The Innovative Technology Partnerships Office (ITPO) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, invites educators, students and the general public to celebrate Pi Day and discover Pi-Sat.
On his Aunt Effie's farm in 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket – and with it, modern space exploration.
That company has just revealed its latest success: a successful testing round for a 3D printed injector for the RL10 upper-stage rocket engine, arguably the most reliable upper stage rocket engine in the world right now.
This paper discusses the design and implementation of an extended Kalman filter (EKF) for model-based engine control (MBEC). Previously proposed MBEC architectures feature an optimal tuner Kalman Filter (OTKF) to produce estimates of both unmeasured engine parameters and estimates for the health of the engine. The success of this approach relies on the accuracy of the linear model and the ability of the optimal tuner to update its tuner estimates based on only a few sensors. Advances in computer processing are making it possible to replace the piece-wise linear model, developed off-line, with an on-board nonlinear model running in real-time. This will reduce the estimation errors associated with the linearization process, and is typically referred to as an extended Kalman filter. The nonlinear extended Kalman filter approach is applied to the Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation 40,000 (C-MAPSS40k) and compared to the previously proposed MBEC architecture. The results show that the EKF reduces the estimation error, especially during transient operation.
The world’s first 3D-printed Cubesat nanosatellite will be launched to the International Space Station later this month, RIA Novosti reported, citing the Tomsk Polytechnic University press service.
