Space Mission Design – EROS

INSTITUTION

Arizona State University (Tempe Campus)

CLASS

Cobalt Class (2019 – 2020)

STUDENT TEAM

Juan Aureoles, Aerospace Engineering (Astronautics)
Adrianna Conway, Aerospace Engineering (Astronautics)
Garrett Driscoll, Aerospace Engineering (Astronautics)
Yoslin Herrera, Aerospace Engineering (Astronautics)
Ciara Sypherd, Aerospace Engineering (Astronautics), Earth and Space Exploration (Astrobiology and Biogeosciences) (Double Major)

ACADEMIC GUIDANCE

Charles Boehmer, Instructor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, ASU

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This project is a design for a hypothesized follow-on mission to NASA’s Psyche Mission. The Eros mission continues the journey to the metal world and reaches further to reconstruct the history of the exposed protoplanetary core. The imagined launch date for this follow-on mission is in July of 2032. Eros will not only help to uncover the story of (16) Psyche’s formation, while potentially providing critical insights into our own planet’s core, but also to establish the feasibility of exploring and sampling an asteroid. Eros will be at the forefront of the conversation involving the utilization of space resources.

At the center of the Eros mission is a rover designed to land on and sample the (16) Psyche asteroid. The rover’s primary objective is to take samples of (16) Psyche in order to study its composition. The Eros rover maneuvers in an unconventional way; it is specifically designed to traverse (16) Psyche’s low gravity environment and complex terrain via a quadrupedal-type locomotion system. Eros equips its rover with all necessary instrumentation to not only mine and extract samples from (16) Psyche, but to analyze the collected samples using on board technology.

This work was created in partial fulfillment of Arizona State University Capstone Courses “AEE 445”. The work is a result of the Psyche Student Collaborations component of NASA’s Psyche Mission (https://psyche.asu.edu). “Psyche: A Journey to a Metal World” [Contract number NNM16AA09C] is part of the NASA Discovery Program mission to solar system targets. Trade names and trademarks of ASU and NASA are used in this work for identification only. Their usage does not constitute an official endorsement, either expressed or implied, by Arizona State University or National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of ASU or NASA.