Landing Impact Research at NASA

Jackson, a NASA senior research engineer, has studied materials, structural designs that can better absorb energy, and crash simulations for 25 years -- first for the Army and now for NASA. She works at what is now the Landing Impact Research at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

Recently she shared some of what she has learned when the NASA TV education channel broadcast "Crash Safety: Past Success and Future Concepts," one in a series of Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) technical seminars.

"I work at a very unique facility at NASA Langley," said Jackson. "It's a steel A-frame gantry that's about 240 feet high, 400 feet long and 265 feet wide at the base."

The gantry, which looks a lot like a huge red and white erector set, started out its life in the early 1960s as the place where Neil Armstrong and 23 other astronauts learned to land on the moon.

Once the Apollo program was over, the lunar landing research facility transformed into an aircraft crash test site -- the only one in this country that can swing a full-sized plane or helicopter into the ground like a pendulum, simulating real life accident conditions.

"The goal of any research program that has an element of impact dynamics is to develop a fundamental understanding of the crash response of aerospace vehicles," said Jackson. "Then once we understand that response we can look at ways to improve the crash performance of that particular vehicle."

Over the last 35 years researchers at NASA Langley have dropped dozens of small airplanes, military aircraft or aircraft components to test materials, structures and systems that can help save lives and reduce injuries in the event of an accident. On board the aircraft in many of the drops were crash test dummies acting as passengers and crew.

"We often have quite a lot of instrumentation on these tests, typically on the order of 100-200 channels of data, collecting about 10,000 samples per second," said Jackson. "We have a large number of external cameras, video cameras, high speed film cameras and we have cameras on board to see how the seats are responding and the occupants."

Recently, with NASA's renewed emphasis on returning to the Moon and going on to Mars and beyond, Jackson and her colleagues have spent a lot of time testing models of the Orion capsule, the next U.S. spaceship for human exploration.

"We're looking at flexible models," said Jackson. "We hope we will also be able to look at an integrated, fully flexible model of the command module that includes dummies, seats, restraints and any external energy absorbing devices that might be used."

NASA Langley impact dynamics specialists are also studying new materials and systems that might be added to space capsules and other air vehicles to help them land safely.

Researchers say the last few minutes of any spaceflight -- the entry, descent and landing -- are some of the most challenging. That was the topic of the one technical seminar. Other subjects include air traffic management automation concepts, thermal protection systems for hypersonic vehicles and pilot training and other improvements to help airliners recover from steep dives or other upset conditions.

Image Credits: NASA