Global Aerospace Corporation plans to present its “Pluto Hop, Skip and Jump” mission concept at NIAC as symposium in Denver, CO on September 25.
IRWINDALE, CA – Global Aerospace Corporation (GAC) announced today that it will present its Pluto lander concept at the 2017 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Symposium in Denver, CO. Under a grant from NASA’s NIAC program, GAC is developing an integrated “entrycraft” architecture that can decelerate and gently land on the surface of Pluto from a speed of over 30,000 mph using only drag from Pluto’s ultra-thin atmosphere and just a few pounds of propellant. Once at the surface, the vehicle can switch to “hopper” mode, taking advantage of the low gravitational acceleration and a modest propellant store to hop around the surface, sometimes tens or hundreds of kilometers at a time, investigating surface features of interest.
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