The NASA L'SPACE Academy is the student collaboration portion of NASA'S Lucy Mission to the Trojan
Asteroids. Lucy will be the first space mission to explore a population of small bodies known as the
Trojans. The Trojans are outer Solar System asteroids that orbit the Sun “in front of” and “behind” the
gas giant Jupiter, at the same distance from the Sun as Jupiter. The gas giant is massive enough that
normally it scatters away all asteroids in its vicinity, but, due to the combined gravitational
influences of the Sun and Jupiter, these Trojan asteroids have been trapped on stable orbits for
billions of years. These Trojans provide a unique,
never-before-explored sample of the remnants of our early Solar System.
Summer 2020, Team 8 Hella Impact, a group of undergraduate engineering and
science students from colleges across the southeast of the United States who came together to create a
Mars mission in which we designed and developed all the necessary critical mission
requirements for making a rover that would land on Martian soil possible. The proposed rover’s mission
was to help prepare for a long term, sustainable, manned mission to Jezero, Mars. In addition to
formulating the mission statement, science objectives, designing our systems and Preliminary Design
Review, we attended weekly
lectures presented by highly esteemed NASA employees and affiliates.
The “Unceasing on Mars” (UoM) mission will help prepare for a long term, sustainable, manned mission to
Jezero, Mars; this includes the following tasks:
- Completion of understanding the planet's geologic diversity.
- Completion of collecting sufficient data on astrochemistry relevance.
- Completion of collecting data on specific compounds (water, carbon dioxide, etc).
Gathering the following data opens new doors for newer ways to understand human adaptations and more
specifically, human adaptations in a Martian environment.
Hella Impact intends to be a large rover with constraints in volume (61cm x 71cm x 96cm), mass (180kg)
and budget ($100M). In addition to the mass constraint awarded, an extra 72kg will be allocated to the
entry, descent, and landing (EDL) phase of the project. This phase will include a heat shield, a
parachute, and airbags.
