Psionic Space Applications

Astrobotic Selects Navigation Doppler Lidar from Psionic for Mission to Deliver VIPER to the Lunar South Pole

Navigation Doppler Lidar chosen for high accuracy and NASA heritage for 2023 CLPS mission to search for water on the Moon

Pittsburgh, PA and HAMPTON, VA, — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Astrobotic today announced they have selected Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL) from Psionic for their mission in late 2023 to deliver NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the South Pole of the Moon. The NDL serves as a critical sensor element as part of the Griffin Lander’s Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GN&C) system to ensure a safe, precise landing. In June 2020, NASA awarded a $199.5 million contract to Astrobotic under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

“Griffin is a vehicle unlike any other and it’s playing a critical role in our return to the Moon by delivering VIPER to the lunar South Pole,” said Daniel Gillies, Mission Director at Astrobotic. “We are excited and honored to have been selected to deliver VIPER the Moon. A safe, precise landing is critical to reach the target areas at the South Pole where water ice is most abundant, and we’re confident that NDL will help us achieve that precision landing in combination with our own suite of terrain navigation and hazard detection sensors.”

NASA’s VIPER is being designed to search for water ice on the moon — a vital preparatory mission that will guide the planned landing sites for the next Artemis human missions to the Moon. NDL was developed by NASA over 10+ years for precise, safe landings on the Moon and in other challenging environments.

The Astrobotic NDL unit will be built by Psionic, which is NASA’s licensee for the underlying patents for NDL. Several NASA-designed NDL payloads are being used to help robotic spacecraft land on the Moon. A separate, NASA-designed and provided NDL is also flying on the Astrobotic Peregrine mission in 2021.

“The accuracy and confidence NDL provides is critical given where these missions are headed,” according to Steve Sandford, founder and CTO of Psionic. “The NDL is an important link in the navigation sensor chain Griffin will use to meet NASA’s stringent landing requirements.”

NDL provides unprecedented ground-relative range and velocity-vector accuracies, precise vehicle coordinates, and other measurements necessary for safe, pinpoint landings, which are critical in narrowly defined landing zones such as those at the South Pole.

Daniel Gillies, Mission Director for Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One

About Astrobotic

Astrobotic is a space robotics company making space accessible to the world. They develop advanced navigation, operation, and computing systems for spacecraft, and their fleet of lunar landers and rovers deliver payloads to the Moon for companies, governments, universities, non-profits, and individuals. The company has more than 50 prior and ongoing NASA and commercial technology contracts and a corporate sponsorship with DHL. Astrobotic was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA.

Announcement from NASA, September 16, 2020

Lander Simulation Testing Helps Advance NASA Navigation Spinoff

A navigation doppler lidar (NDL) technology originally developed by NASA was demonstrated on a flight test on September 10 with support from the Flight Opportunities program, part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. With roots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, the technology was licensed in 2016 by Psionic for both terrestrial and space applications, and both the company and Langley continue to evolve and advance the innovation for upcoming lunar missions.

On the recent flight in Mojave, California, Masten Space Systems flew Psionic’s NDL payload on a vertical takeoff vertical landing (VTVL) system called Xodiac, which simulates some of the maneuvers of a lunar lander. Designed for precision landing in a very tightly defined area—often called the landing ellipse—the NDL transmits laser beams to the ground that bounce back to a sensor, providing information about the lander’s velocity and distance relative to the ground.

The flight test was designed to help Psionic validate their NDL unit’s algorithms and data processing in order to verify the accuracy of these measurements. Data analysis is now underway to determine any modifications needed before advancing to a future closed-loop flight test on Xodiac, in which Masten and Psionic will use the NDL payload to actually navigate the VTVL system.

Read the full announcement on NASA.gov >

Our view:

“Psionic Navigation Doppler Lidar (PNDL) helps ensure safe, precise lunar landings and will be an important part of upcoming unmanned and manned flights. The Flight Opportunities program enabled us to advance the technical readiness level of PNDL with a representative lunar landing trajectory aboard the Masten Xodiac free flying rocket. During the flight, we acquired valuable data to advance the robustness of the sensor-to-navigation computer interfaces, setting the stage for future missions, and ultimately for Artemis’s manned mission to the moon.”

—Diego Pierrottet, Chief Engineer, Psionic

Developing and Testing Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL)