Understanding and Predicting Dominant Physics in Supersonic Retropropulsion

The future of Mars exploration will require landing vehicles much larger than anything humans have ever attempted. This challengedrives a need for a new entry and descent technique: Supersonic Retropropulsion (SRP), the use of firing rockets to reduce speedwhile still in the upper atmosphere. Due to the difficulty to test Mars SRP systems on Earth, NASA is relying on computational (CFD)simulations to help motivate design decisions for future entry and descent vehicles. A large multi-center team at NASA has spentthe better part of the last decade developing cutting edge CFD simulations of SRP flow fields. While many significant findings haveresulted from the studies, the results have exposed many gaps in current turbulence modeling techniques that will need to be addressedbefore results can be used to design full-scale SRP vehicles.This project proposes to innovate and expand on modern CFD techniques to model high energy flow structures. The existingcomputational tools implemented by NASA and industry are based on solvers that were never intended to handle the highlycompressible flows found in SRP systems. Due to this, most published SRP solutions show high uncertainties or inconclusive resultsin the highly turbulent regions. We plan to bridge modern high energy physics capturing techniques only conceptualized in academiawith current NASA solvers in a way that increases the confidence in CFD solutions of SRP flow fields so that they can be a valuable,reliable design tool for future Mars vehicle design.Ultimately, our project will benefit NASA and the high-speed flow community as a whole by developing and applying novel techniquesto SRP flow problems. In doing so, we will achieve physically accurate data to aid in vehicle design for NASA, but also generatevaluable data-sets for the high-speed flow research community.

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