IMMUNOLOGY: Soft Landing

Optimal trajectories for soft landing on asteroids

Optimal Guidance for Lunar Module Soft Landing

In this paper, we consider an optimal control problem arising from the optimal guidance of a lunar module to achieving soft landing, where the description of the system dynamics is in a three-dimensional coordinate system. Our aim is to construct an optimal guidance law to realize the soft landing of the lunar module with the terminal attitude of the module to be within a small deviation from b...

Mass-selective soft-landing of protein assemblies with controlled landing energies.

Selection and soft-landing of bionanoparticles in vacuum is potentially a preparative approach to separate heterogeneous mixtures for high-resolution structural study or to deposit homogeneous materials for nanotechnological applications. Soft-landing of intact protein assemblies however remains challenging, due to the difficulties of manipulating these heavy species in mass-selective devices a...

Running backwards: soft landing-hard takeoff, a less efficient rebound.

Human running at low and intermediate speeds is characterized by a greater average force exerted after 'landing', when muscle-tendon units are stretched ('hard landing'), and a lower average force exerted before 'takeoff', when muscle-tendon units shorten ('soft takeoff'). This landing-takeoff asymmetry is consistent with the force-velocity relation of the 'motor' (i.e. with the basic property ...

Design of Guidance Laws for Lunar Pinpoint Soft Landing

Future lunar missions ask for the capability to perform precise Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) to the selected landing sites on the lunar surface. This paper studies the guidance issues for the lunar pinpoint soft landing problem. The primary contribution of this paper is the design of descent guidance law based on the Pontryagin maximum principle. The simulation shows that the proposed...