NASA officials met last week to review the agency's overall exploratory architecture, but it wasn't immediately clear what decision they made and when it will be made public. As part of formulating 63 targets for Moon and Mars exploration plans announced in September, agency leaders met at the Kennedy Space Center for what NASA calls the Architectural Concept Review.
Catherine Koerner, deputy director for exploration systems development, tweeted on January 23: “Today is the start of NASA's Architectural Concept Review, where we will agree among our colleagues on our architecture from the Moon to Mars so we can work on the same blueprint.”
NASA officials have talked about creating an architecture that will achieve these goals before. “We have a core philosophy of architecture on the right and executing on the left,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said during a speech at the International Astronautics Congress in September, during which the agency unveiled its updated list of goals. He explained that this means creating an architecture to achieve a desired goal and using that to drive work on existing systems.
Over the course of three days, Koerner made a series of review updates, focusing more on procedural than content.
“We tried to address the objections of our colleagues to the document yesterday and today – again agreeing to make sure we are advocating an architecture that supports what we want to achieve on the Moon and Mars and where everyone can see themselves in it,” he tweeted on January 25.
The Architectural Description Paper he referred to was, by his own definition, a document that linked exploration goals with “needed functionality and use cases.”
In other contexts, various NASA officials have made reference to assessment and documentation. Korth, vice president of the Orion program at Johnson Space Center, said at a panel at the AIAA SciTech Forum on Jan. 23 that the document will "explain exactly what this architecture will look like, how we're going to develop it."
According to him, this progress will go from the first Artemis landing missions, where two astronauts can stay on the Moon's surface for up to six and a half days, to later, more sophisticated missions "to test what we'll want to do when we get to Mars."
Kathy Lueders, deputy director of space operations, said she participated in the assessment during a briefing on the Crew-25 commercial crew trip to the International Space Station on January 6. As we take these extremely important steps to travel to the Moon and to Mars, there will undoubtedly be many opportunities for NASA and our foreign partners to work together in the future.
Still, he did not mention the outcome or the details of the meeting. "I don't want to issue any spoiler alerts regarding additional news that Jim Free will unveil over the next few months," said the organization's deputy director of discovery systems development.
Few details about the review's findings and when they will be made public have been given by other NASA officials. Noting that the architecture and how it supports the goals will be discussed in public publications, Korth added that this will happen “very soon.” Korth said the assessment will consider new information each year. This architectural review will not be finished in one sitting.
Still, he and other NASA representatives on the conference panel admitted that they were unsure of the exact date when any material related to architectural evaluation would be made public. They read the comments carefully. The speaker added that it depends on what they will achieve this week and what needs to be taken care of.
The document needs to be updated further before it can be made public, Koerner said, but this review is an important first step in establishing a basic architecture.
Source: spacenews
Günceleme: 30/01/2023 11:34
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