Guidance, Navigation, and Control System Performance Trades for Mars Pinpoint Landing

Abstract

Landing site selection is a compromise between safety concerns associated with the site's terrain and scientific interest. Therefore, technologies enabling pinpoint landing performance (sub-100-m accuracies) on the surface of Mars are of interest to increase the number of accessible sites for in situ research, as well as allow placement of vehicles nearby prepositioned assets. A survey of the performance of guidance, navigation, and control technologies that could allow pinpoint landing to occur at Mars was performed. This assessment has shown that negligible propellant mass fraction benefits are seen for reducing the three-sigma position dispersion at the end of the hypersonic guidance phase (parachute deployment) below approximately 3 km. Four different propulsive terminal descent guidance algorithms were examined. Of these four, a near propellant-optimal analytic guidance law showed promise for the conceptual design of pinpoint landing vehicles. The existence of a propellant optimum with regard to the initiation time of the propulsive terminal descent was shown to exist for various flight conditions. Subsonic guided parachutes were shown to provide marginal performance benefits, due to the timeline associated with descent through the thin Mars atmosphere. This investigation also demonstrates that navigation is a limiting technology for Mars pinpoint landing, with landed performance being largely driven by navigation sensor and map tie accuracy.

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