It's a nail biting event to touch down on Mars. The terrifying moments of entry, descent, and landing are frightening.
The EDL community is trying to come up with new ideas on how to get to Mars. NASA's Mars Sample Return project is one of the biggest and new assignments.
Mars is going to get a load of landed hardware in the near term to support further robotic investigations, but also to reinforce a human presence on the planet. Getting down, dirty and securely on Mars is a balancing act of technical skill and luck.
There is shiny silver litter on the red planet.
Putnam is an assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Illinois. "Landing big things on the surface, for more advanced robotic missions and human exploration, and landing lots of smaller, less expensive things at relatively low cost."
Putnam said what's next for Mars is clear.
Putnam said that being able to send lots of smaller payloads to the Martian surface less expensively would leverage excess capacity on launch vehicles used to send larger payloads and take advantage of the improving abilities of small satellites.
"It would allow us to accept more risk, since a few failures is less of an issue if there are a lot of landers," said Putnam. A larger, more diverse community of scientists and engineers can be found at universities.
The resemblance is that of a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology and an associate director of the Keck Institute for Space Studies.
Mars surface access technology is gaining new interest from companies and government technology programs. All of the commercial space systems investment at the moon to Mars is translated into lower cost and more frequent Mars exploration.
There is a need for development at both the small and large sizes. Small science missions can be delivered with more cost efficient means. Different approaches are required for human-rated payloads at the large size.
In September, NASA gave seven contracts to six companies to build inflatable aerodynamic decelerator systems. This technology will benefit potential NASA and commercial mission applications.
JPL's focus for the last 20 years has been Mars Sample Return. It is to land on Mars more precisely than before.
There is a NASA-led Mars ascent rocket and a pair of Mars helicopter in front of EDL experts.
After landing in Jezero Crater, the landers would load up with Mars collectibles and then send them back to Earth to be studied.
Two metric tons is how much the Sample Retrieval Lander is now. It's almost twice the mass of what we put down with the Perseverance rover. It's a big difference in terms of what we need to do. He said that it was much larger than what they had landed before.
The helicopter on Mars is on the 31st flight.
The sample retrieval will not use the sky crane concept. Built-in retro rockets are used to power the craft down.
Chen said that there's a doubling-down on the use of Terrain Relative navigation, a capability that provides a map-relative position fix that can be used to accurately target specific landing points on the surface of the ocean.
Adding a lot of fuel to the Sample Retrieval Lander will allow the craft to land close to a target. Chen said that they needed to land a bigger vehicle in a parking lot.
An adaptive rangetrigger will enable a smarter self- decision about when the lander deploys its parachute.
There is more to come. The landers parachute is growing to an 80 foot design. Chen said they want to beef up the parachute to handle larger vehicles.
The Mars Perseverance rover is looking at the landscape to see if there is a parking spot. Chen said that for the first time, they can see everything that is a concern to the landers. It's a huge advantage that we know what's there.
The goal is to land within a couple hundred meters of where the Perseverance rover will be, or a location where the wheeled robot can easily drive up to deliver Mars samples. Chen said that care would be taken not to land directly near Perseverance due to concern about the ruckus created when the lander's rocket plume pitches out.
Given what we have right now, and the need to land a huge amount of mass very precisely, what you are seeing is an evolution of what we have been doing in the past. We're looking forward to showing what we can do.
Rob Manning, now chief engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has been actively engaged in planning out EDL at Mars.
Manning doesn't know how to quantify the risks but there are a lot of developmental challenges. I hope we don't get in trouble.
Manning believes there is a "kink in the curve" for EDL.
Manning said that the game was a new one. SRP is a way to decelerate a vehicle using retrorockets.
Taking a stab and trying SRP on Mars will be the big step in the future. I'm pretty sure it will work. Everyone agrees that it's possible. Manning said that they are all kind of chicken.
The SRP work at JPL has been aided by the cooperation of the two companies. Manning said that they have been able to monitor the quality of their booster returns which fly exactly in the right domain.
Manning said it was very hard to analyze.
There's a lot of work to be done by the EDL community in regards to new research, new know-how and hardware.
Manning said that the Sample Retrieval Lander fits in between where we're going with the large landing system and where we are going after that.
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