2028: The Great Return
Mission plan
Return to STELLA HOMEPAGE
Mission Breakdown
To comply with NASA's requirements of the RASC-Al competition, the group has begun to plan the mission from the preliminary design stage currently being worked on, to design adaptation, to the first launch of a crewed mission, to the end-of-mission procedures and phase out. Agency reviews and key decisions are anticipated throughout to lifetime of the project, so they have also been accounted for.
The lunar lander is expected to facilitate one crewed period per year, meaning that there will be roughly 11 months out of every year that the module is uncrewed and docked to the Gateway architecture. As the team continues to develop the lander concept, the mission plan will be updated with refueling dates and technology upgrade periods.
Risk Mitigation
Many of these systems have not been tested in a landing sequence on a foreign planetary body or have not previously been used in space applications. To begin the risk analysis, a consequence matrix was designed to normalize key sectors that could possibly be affected to evaluate all system issues. The consequences are based on the effects on 5 key parameters: performance, human safety according to OSHA standards, asset damage, schedule impact, and cost. The scores range from 1 to 5, with a lower score being the most desirable, as a lower overall risk score means a safer, more reliable system.
A series of potentially hazardous or costly events were identified within each system of the module that would result in either risk to the safety of the lander, the crew, or risk to the overall timeline of either the mission. Of the 25 identified risk items, 5 key operations were identified as priorities to summarize the module in it’s most hazardous stages. A probability and consequence score was assigned to each event based on the consequence matrix, and the scores were then synthesized into a color-coded risk mitigation matrix. A mitigation strategy is imperative for all risk tracking procedures throughout the continued analysis and development of STELLA and the entire mission timeline.
