Terrain Adaptive Reconfiguration of Mobility

There are a number of concepts under development at NASA Centers and universities on small spacecraft assets that might be deployed as a swarm during descent to a planetary body, often with a focus on Mars. Deployment of a large number (100s-1000s) of assets could enable simultaneous in-situ, spatiotemporal measurements of the Martian atmosphere, something that current single spacecraft missions cannot do. Examples of such concepts include the Prandtl-m glider, the Tensegrity lander, Printable spacecraft, and PUFFER rovers. These assets tend to have low controllability during descent and landing and limited communication capability. Two open issues with these concepts are first, whether or not the assets, upon release, will distribute sufficiently to provide the desired measurement coverage and, second, whether the landed distribution will result in a connected communication network as required to return the data from the distributed nodes. This task first evaluated what would be the desired distribution of assets to ensure both sampling coverage and data return across the swarm and then developed deployment algorithms to achieve the distribution. Project is pursuing future funding opportunities, check back in.