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Exploration Systems

Within the Institute of Space Systems, the "Exploration Systems" division covers technologies and mission concepts related to planetary landing missions. This primarily concerns the topics: landing systems; mobility on planetary surfaces; surface and subsurface sampling. The key competence behind these topics, rooted in the division, is in space mechanisms interacting with planetary materials and in modeling this interaction with particular focus on behaviour of planetary soils. To that effect, also a number of specialized test facilities is maintained and operated (single wheel tester, soil mechanics lab, landing and mobility test facility LAMA).
Further competences reside in an extensive background in scientific payloads of planetary landing missions through existing science memberships in several missions in flight (such as the NASA Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission and the ESA ROSETTA comet mission) and through on-going and prior payload developments in multi-nation teams. This also allows a meaningful and efficient assessment of concepts for future planetary landing missions.

Prototypes of flexible metal wheels for EXOMars rover

Specifically, the "Exploration Systems" division currently has the following activities:

• Subcontractor in the development of the rover for ESA’s ExoMars mission: "Exploration Systems" is responsible for development of the wheels, a function that builds upon numerous prior technology development work in the area done for ESA and for terrestrial applications
• Basic research in wheel-terrain interaction of planetary rovers
• Engineering responsibility (through the tasks of systems engineering and project management) for the HP3 geophysical heat flow probe instrument intended for the future lunar landing missions "International Lunar Network" (ILN) (NASA and partners) and SELENE-2 (Japan)
• Build-up and operation of landing and mobility testbed LAMA; this facility, being unique at the international level, permits realistic touchdown dynamics tests to be performed for planetary landers from the point of view of granular target surfaces and landing dynamics; this is achieved through controlled weight reduction of the test item while working in the vertical over a simulated planetary surface; LAMA also supports dynamically realistic rover mobility tests; LAMA is presently used
  • in the joint "landing technology" basic research collaboration with EADS Astrium Bremen (landing dynamics tests for future lunar landers such as ESA’s NEXT Lunar Lander)
  • for landing tests related to missions to comets and asteroids
  • for rover mobility tests (including for ExoMars)
• Mission and payload studies for national and European robotic landing missions within the planning framework of relevant space agencies (such as for ESA’s "Cosmic Vision" programme) and as part of the "Helmholtz Alliance Planetary Evolution and Life"
• Selected basic research on physical properties of planetary surface soils as a function of gravity; this includes experiments conducted at reduced gravity
• Technology pre-development for future human exploration of the Solar System: this includes preparing the University of Bremen research cluster ALI ("Autonomous Lunar Infrastructure") and the development of a prototype facility for extraction of mineralogically bound oxygen from lunar soil ("VELOX")
• Project management and consortium leader for a DLR-led surface science landing package ("MASCOT") to fly on the Japanese "Hayabusa-2" near-Earth asteroid sample return mission.