{"id":4777,"date":"2011-08-10T04:38:33","date_gmt":"2011-08-09T20:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/touching-the-moon-lightly\/"},"modified":"2024-12-12T11:41:11","modified_gmt":"2024-12-12T03:41:11","slug":"touching-the-moon-lightly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/touching-the-moon-lightly\/","title":{"rendered":"Touching the moon lightly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Helping to ensure future spacecraft make a soft landing on the moon is how two Curtin-based researchers aim to make tomorrow better<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

John Curtin Disinguished Professor Kok Lay Teo<\/a><\/strong> and his Department of Mathematics and Statistics<\/strong><\/a> colleague Dr Jingyang Zhou say they have developed a practical guidance law to land a lunar module upright and very close to zero velocity.<\/p>\n

Dr Zhou (pictured right) said the model used in previously published research was normally a two-dimensional one that assumed lunar landers descended vertically, without horizontal movement.<\/p>\n

He said this assumption was clearly unrealistic.<\/p>\n

A new model and a newly developed computational method for optimal control helped the researchers devise the new guidance law.<\/p>\n

Professor Teo (pictured left) said benefits included fuel savings and minimising the risk of a lunar lander toppling over.<\/p>\n

Dr Zhou\u2019s initial involvement in the research was at Harbin Institute of Technology in China, where he met Professor Teo.<\/p>\n

Dr Zhou\u2019s expertise is in aerospace engineering and the study stemmed from a thesis completed for his PhD, of which Professor Teo was the supervisor.<\/p>\n

Professor Teo has been a visiting academic at Harbin Institute of Technology for more than seven years.<\/p>\n

He said the inter-university collaboration had proved beneficial – with several Harbin researchers spending time at Curtin and the two institutions having jointly hosted PhD students.<\/p>\n

“My expertise is in numerical optimal control and optimisation, but combining that with other expertise such as Dr Zhou’s, we could do a lot more,” he said.<\/p>\n

The findings are revealed in Optimal Guidance for Lunar Module Soft Landing<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a paper written jointly with Professor Di Zhou from Harbin Institute of Technology and Dr Guohui Zhao from Dalian Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n

PHOTOGRAPHY: SAM PROCTOR<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Improving the lunar landings of tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4275,"featured_media":4778,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"4962,7733,5512,4662,6122,4652","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-4777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"","content":"","image":false},"related_courses":[{"title":"","qualification":"","link":"","description":"","faculty":""}],"credits":{"author":"","photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}},"post_components":false},"featured_image":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Curtin-lunar-module2.jpg","author_meta":{"first_name":"Curtin","last_name":"University","display_name":"Curtin University"},"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 04:42:29","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4275"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4777"},{"taxonomy":"research-areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-areas?post=4777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}