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Soft landings with hybrid rockets

In August 2023, Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander touched down softly on the lunar surface, demonstrating its precise landing technology. As we continue to celebrate this triumph, it’s exciting to consider how emerging technologies might shape the future of landings - both in space and on Earth.

Whether it’s a lunar lander gracefully descending on the Moon’s surface, a Mars explorer touching down on the Red Planet, or a cutting-edge vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft on Earth, the ability to land softly and safely is a complex yet crucial challenge.

Historically, liquid rocket engines have been the go-to for achieving VTOL capabilities in planetary vehicles, largely due to their ability to provide controllable thrust. However, VTOL applications on Earth necessitate a safer option. Enter hybrid rockets, which could prove to be a superior alternative for VTOL operations within Earth’s atmosphere and in space, offering advantages that extend well beyond just safety.

In another post, I had described my PhD student Anandu Bhadran’s work on establishing the thrust controllability of hybrid rocket motors. Leveraging on that, we embarked on a journey to show that hybrid rocket motors can be used for soft landings. Beyond simulations, we wanted to demonstrate soft landing using hybrid rocket motors. However, we did not have the bandwidth, in terms of time and resources, to develop a complete platform for this.

Hence, Anandu, along with Prof. Ramakrishna and I, delved into an innovative approach to this problem – we demonstrated the practical feasibility of using hybrid rocket thrusters in landing platforms with a technique called hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS). We reported our studies in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences.

This work was featured as a Linkedin post and also appeared in news.

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Multirotors as microgravity platforms

If there is a fire breakout in the International Space Station (ISS), will the fire propagate as if on Earth?

There are these fantastic experiments done onboard ISS that reveal how physical phenomena behave differently under microgravity conditions. To study how physical and biological processes behave in microgravity conditions, we need to create microgravity. ISS naturally has microgravity, but access to ISS as an experimental platform is limited and expensive. A facility that allows us to simulate microgravity on Earth is a drop-tower — a tall tower from which the experimental set-up can be ‘dropped’ and the set-up experiences microgravity during the resultant free-fall. Building these tall drop-towers takes time and is costly.

Siddhardha, as part of his PhD thesis, proposed that multirotors can be turned into microgravity platforms. Thus, now we have a portable, cheap, and versatile microgravity platform.

Siddhardha’s work was featured as a news article in various newspapers.

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