Mentor: Tarek A. Elgohary
Description: Research on atmospheric entry has been a crucial area of space exploration since the early stages of the space program; however, future human Mars missions will drastically increase the requirements of our atmospheric entry capabilities. Atmospheric entry requires a careful balance of landing accuracy, maximum acceleration, and heating requires a careful balance of landing accuracy, maximum acceleration, and heating requirements; however, the requirements for landing accuracy are now significantly higher. Manned Mars missions require an order of magnitude improvement over current state of the art, as many plans call for multiple missions to be landed within close proximity to each other. Any significant distance between these missions could risk mission failure. EDL algorithms for the most recent Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), aka Curiosity, are based on the Apollo reentry method. A more recent approach for a unified algorithm relaxed some constraints to improve overall performance; however, oscillations were observed in some cases which may cause excessive heating. The table highlights the improvements in EDL performance for unmanned Mars mission. We propose a unified algorithm that simultaneously propagates uncertainties and integrates them with robust feedback control algorithms. The approach will handle uncertainties in real time as well as propagate the system dynamics to achieve feedback control to improve existing landing accuracy.
The REU student will implement the Apollo guidance method in order to establish a firm foundation and understanding of improvement areas. Next, the team will develop a unified method for direct Mars EDL that will accurately land low and medium vehicles. By fulfilling these tasks, our students will be exposed to various theoretical and computational aspects of graduate-level research in space flight. In terms of instruction, the REU student will learn the fundamental aspects of the research methods as well as proper dissemination methods.
Comparison of Mars Missions Attributes