Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing for Suborbital Flights of the Safe and Precise Landing Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) Project Technologies

Abstract

The Safe and Precise Landing Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) project continues NASA’s extensive heritage of precision navigation and hazard avoidance for landing technology development. These technologies support human and robotic exploration, providing the capabilities to perform planetary landings accurately to desired sites of interest, and complete the landings safely despite challenging terrain. The SPLICE project is developing sensor systems, navigation algorithms and techniques, and computing resources that will be tested as an integrated Precision Landing and Hazard Avoidance (PL&HA) system in the coming year on a suborbital rocket flight provided by a commercial company. This partnership resulted from a NASA Tipping Point Solicitation, designed to utilize industry-developed space technologies for the demonstration of NASA capabilities to significantly advance their maturity. To this end, SPLICE avionics and software/simulation teams are developing a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HWIL) simulation capability to provide a development, integration, and test and verification platform for the SPLICE payload suborbital flight configuration. Key elements of this HWIL platform are (1) the Descent and Landing Computer (DLC), which integrates all the SPLICE technologies and provides the computational capabilities for the system, (2) the core Flight System cFS, an agency investment in a flight software framework, (3) the TRICK simulation, another agency investment in a simulation framework, (4) models for the flight vehicle, navigation sensors, and environment, and (5) the Guidance, Navigation, and Control algorithms and software that define the PL&HA capabilities for SPLICE.