIA booth 901, running on a cluster of NVIDIA DGX-2 systems. To be able to do that with the highest-resolution datasets we’ve gathered is truly groundbreaking.” “The ability to move your way around the solution in real time is something we’ve never been able to do, even with small datasets.

Simulations this detailed and responsive are unprecedented, Korzun said.

NASA MARS LANDING SOFTWARE

Onstage at the SC19 supercomputing show in Denver, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang wowed audiences with a demo created using NVIDIA IndeX volume visualization software - displaying a stunning visualization of the velocity field around a lander as it hurtles towards the Martian surface. To plan the landing for NASA’s first manned mission to Mars, the agency is relying on high-resolution, NVIDIA GPU-powered simulations of the complex physics involved. “Once you start, you’re going to the surface.” “Landing’s not something you can bail out on,” says Ashley Korzun, a researcher in the Atmospheric Flight and Entry Systems Branch at the NASA Langley Research Center. The process is incredibly complicated, and the lander will only have one shot to get it right. That’s how long the vehicle has to slow from its initial descent rate of 12,000 miles per hour to near zero for a smooth landing. But the entire journey can be in vain if something goes wrong in the last six minutes. It can take up to 10 months for a spacecraft to get from Earth to Mars.

Nasa mars landing