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Completed TRL 5 (started at 4, targeting 5)
Precision landing on Mars is a significant GNC challenge. Complications arise due to uncertainties in a range of factors that impact the landing site including wind pattern variations, atmospheric uncertainties, and spacecraft sensor errors. Predicting a vehicle’s landing radius requires simulating a huge number of potential trajectories by varying these uncertainties. Since time-consuming, high-fidelity EDL models are needed for accurate trajectory simulation, precise landing predictions under mission-critical time constraints are often infeasible.
The proposed work specifically addresses the challenge of producing fast and high-precision predictions for EDL under uncertainty. The crux of the approach is the development of a cutting-edge, multifidelity uncertainty quantification (UQ) capability to fuse the predictions from a well-established, high-fidelity EDL code with estimates from low-fidelity models. The fast, low-fidelity models enable substantial speedup while the high-fidelity model establishes accuracy and convergence guarantees.
An innovative framework for rapid, high-precision trajectory simulation is proposed to advance the current state-of-the-art for entry, descent, and landing (EDL) systems, where uncertainty propagation for EDL systems involves Monte Carlo Dispersion analysis that needs thousands or millions of trajectory simulations. Significant breakthroughs for EDL are needed for NASA's crewed Mars missions, where nearly three orders-of-magnitude reduction in landing radius is required to safely land humans on the Martian surface.
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