meetings - Space Flight Mechanics Committee

Feb 12, 2013
Puna Room C&D
SESSION 12: SPECIAL SESSION: MARS SCIENCE LABORATORY (MSL) -- II
Chair: Dr. Gerhard Kruizinga, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
8:00 AAS Entry System Design and Performance Summary for the Mars Science
13-422 Laboratory Mission
Allen Chen, NASA / Caltech JPL
While the Sky Crane portion of Mars Science Laboratory’s Entry, Descent, and Landing
system draws well-deserved attention as the iconic image of the landing, the entry segment
is at least an equally harrowing part of the journey where a multitude of opportunities for
failure exist. Over 99% of the spacecraft’s kinetic energy is dissipated during entry; all
before the use of the supersonic parachute or the descent engines. This paper provides an
overview of the entry segment design and summarizes Curiosity’s as flown entry
performance on the night of August 5th.
8:20 AAS Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent, and Landing Trajectory and
13-307 Atmosphere Reconstruction
Chris Karlgaard, Analytical Mechanics Associates, Inc.; Mark Schoenenberger,
NASA Langley Research Center; Prasad Kutty, NASA Langley Research Center;
Jeremy Shidner, Analytical Mechanics Associates, Inc.
On August 5th 2012, The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) entry vehicle successfully
entered Mars' atmosphere and landed the Curiosity rover on its surface. Onboard
instrumentation was used to reconstruct the entry trajectory and measure information about
the atmosphere encountered. The instrumentation includes IMU accelerations and angular
rates; surface pressure measurements from the Mars Entry Atmospheric Data System
experiment; radar altimeter data; and the vehicle aerodynamic database. These data sources
are blended using a Kalman filter. This paper provides an overview of the approach and the
details of the results of the reconstruction.
8:40 AAS Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent, and Landing Flush Air Data System
13-308 Atmosphere Reconstruction
Rafael Lugo, North Carolina State University
A method is presented that enables atmosphere reconstruction from flush air data pressure
observations. An innovative technique that permits the inclusion of redundant data types
through the use of Monte Carlo dispersions is used as the framework for the inclusion of the
pressure observations. The method is applied to the entry, descent, and landing flight data
from Mars Science Laboratory. In addition to extracting atmosphere properties, the
inclusion of pressure data is shown to aid in the quantification of trajectory parameter
uncertainties in the hypersonic flight regime by reducing the state estimate uncertainties
recovered from the Monte Carlo technique.
Page 50
23 rd AAS / AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting