(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-09)
Mueller, Robert P.; Braun, Robert D.; Sforzo, Brandon; Sibille, Laurent; Gonyea, Keir C.; Ali, Hisham
Landing on Mars is extremely difficult [1] and is considered one of NASA’s biggest technical challenges on the journey to Mars. Science magazine [2] reported the following about the NASA Mars Science Lab (MSL) Mission:
“Not only will NASA have to slow the most massive load ever delivered to another planet's surface from hypervelocity bullet speeds to a dead stop, all in the usual "7 minutes of terror." But NASA is also attempting to deliver Curiosity to the surface of Mars more precisely than any mission before, within a 20-kilometer-long ellipse some 240 million kilometers from Earth. Both feats are essential to NASA's long-term goals at Mars: returning samples of Martian rock and sending humans to the Red Planet.”
As a result of the thin Mars atmosphere, this challenge is exacerbated as the payload mass is increased. This NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project has studied one of the top challenges for landing large payloads and humans on Mars by using advanced atmospheric In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) methods that have never been tried or studied before. The proposed Mars Molniya Orbit Atmospheric Resource Mining concept mission architecture changes the paradigm of Mars landings for a wide range of vehicle classes to make the Earth-Mars round-trip travel robust, affordable, and ultimately routine for cargo and crew, therefore enabling the expansion of human civilization to Mars.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-01)
Skolnik, Nathaniel; Kamezawa, Hiromasa; Li, Lin; Rossman, Grant A.; Sforzo, Brandon; Braun, Robert D.
Entry, descent, and landing (EDL) is especially challenging on Mars because the
atmosphere is too thin to provide substantial deceleration, but thick enough to
generate significant heating during the reentry phase. As a result, innovative ideas
are required to enable future high-mass Mars landing missions. One such promising
approach is to use an inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (IAD). Compared with
traditional rigid aeroshells, IADs are made of lightweight, flexible materials that can
be folded into a smaller volume in the rocket payload fairing and inflated prior to
atmospheric entry. Such IADs are able to reduce the ballistic coefficient and peak
heating, providing an opportunity to land at higher surface elevations on Mars.
Currently, NASA Langley Research Center is investigating the development of
Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerators (HIADs) to enable future large
robotic and human exploration missions. Much of the previous work performed on
HIADs has focused on symmetric shapes that fly through the atmosphere with
ballistic trajectories or trajectories with low lift-to-drag ratios accomplished via CGoffset.
The present investigation assesses the technical feasibility of a novel HIAD
concept that can vary lift-to-drag ratios between 0.2 and 0.5, is aerodynamically
stable between 0.6 km/s and 6.5 km/s, is extensible to aeroshell diameters of 15 to 20
meters, and possesses an approximately smooth outer mold line to avoid localized
heating.