Ms. Haley Cummings and her early career teammates have been selected for a NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) Early Career Initiative Project titled “Rotorcraft Optimization for the Advancement of Mars eXploration” (ROAMX). The ROAMX project builds off the successful NASA Ames Aeromechanics Office collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that led to the Mars Helicopter Technology Demonstrator Ingenuity that is scheduled to fly on Mars in 2021. The ROAMX Project will significantly enhance rotorcraft capabilities on Mars, thereby enabling a vast expansion of science experiments and exploration of the surface and atmosphere of Mars. The work proposed will lead to an optimized rotor using novel unconventional airfoils and rotor blades for use in future-generation advanced Mars rotorcraft which significantly increase payload capacity, speed, and range. To accomplish these goals, the focus of this research is to mature optimization of airfoils and blade geometries for advanced Mars rotorcraft and to experimentally validate and demonstrate rotor performance improvements. The project will be supported by Aeromechanics Office members Mr. Witold Koning (computational lead), Ms. Natalia Perez Perez (experimental lead), Ms. Dorsa Shirazi, Ms. Lauren Wagner, Ms. Shannah Withrow-Maser, and Ms. Sarah Conley. Mentors for the project include Dr. Wayne Johnson, Mr. Larry Young, Dr. Bob Balaram, Mr. Theodore Tzanetos, and Ms. Susan Gorton.
Ms. Cummings was a NASA Aeromechanics Intern in summer 2014 conducting photogrammetry experiments on wind tunnel test stands. She returned to NASA Ames as a Science Mission Directorate Sally Ride Internship Fellow in the Aeromechanics Office in spring 2016 and designed the first helicopter rotor wind tunnel test stand for the Aeolian Wind Tunnel in the Ames Planetary Aeolian Laboratory. She was selected into the NASA Pathways Employment Internship Program in 2017 while a graduate student at Northern Illinois University (NIU) where she was a member of the NIU Division I women’s soccer team. After graduating in June 2018, she converted from the Pathways Program to a mechanical engineering position in the Aeromechanics Office. She currently serves in the Aeromechanics Mechanical Systems Team and leads the Laser Scanning and Photogrammetry Team. She is the Lead Design Engineer for the new NASA Side-by-Side Urban Air Mobility 7-foot by 10-foot Wind Tunnel model. She recently first authored a paper on measuring the as-built geometry of the NASA/Army XV-15 Tilt Rotor Aircraft on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. She has participated in helicopter wind tunnel tests at Mars atmospheric densities and has co-authored several papers on conducting Mars science using rotorcraft.