Low-cost Mars EDL solutions

The cost of arriving at Mars is projected to decrease in the future thanks to growing commercial spaceflight interests. The cost to launch to Earth orbit is being reduced through launch vehicle reusability and secondary payload opportunities. Commercial vendors are working to develop in-space propulsion solutions for Earth orbital operations, which could be extended in the future to interplanetary transport. Design concepts also include dedicated “bus” spacecraft to deliver multiple low-mass payloads to Mars. For a mission planner, these conditions could mean lower transportation costs and more mission opportunities.

These solutions could bring a scientific payload all the way to Mars arrival. But for surface missions, the atmospheric entry system required to deliver it through entry, descent, and landing (EDL) has historically been a complex and costly system that is custom designed for each mission. Non-recurring engineering and development costs are high, typically around five to ten times the production cost. Even attempts at “build to print” which allow for “small” modifications to the entry vehicle, such as InSight and Mars 2020 reusing the aeroshell design from Mars Phoenix and Mars Science Laboratory, respectively, incur additional development costs that can outweigh the advantage of design reuse. The ideal from the mission planners’ perspective would be a “package delivery service” of EDL: when you ship a package somewhere, you don't worry about designing the box it goes in, you buy one that has already been developed.

The objective of this project is to study ways to lower the cost of EDL solutions for low-mass Mars missions using a family of common entry vehicle systems or components. Development costs for a single vehicle can be reduced by leveraging high technology readiness level (TRL) or commercial off the shelf (COTS) systems. Using the same vehicle design multiple times without needing to make modifications for each payload would reduce non-recurring development costs. Furthermore, economies of scale can be leveraged through a production run of multiple units at the same time.

The caveat is that such a vehicle would have to be suitable for multiple missions. Therefore, this project also includes conducting a survey of low-cost or low-mass Mars missions to identify commonalities in payload requirements such as mass, volume, and environmental constraints. A single entry vehicle design could be used for missions with substantially similar requirements; a limited number of vehicle designs might be able to support a broad range of the mission requirement space, including soft landers, impactors or penetrators, and aerocapture to orbit. Developing a single common vehicle to support multiple missions could have the benefit of reduced cost to each individual mission.

The cost-effectiveness of the entry vehicle family could be further enhanced by maximizing the commonality of vehicle components like aeroshell structures, thermal protection systems, parachutes, separation mechanisms, avionics, control systems, etc. For example, the design of a rigid aeroshell heatshield might be reused as the nosecap for a vehicle with a deployable aerodynamic decelerator. Developing such a family of vehicles would benefit an organization like NASA considering multiple missions.

This project is a collaboration between NASA’s Langley Research Center, Ames Research Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Initial development is focused on the architecture selection and parametric design of small entry vehicles, either using a rigid aeroshell or a deployable decelerator, designed to meet the requirements of multiple science missions. With the design of a single reconfigurable vehicle, trade studies will investigate the cost-effectiveness of the concept compared to designing custom entry vehicles for each mission.

A catalog of EDL solutions can offer flexibility to mission planners and fit into the developing ecosystem of commercial solutions and low-cost missions. Vehicle designs would have a known envelope, defined by the available volume, mass, arrival velocity at Mars, and the mission target (in orbit or on the surface). By providing a vehicle with known capabilities up front, the mission planners have much more certainty in the constraints and interfaces to which the payload must be designed. Using an existing vehicle also relieves the mission of most of the development risk associated with the entry vehicle, both in terms of cost and schedule. The vehicle inventory could be made available to both NASA and commercial or international partners.

This project also delivers analysis tools for the design and sizing of small robotic Mars mission entry vehicles. This capability can be used by mission planners for early estimates of entry vehicle design, or it can be used by other projects to evaluate the impact of new technologies on entry vehicle performance.

This project also yields the results of the science mission survey. Surveyed missions are being identified from literature or are being developed from science goals laid out by the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, the Mars Concurrent Exploration Science Analysis Group, or similar high-level directives. The benefit of the survey and the processing of results is the translation of sometimes very disparate requirements for different mission types into a consistent set of requirements that would be placed on the entry vehicle (as well as on the in-space transportation and orbital launch vehicles).

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 2) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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