Designing NASA’s VIPER Rover: LSU Alum Jordan Duhé’s Mission to the Moon
When NASA tasked Jordan Duhé (2012 BACH EGR) to help design VIPER, she and her peers had to design and build a vehicle capable of operating and performing science on the lunar surface, as well as perform testing here on Earth that simulated those lunar environments in order to prove its capabilities.
Engineering for Extremes: What Is NASA’s VIPER Rover?
NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) mission involves a fully robotic rover designed to operate uncrewed on the Moon. VIPER is designed to go to the Moon’s south pole and search for water ice on and under the surface.
“We know there is some water there, but we don’t know how much and how it’s distributed,” Duhé says.
Duhé, a design engineer who is part of the Structures and Mechanisms Team at Johnson Space Center in Houston, has been part of the project since 2019.
“We are the team that makes sure this vehicle can support all the loads it is going to experience,” Duhé says. “That’s everything from driving around on the Moon's surface to the vibrations it is going to experience while it’s being launched into space. We have to make sure it can sustain all that.”
How NASA Simulates the Moon on Earth
VIPER will send data back to Earth. It will not send samples back or return to Earth. It does the science on board. That water could potentially be used as either an equipment coolant or drinking water source during future Moon exploration missions. Duhé faced a couple of fun challenges during the VIPER process.
“One was understanding the different environments – operating on the Moon versus operating on Earth,” Duhé says. “Operating something that needed to work in a vacuum, that needed to work in a wide range of very hot and very cold temperature extremes.”
VIPER also has to be able to navigate the Moon surface where designers only know so much about how big the craters are and how big the rocks are. The design team took existing Moon surface data and applied it to the VIPER design.
“Looking at the wheel module – it has an active suspension, steering and drive motor and wheel,” Duhé says “It is designed to operate in lunar gravity in one-sixth Earth gravity.”
To simulate those conditions for testing, the team built a prototype vehicle that had flight-like wheel modules. They stripped down the chassis to include neither science instruments nor motor controllers to make the vehicle one-sixth of its normal mass. Designers use the scaled-down vehicle to test that VIPER will be able to support lunar roving loads without encountering any structural failures.
VIPER is built and tested and NASA is seeking public/private U.S. partner proposals to land VIPER, conduct a science/exploration campaign and disseminate VIPER-generated data.
Women in Space Engineering: Advancing STEM from LSU to NASA
Duhé, a Gonzales, La., native, laid the groundwork for her NASA career by choosing a mechanical engineering degree plan at LSU with an aerospace engineering minor. A space system design class enabled Duhé to discuss all aspects of a space exploration mission, including launch vehicles, spacecraft power systems, and science payloads.
“It was every aspect of a project,” Duhé says. She also gained design engineering experience through the program’s Capstone Design class “My mechanical engineering capstone project involved designing a cryogenic tank that stored biosamples and liquid nitrogen. We were basically redesigning it to make it more user-friendly and accessible.”
“The things I learned in classes and the relationships built at LSU were helpful,” Duhé says. “I heard about the internship because an LSU professor mentioned it and said I should apply.”
Her first summer at the Marshall Space Flight Center required Duhé to work in the Main Propulsion System dealing with valves, actuators, and the Ducts Design and Development Branch. Duhé also participated in the preliminary design and analysis of a since patented actuator design. Her work was highlighted in a NASA Tech Brief “Non-Collinear Valve Actuator.” Duhé worked in the same environment in her second summer with one new responsibility. She participated in the development and testing of a liquid oxygen throttling cavitation valve for a cryogenic deep throttling engine.
Duhé supplemented her LSU degree with a master’s degree from Rice University. Her foundational LSU knowledge, the NASA summer internship, and the VIPER project have given her a view of what is possible in support of human space exploration.
“Being able to do all that remotely – the idea we can get there faster and cheaper with robotics and get good data – is very cool to me.”