Soft-landing: the key building block for exploration

Paper number

IAC-06-D2.3.08

Author

Mrs. Francine Bonnefond, EADS Astrium, France

Year

2006

Abstract

The new missions towards Mars : the European mission Mars Express and the American missions, launched mid 2003, are very important milestones in the exploration of Mars and also for the whole solar system. Even the first results provided seem very promising regarding potential life on Mars and highlight the need and interest to go ahead and continue the exploration adventure. Following the successful Mars-Express orbiter mission, the near-term perspective in Europe for exploration is now to perform an entry, descent and landing safely on Mars: this is the EXOMARS mission expected to be launched in 2011; its main goal is to provide enabling technologies for future missions, search for traces of life, improve the knowledge of the Martian environment and geo-physics.
A next milestone would be the sample return mission : since it appears that water exists on Mars this even increases the necessity to further analyse the Martian soil and bring back to Earth samples for deeper analysis. This gives real hope to prepare then for a manned mission.
For all these missions the key element is the system called EDLS (entry, descent and landing system) and consists of a strategic building block in Europe’s toolbox. For entry, this phase is still considered as ballistic one and mainly depends on the ballistic coefficient. Descent and landing phases are really critical for the mission success and need to be carefully analysed and defined. Especially for heavy systems these two phases consider the combination of the retro-rockets, parachute and airbags.
The aim of the present paper is to identify and present for each phase the main challenges and drivers and associated solutions. The selection of the optimal configuration of any entry, descent and landing system involves analysing many closely linked trade-offs. No single part of the system can be designed or optimised in isolation. Instead, the choice of design and parameters for the whole sequence which, taken together, can give the ‘optimal’ solution (with respect to the appropriate drivers, such as minimum mass or increased robustness) must be established using an integrated analysis. As an application to this approach the paper will present such optimal solutions where one is the so-called soft-landing option. This very promising concept allows to land safely and softly the scientific package with an impact velocity lower than 5 m/s. This concept will be detailed in the present paper.

Abstract document

IAC-06-D2.3.08.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-06-D2.3.08.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

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