The last moon landing occurred nearly half a century ago, in December of 1972. NASA’s Artemis III mission is looking to change that, with the agency planning to use its new Orion spacecraft to launch from Cape Canaveral in 2024, land humans on the moon and return them safely to Earth. Preparing for the first manned lunar landing in over fifty years, though, is no small task – and NASA is employing its in-house supercomputers as it prepares.
Orion, the spacecraft, will be launched by NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket in the world. This, of course, comes with its fair share of anxieties: more powerful rockets mean more powerful explosions – and more severe consequences if something were to go awry. So, with the SLS and Orion, NASA is hard at work on a launch abort system that will allow split-second separation of the rocket and the crew module.
The launch abort system uses high-speed turbulent exhaust to blast the crew module away from the rocket. These forces are complex: the high turbulence is potentially dangerous to the crews inside and the structure of the module, which could be torn apart; furthermore, the launch abort system will need to function equally well in a variety of conditions, including wide varieties of altitude, speed and orientation configurations of the rocket during its initial ascent.
To tackle these multitudinous scenarios, NASA is employing its in-house Aitken and Electra supercomputers. Aitken, an HPE system, leverages both Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc Rome CPUs, along with around a terabyte of aggregate memory, to deliver 5.79 Linpack petaflops; Electra, meanwhile, is an SGI/HPE system that uses Intel Skylake and Broadwell CPUs and around half a terabyte of memory to deliver 5.44 Linpack petaflops.
The systems are being used to run computational fluid dynamics simulations of the launch abort system via the LAVA (Launch, Ascent and Vehicle Aerodynamics) software package. Specifically, the researchers ran three simulations of the Ascent Abort-2 Flight Test, a 2019 real-world test of the launch abort system. But the simulations varied from the way the real-world test played out: one scenario played out a low-altitude launch abort, another while the rocket was traveling faster than the speed of sound, and a third right at the last opportunity to abort the mission before exiting the atmosphere.
These simulations, NASA says, help reduce uncertainty for these scenarios, which are often too onerous or expensive to test in the real world.
To learn more about this research, visit NASA’s webpage.