To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and inspire the next generation of engineers, Draper launched a new website that shares a treasure trove of newly released photos, videos and stories about the unsung heroes behind the moon landing. Hack the Moon details the remarkable story of the engineers behind some of the revolutionary technologies developed for the Apollo missions. In the face of epic challenges, and with a fraction of today’s technology, these were the people who navigated us to the moon and back.
The end of the decade has featured many exciting moments for Draper. From new partnerships to expanded capabilities, here is a look back at 2019.
Blue Origin's National Team
In October, Jeff Bezos announced that Blue Origin will lead a national team to offer a Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis program to return Americans to the lunar surface by 2024. Draper will lead descent guidance and provide flight avionics.
Dexai Spin-out
Draper is extending its leadership in robotics and autonomous systems honed on projects for commercial and government customers with the spin-out of Dexai Robotics, a company formed earlier this year that will build customized robots for industrial kitchens and restaurants. David M.S. Johnson, a robotic systems engineer who led development of the system at Draper, serves as CEO. Most recently, Dexai demonstrated their food-service robot alongside Draper’s president, Dr. Kaigham Gabriel, at Web Summit.
Terrain-relative Navigation Test Flight
Draper recently achieved a milestone toward future moon missions by demonstrating its terrain-relative navigation (TRN) system onboard the Xodiac lander vehicle, developed and provided by Masten Space Systems, Inc., Mojave, Calif. The flight demonstration was carried out as part of the Safe and Precise Landing Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) project led by NASA’s Johnson Space Center, with funding from NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program (FO). The TRN system successfully identified features throughout the flight and maintained an accurate navigation solution to the landing.
Trident II Test Flights
In September, four tests of unarmed Trident II missiles were launched from the submarine USS Nebraska as part of a Commander Evaluation Test to validate performance of the strategic weapon system. The launches are the latest in 176 successful test flights of the Trident II. Draper provides the guidance system for the Trident II missile and continues to support the nation’s strategic mission through the life-extension program.
Hemera
This year, Draper demonstrated its all-weather LiDAR detector, Hemera, at 200 meters in rainy weather conditions and set a new LiDAR performance standard to be able to see more objects in adverse weather conditions. Hemera is a detection software that augments existing LiDAR technologies, making those systems more robust for autonomous vehicles that use LiDAR to measure distance to objects. Today’s self-driving cars use this technology to differentiate objects—telling the difference between a fire hydrant and a toddler—but the current, commercially available state-of-the-art cannot see through difficult weather like fog, rain or snow.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Partnership
Draper and Bristol-Myers Squibb are working together to develop a unique liver tissue model for screening the toxicity of drugs. In the collaboration, Draper is using its Human Organ Systems (HOS) platform—a microenvironment that can sustain human tissue organ models for several weeks of automated testing. Draper will generate a unique liver model for Bristol-Myers Squibb to perform toxicity testing. The model could have the potential to study progression of liver diseases and to evaluate candidate therapeutics.
NEEMO 23 Mission
This summer, Aquanauts at NEEMO 23 tested two Draper technologies. Undersea they wore Draper’s wearable kinematics system (WKS) to map the environment, track aquanaut position and orientation and time- and location-tag carbon dioxide (CO2) measurements within the habitat. The aquanauts also operated Draper’s lunar landing simulator to characterize how mission events and the analogous environment to spaceflight affect their ability to perform on a complex, operationally relevant task—piloting a spacecraft.
Tiny Robots
Engineers from Draper and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) are creating a small climbing robot, inspired by insects’ movements, with funding from a recently awarded DARPA grant. Designed to be just one centimeter in size, these microrobots are expected to be capable of object manipulation, jumping and climbing up walls—all autonomously. These so-called microrobots could be agile teammates to search-and-rescue personnel, but until now, such tiny tech has been largely held up in the research phase.
Student Hovercrafts
An autonomous hovercraft served as the summer internship project for 14 engineering students at Draper. The students learned aspects of model-based engineering and trade space analysis, which are common in engineering companies but rare in student internship programs. In recent years, Draper’s summer interns have designed and built a payload-carrying blimp, a wall-climbing robot and a human-powered flying machine in the form of a dragon inspired by Game of Thrones.
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