Session: 01-07-01 Industrial Fluid Mechanics

Paper Number: 76393

Start Time: August 11th, 12:50 PM

76393 - Modeling Supersonic Parachute Inflations and Plume-Surface Interactions for Landing Spacecraft on Mars 

For any spacecraft, crewed or robotic to land safely on Mars, it must decelerate from an extremely high speed at the top of the atmosphere (typically ~ 5 km/s) to a low speed at the Martian surface during touchdown to ensure a safe landing. During this process, commonly referred to as Entry, Descent, & Landing (EDL), many operations need to be successfully executed in succession in order to ensure a safe landing in the desired landing ellipse. While there are many complex operations involved with Mars EDL, this talk will focus specifically on two aspects: 1) modeling supersonic parachute inflations during Mars EDL, and 2) modeling plume-surface interactions during the final phases of touchdown.

Due to the relatively low-density atmosphere on Mars (~1% that of the Earth’s), it is generally desirable for a spacecraft to try to decelerate as high as possible in the Martian atmosphere. For robotic spacecraft, this tends to necessitate the deployment of a supersonic parachute. NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) program highlighted some of the limitations with current understanding of supersonic parachute deployments and has motivated large investments in advancing the state of the art for high-fidelity fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations of supersonic parachute inflations. This talk will provide an update on some recent advances in FSI modeling of supersonic parachute inflations and discuss some of the challenges associated with both testing and modeling supersonic parachute inflations.

On Mars, the terminal velocity of a spacecraft using a parachute is still too high for a soft landing due to the low-density atmosphere. To compensate for this, many spacecraft use powered descent (i.e. thrusters) during the terminal landing maneuver, to reach an acceptable speed for landing (~< 1 m/s). However, high-speed exhaust products from the landing thrusters (~1 km/s) can interact with the surface causing regolith to be mobilized and accelerated to high speeds, and this can have a detrimental effect on the landing process and the spacecraft itself. This talk will also provide an update on recent modeling efforts to be able to predict the regolith environment created from plume-surface interactions during powered descent on Mars.

Presenting Author: Jason Rabinovitch Stevens Institute of Technology

Authors:

Jason Rabinovitch Stevens Institute of Technology