NASA and their partners are embarking on a series of space missions to the moon and beyond, collectively known as the Artemis Program. The Artemis I mission launched November 2022. This talk briefly summarizes Artemis program and describes laser and optical measurement technique development and application to ground and flight tests related to, or inspired by, the Artemis program. In particular, development and application of three different measurement techniques (planar laser-induced fluorescence [PLIF], femtosecond laser electronic excitation and tagging [FLEET] and stereo photogrammetry) are described. These techniques have been applied to study vehicle launch, lunar landing, and earth entry. Such optical and laser-based instrumentation can provide unique qualitative and quantitative information to inform the underlying physics of space flight while also providing benchmark data for validating ever advancing predictive codes.
About the speaker: Dr. Danehy graduated from the University of New Hampshire in Mechanical Engineering in 1989. He then attended Stanford University and obtained both MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering, finishing in 1995. At Stanford he studied optical measurement techniques applied to study combustion. Thereafter, he spent five years at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra as a post-doctoral researcher and then as a faculty member in the Department of Physics, where he applied laser-based methods to study hypersonic flows. Dr Danehy has been at NASA Langley Research Center since 2000. As NASA’s Senior Technologist (ST) for Advanced Measurement Systems he leads and participates in the planning, advocacy, execution and review of basic and applied research to advance the state of the art in measurement technology, with a particular emphasis on measurement techniques to characterize off-body, temporally dense, spatially dense flow fields to enable NASA’s missions.
