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By NASA
Landing on the Moon is not easy, particularly when a crew or spacecraft must meet exacting requirements. For Artemis missions to the lunar surface, those requirements include an ability to land within an area about as wide as a football field in any lighting condition amid tough terrain.
NASA’s official lunar landing requirement is to be able to land within 50 meters (164 feet) of the targeted site and developing precision tools and technologies is critically important to mission success.
NASA engineers recently took a major step toward safe and precise landings on the Moon – and eventually Mars and icy worlds – with a successful field test of hazard detection technology at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida.
A joint team from the Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s in Houston and Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, achieved this huge milestone in tests of the Goddard Hazard Detection Lidar from a helicopter at Kennedy in March 2025.
NASA’s Hazard Detection Lidar field test team at Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida in March 2025. NASA The new lidar system is one of several sensors being developed as part of NASA’s Safe & Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) Program, a Johnson-managed cross-agency initiative under the Space Technology Mission Directorate to develop next-generation landing technologies for planetary exploration. SPLICE is an integrated descent and landing system composed of avionics, sensors, and algorithms that support specialized navigation, guidance, and image processing techniques. SPLICE is designed to enable landing in hard-to-reach and unknown areas that are of potentially high scientific interest.
The lidar system, which can map an area equivalent to two football fields in just two seconds, is a crucial program component. In real time and compensating for lander motion, it processes 15 million short pulses of laser light to quickly scan surfaces and create real-time, 3D maps of landing sites to support precision landing and hazard avoidance.
Those maps will be read by the SPLICE Descent and Landing Computer, a high-performance multicore computer processor unit that analyzes all SPLICE sensor data and determines the spacecraft’s velocity, altitude, and terrain hazards. It also computes the hazards and determines a safe landing location. The computer was developed by the Avionics Systems Division at Johnson as a platform to test navigation, guidance, and flight software. It previously flew on Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster rocket.
The NASA team prepares the Descent and Landing Computer for Hazard Detection Lidar field testing at Kennedy Space Center. NASA For the field test at Kennedy, Johnson led test operations and provided avionics and guidance, navigation, and control support. Engineers updated the computer’s firmware and software to support command and data interfacing with the lidar system. Team members from Johnson’s Flight Mechanics branch also designed a simplified motion compensation algorithm and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California contributed a hazard detection algorithm, both of which were added to the lidar software by Goddard. Support from NASA contractors Draper Laboratories and Jacobs Engineering played key roles in the test’s success.
Primary flight test objectives were achieved on the first day of testing, allowing the lidar team time to explore different settings and firmware updates to improve system performance. The data confirmed the sensor’s capability in a challenging, vibration-heavy environment, producing usable maps. Preliminary review of the recorded sensor data shows excellent reconstruction of the hazard field terrain.
A Hazard Detection Lidar scan of a simulated hazard field at Kennedy Space Center (left) and a combined 3D map identifying roughness and slope hazards. NASA Beyond lunar applications, SPLICE technologies are being considered for use on Mars Sample Return, the Europa Lander, Commercial Lunar Payload Services flights, and Gateway. The DLC design is also being evaluated for potential avionics upgrades on Artemis systems.
Additionally, SPLICE is supporting software tests for the Advancement of Geometric Methods for Active Terrain Relative Navigation (ATRN) Center Innovation Fund project, which is also part of Johnson’s Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Division. The ATRN is working to develop algorithms and software that can use data from any active sensor – one measuring signals that were reflected, refracted, or scattered by a body’s surface or its atmosphere – to accurately map terrain and provide absolute and relative location information. With this type of system in place, spacecraft will not need external lighting sources to find landing sites.
With additional suborbital flight tests planned through 2026, the SPLICE team is laying the groundwork for safer, more autonomous landings on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. As NASA prepares for its next era of exploration, SPLICE will be a key part of the agency’s evolving landing, guidance, and navigation capabilities.
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By NASA
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https://youtu.be/63uNNcCpxHI How are we made of star stuff?
Well, the important thing to understand about this question is that it’s not an analogy, it’s literally true.
The elements in our bodies, the elements that make up our bones, the trees we see outside, the other planets in the solar system, other stars in the galaxy. These were all part of stars that existed well before our Sun and Earth and solar system were even formed.
The universe existed for billions of years before we did. And all of these elements that you see on the periodic table, you see carbon and oxygen and silicon and iron, the common elements throughout the universe, were all put there by previous generations of stars that either blew off winds like the Sun blows off a solar wind, or exploded in supernova explosions and thrust their elements throughout the universe.
These are the same things that we can trace with modern telescopes, like the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory. These are all elements that we can map out in the universe with these observatories and trace back to the same things that form us and the elemental abundances that we see in stars now are the same things that we see in the Earth’s crust, we see in asteroids. And so we know that these are the same elements that were once part of these stars.
So the question of, “How are we made of star stuff?”, in the words of Carl Sagan, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]
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Last Updated Apr 28, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
5 Min Read NASA Langley’s Legacy of Landing
The first image of the Moon taken by the cameras on the Lunar Orbiter in 1966. Credits: NASA Landing safely on the surface of another planetary body, like the Moon or Mars, is one of the most important milestones of any given space mission. From the very beginning, NASA’s Langley Research Center has been at the heart of the entry, descent and landing (EDL) research that enables our exploration. Today, NASA Langley’s legacy of landing continues at the forefront of present day lunar missions and as NASA prepares for future travel to more distant worlds.
Project Mercury: 1958
Project Mercury was the United States’ first human-in-space program, led by NASA’s Space Task Group located at NASA Langley. There were five major programs of study and experimentation.
An airdrop study that helped us understand the characteristics of the Mercury capsule as it returned to Earth. A group of study focused on the escape systems, ultimately becoming known as the launch abort system. Exhaustive wind-tunnel studies of the blunt-nosed capsule design and its aerodynamic stability at various altitudes and speeds and angles of reentry, all with a focus on making the capsule safe and stable. A study on the problem of landing impact, resulting in the development of absorption systems that minimized the shock of impact to the capsule’s pilot. Studies into the use of drogue parachutes and their characteristics at high altitudes and speeds, ensuring that they would be able to stabilize and slow the capsule’s descent for a safe landing. All of this research went on to inform the subsequent Gemini and Apollo programs. All of this research went on to inform the subsequent Gemini and Apollo programs.
Apollo Program: 1962
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed to putting Americans on the surface of the Moon and shortly after that historic declaration, NASA’s Apollo program was born. In the years that followed, the original team of NASA astronauts completed their basic training at NASA Langley’s Lunar Landing Research Facility (LLRF). When Apollo 11 successfully landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969, NASA Langley had played a pivotal role in the monumental success.
Lunar Orbiter: 1966
The Lunar Orbiter missions launched with the purpose of mapping the lunar surface and identifying potential landing sites ahead of the Apollo landings. From 1966 to 1967, the five successful Lunar Orbiter missions, led and managed by Langley Research Center, resulted in 99% of the moon photographed and a suitable site selected for the upcoming human landings.
Viking: 1976
After the success of Apollo, NASA set its sights further across the solar system to Mars. Two Viking missions aimed to successfully place landers on the Red Planet and capture high resolution images of the Martian surfaces, assisting in the search for life. Langley Research Center was chosen to lead this inaugural Mars mission and went on to play key roles in the missions to Mars that followed.
HIAD: 2009 – Present
Successful landings on Mars led to more ambitious dreams of landing larger payloads, including those that could support future human exploration. In order to land those payloads safely, a new style of heat shield would be needed. Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) technology was positioned as an answer to the payload problem, enabling missions to use inflatable heat shields to slow down and protect a payload as it enters a planet’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.
IRVE – 2009-2012
Two successful Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiments (IRVE) proved the capability of inflatable heat shield technology and opened the door for larger iterations.
LOFTID – 2022
The Low Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) followed in the footsteps of its predecessor IRVE with a larger aeroshell that could be deployed to a scale much larger than the shroud. The 2022 successful test of this technology further proved the capability of HIAD technology.
MEDLI 1 and 2: 2012 & 2020
As a part of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, NASA Langley’s Mars Entry, Descent and Landing Instrument (MEDLI) was designed to gather data from the MSL entry vehicle’s heatshield during its entry and descent to the surface of Mars. MEDLI2 expanded on that groundbreaking data during the Mars 2020 mission which safely landed the Perseverance rover after successfully entering the planet’s arid atmosphere, and enabling improvements on the design for future entry systems.
Curiosity Rover
Curiosity was the largest and most capable rover ever sent to Mars when it launched in 2011. Leading up the mission, Langley engineers performed millions of simulations of the entry, descent and landing phase — or the so-called “Seven Minutes of Terror” — that determines success or failure. Curiosity continues to look for signs that Mars once was – or still is – a habitable place for life as we know it.
CLPS: 2023 – Present
The Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative takes the Artemis mission further by working with commercial partners to advance the technology needed to return humans to the Moon and enable humanity to explore Mars.
NDL
Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL) technology, developed at Langley Research Center, uses lasers to assist spacecraft in identifying safe locations to land. In 2024, NDL flew on the Intuitive Machines’ uncrewed Nova-C lander, with its laser instruments designed to measure velocity and altitude to within a few feet. While NASA planetary landers have traditionally relied on radar and used radio waves, NDL technology has proven more accurate and less heavy, both major benefits for cost and space savings as we continue to pursue planetary missions.
SCALPSS
Like Lunar Orbiter and the Viking missions before it, Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) set out to better understand the surface of another celestial body. These cameras affixed to the bottom of a lunar lander focus on the interaction between the lander’s rocket plumes and the lunar surface. The SCALPSS 1.1 instrument captured first-of-its-kind imagery as the engine plumes of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander reached the Moon’s surface. These images will serve as key pieces of data as trips to the Moon increase in the coming years.
About the Author
Angelique Herring
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Last Updated Apr 03, 2025 EditorAngelique HerringContactJoseph Scott Atkinsonjoseph.s.atkinson@nasa.govLocationNASA Langley Research Center Related Terms
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