Artificial intelligence software helped NASA to imagine this interplanetary lander

Using an artificial intelligence design process, engineers at NASA's Autodesk software company and Jet Propulsion Laboratory have come up with a new interplanetary lander concept that could explore distant moons like Europa and Enceladus. Its slender design weighs less than most landers that NASA has already sent on other planets and moons.

At the company's conference in Las Vegas, Autodesk announced today, at its company's Las Vegas conference, its innovative new LG design. This spaceship looks like a spider woven metal. The company said the idea of ​​creating the vehicle was launched when Autodesk asked NASA to validate the prototype of a landing gear it was working on. After reviewing Autodesk's work, JPL and the company decided to form a design team consisting of five Autodesk and five JPL engineers to design a new landing gear design.

NASA is beginning to think of ways to land on distant moons of our solar system that can harbor oceans beneath their crusts. The moon of Saturn, Enceladus, is one of these candidates, because it can gather the adequate conditions to support life in its invisible waters. NASA has already studied concepts that allow landing gear to touch the surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa, to probe the world's ice and see if it could harbor life.

Image: Autodesk

The collaboration between Lander and Autodesk was essentially experimental, with JPL giving the company a very clear goal: to find a way to reduce the weight of a lander in the deep space. When it comes to traveling in space, titanium and aluminum are the best materials to withstand the hardness of space, but these metals can be heavy. And the more weight a vehicle weighs, the more difficult and expensive it is to get into space. So, reducing costs in pounds can help reduce the overall cost and complexity of a mission. The weight reduction also offers the ability to add more instruments and sensors to a lander, in order to collect more valuable scientific data.

"When we talked to them for the first time, they told us that 10% mass reductions were not of interest to us at all," said Mark Davis, senior director of industrial research at Autodesk. The edge. "If you can get anywhere from 20 to 30%, that will change the game for us. So that was an initial goal that we set ourselves.

To make the lander, Autodesk used its own artificial intelligence software, capable of developing hundreds of different designs in a very short time. Known as generative design, it is a technique that allows engineers to design computer-generated concepts for a project by introducing a set of constraints that the software must adhere to. For the undercarriage, Autodesk and JPL capture the types of temperatures and forces that the undercarriage can experience when traveling in deep space. They also introduce variables such as the types of materials that the software must experiment with, such as titanium and aluminum. And they asked the software to explore different types of manufacturing methods, including casting and 3D printing.

Image: Autodesk

"You can look at all these things at the same time," says Davis. "You load forces and requirements, then the computer thinks about it."

After a month and a half of DIY with the software designs, JPL and Autodesk have opted for the spider-type concept, which includes three main sections. The first is the internal structure – or the digestive tract – which contains the suite of instruments for studying distant worlds. This piece is printed in 3D aluminum. The second section is the main body of the spacecraft, called chassis, which provides overall structural support. This piece, which is made by casting aluminum in a mold, is based on the third vital section: the aluminum feet made by a 3D milling machine. The whole thing is about seven feet and a half wide and three feet high.

Overall, Autodesk claims to have been able to reduce the weight of the undercarriage by 35% compared to the basic design of other JPL undercarriages. According to Autodesk, the undercarriage weighs about 176 pounds, which is relatively light compared to NASA's latest Mars InSight, which weighs about 770 pounds. And Autodesk says the internal structure can support a payload of scientific instruments weighing up to 250 pounds.

From design to finish, Davis stated that the whole process had taken about a year and a half and that the team could quickly reiterate the design during the first month with Autodesk software. Although this particular lander does not go into space, Davis hopes to continue working with JPL to find ways to incorporate generative design into their mission planning. "The introduction of a new feature, such as generative design, is a disruption. So they have to be careful about how they introduce it and give the engineers the confidence they need to proceed, "says Davis. "It's an exercise in cultural change."