NASA’s Research on Landing Impact
Jackson, a NASA senior research engineer, has studied materials, structural designs that can better absorb energy, and crash simulations for 25 years — first for the Army and now for NASA. She works at what is now the Landing Impact Research at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.Recently she shared some of what she has learned when the NASA TV education channel broadcast “Crash Safety: Past Success and Future Concepts,” one in a series of Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) technical seminars.
“I work at a very unique facility at NASA Langley,” said Jackson. “It’s a steel A-frame gantry that’s about 240 feet high, 400 feet long and 265 feet wide at the base.”
The gantry, which looks a lot like a huge red and white erector set, started out its life in the early 1960s as the place where Neil Armstrong and 23 other astronauts learned to land on the moon. Read more
