Morpheus successfully passed the test

The Morpheus project was first announced by NASA in July 2010 - it is a reusable vehicle for vertical takeoff and landing in automatic mode on other planets and / or asteroids, and with a certain degree of security provided by specially created technology Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT).

On December 10, a team of project engineers carried out the first successful field tests of Morpheus, during which the device successfully launched from the surface of a special platform, reached a height of about 15 meters, began lateral movement and landed without problems at another point located 7 meters from the starting point. The entire flight took less than a minute.

The apparent ease of the task (testing still takes place under terrestrial conditions) should not be misleading: in August last year, inertial navigation system failed during one of the ancestors of the apparatus during similar tests, the result of which can be seen in the photo below:


')
The video itself is well shot the process of testing and well heard the noise of the movement Morpheus, whose engines work on a mixture of liquid oxygen and methane:



The Morpheus blog is here .