Agile prototype development for a small planetary lander

This paper details the results of two years of development of a monopropellant planetary landing system via a hybridized Agile-Lean development method. This paper continues to describe an outline of Agile and Lean development methodologies and the design of the Lunar Lion team and the Puma prototype. The paper also discusses program requirements, system implementation, and the results of using an Agile-Lean process for hardware development. The Penn State Lunar Lion team designed a low-cost landed mission to the surface of the Moon. This lander is designed to autonomously execute mission activities and collect valuable science data targeting lunar exploration goals set by the science community. Currently, Lunar Lion's team of geoscience students is developing a viable set of science goals for a small lander. For the propulsion system and vehicle design, a notional 30 kg science payload was assumed in the calculation of mission parameters. To achieve the final 300 m/s descent and landing delta-V, the team considered a monopropellant, hydrogen peroxide system; they performed analysis for thrust levels, Isp requirements, throttle range, and total propellant loading. The team identified readily available, low-cost hydrogen peroxide rocket engines that use a proprietary blend of precious metals for the catalyst and subsequently purchased several fitting rocket engines. Students then performed initial testing to confirm performance characteristics, and fed the engine specifications forward into the design of a prototype for earth-based operations. Lunar Lion uses the Agile approach to development by defining tasks and deliverables in Scrums and by using a Kanban project board to monitor progress. Merging the two methods allows for several key program management benefits such as centralized documentation resources, increased peer-to-peer interaction, and rapid turnaround of deliverables. It is this blend of Agile and Lean constructs that have directly led to the recent success of the Lunar Lion program. During the 160-day period that the team followed the Agile-Lean approach, the team successfully reached two challenging technical milestones: multiple full-scale, vehicle-level static fire tests and the system's first tethered 1-DOF vertical takeoff and soft landing test. This paper concludes with projected next steps, as well as a discussion of the effectiveness of the team's use of Agile methods and its applicability to future student-focused technology development projects.