The Mighty Eagle, NASA's robotic prototype lander managed out of NASA"s Marshall Space Flight Center, recently completed a test series to monitor its systems functionality after coming out of winter storage.
This latest series included a test flight that was recorded by the Quad-Copter—a small vehicle also developed at Marshall that was equipped with a video camera allowing for never-before-seen footage of the Mighty Eagle.
The Mighty Eagle, nicknamed after one of the characters in the popular Angry Birds game, is a three-legged prototype vehicle.
It is 4 feet tall, 8 feet in diameter and weighs about 700 pounds when fueled. It is a green vehicle, fueled by 90 percent pure hydrogen peroxide, and is guided by an onboard computer that activates the thrusters to power the craft's movements.
"We were approached by the Mighty Eagle team to film the vehicle in flight, and we thought it would be a great collaboration," said Garrick Merrill, a member of the Aero-M team and a computer engineer in the Space Systems Department at Marshall.
"It gave us an opportunity to test the copter in a flight situation, and we were really pleased with the results. It really was a win-win situation for both teams—giving us both important data we can use on future flights."
The Quad-Copter is an achievement in itself. The vehicle was designed and built by the Aero-M team at Marshall as part of the 2012 Unmanned Aerial Systems, or UAS, competition between various NASA centers.
The Marshall team was made up of young engineers from across the center who were tasked with designing a vehicle that could perform an autonomous search and rescue mission to locate people after a small plane crash.
The Quad-Copter is built with off-the-shelf, hobbyist-grade parts and uses an open-source flight computer.
The initial design of the vehicle uses a two-megapixel IP camera, but for the Mighty Eagle flights the IP camera was removed and a GoPro video camera was attached to provide high-definition video.
Read the full article here
For more information on NASA's robotic landers, visit here.
This latest series included a test flight that was recorded by the Quad-Copter—a small vehicle also developed at Marshall that was equipped with a video camera allowing for never-before-seen footage of the Mighty Eagle.
The Mighty Eagle, nicknamed after one of the characters in the popular Angry Birds game, is a three-legged prototype vehicle.
It is 4 feet tall, 8 feet in diameter and weighs about 700 pounds when fueled. It is a green vehicle, fueled by 90 percent pure hydrogen peroxide, and is guided by an onboard computer that activates the thrusters to power the craft's movements.
"We were approached by the Mighty Eagle team to film the vehicle in flight, and we thought it would be a great collaboration," said Garrick Merrill, a member of the Aero-M team and a computer engineer in the Space Systems Department at Marshall.
"It gave us an opportunity to test the copter in a flight situation, and we were really pleased with the results. It really was a win-win situation for both teams—giving us both important data we can use on future flights."
The Quad-Copter is an achievement in itself. The vehicle was designed and built by the Aero-M team at Marshall as part of the 2012 Unmanned Aerial Systems, or UAS, competition between various NASA centers.
The Marshall team was made up of young engineers from across the center who were tasked with designing a vehicle that could perform an autonomous search and rescue mission to locate people after a small plane crash.
The Quad-Copter is built with off-the-shelf, hobbyist-grade parts and uses an open-source flight computer.
The initial design of the vehicle uses a two-megapixel IP camera, but for the Mighty Eagle flights the IP camera was removed and a GoPro video camera was attached to provide high-definition video.
Read the full article here
For more information on NASA's robotic landers, visit here.
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