Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent, and Landing System Development Challenges

Abstract

project recently landed the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. With the success of the landing system, the performance envelope of entry, descent, and landing capabilities has been extended over the previous state of the art. This paper will present an overview of the MSL entry, descent, and landing system, a discussion of a subset of its development challenges, and include a discussion of preliminary results of the flight reconstruction effort. INTRODCUTION On August 5 th at 10:31 PM PDT, signals were received on Earth confirming the successful landing of the Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity rover on the planet Mars. With this signal came the first proof of success of the ambitious new entry, descent, and landing system that had taken Curiosity to the surface. Curiosity weighs 900 kg and required the development of a new landing system. The MSL entry, descent, and landing system is novel, using old technologies in a new application and pioneering new technologies as well. Development was paced originally for a 2009 launch to Mars, but development issues across the spacecraft resulted in a slip to the 2011 launch window. With this slip, the development lifecycle was a total of eight years, from the inception of the entry, descent and landing (EDL) system architecture in 2004 to its final test at Mars in 2012. The EDL system for Curiosity possesses many technological advancements, mostly in the form of novel uses of existing technologies (ex: Ka-band pulse pair Doppler multi beam radar for landing) but also some notable direct innovations (ex: the sky crane maneuver). Through out the development of this EDL system, architecture and design choices were made in an attempt to yield a robust system design that would be resilient to the ever present threats of spacecraft development such as shortfalls in piece part or subsystem performance, errors and lapses the understanding of the design challenges and requirements, and error in understanding the interconnectivity of the individual system elements. Through the development process, the MSL EDL architecture survived intact that is no major architectural redesign occurred (ex: adopting a different touchdown technique other than

A Novel Approach to Visual Navigation based on Feature Line Correspondences for Precision Landing

“…Lastly, the landing process of the NASA spacecraft Curiosity is simulated by using our method with the EKF (Steltzner et al, 2014). The simulation result can confirm whether the proposed algorithm meets the requirements of a pin-point landing.…”

An enhanced anti-disturbance guidance scheme for powered descent phase of Mars landing under actuator fault

“…where r L 2 R 3 and v L 2 R 3 represent lander's positions and velocities, respectively, H 0 2 R 3Â3 is given system matrix, u a 2 R 3 is the control input, dðtÞ 2 R 3 is the disturbance acceleration from Mars wind, [3][4][5]22 and f 1 ðv L ðtÞ; tÞ is nonlinear function corresponding to the Mars angle rotating velocity which is supposed to be known and satisfies bounded condition described in Assumption A.1. Here, f 1 ðv L ðtÞ;…”

“…1,2 Unfortunately, landers will inevitably face Mars wind disturbance, which may result in far range away from the prespecified landing point, sometimes it even causes a crush into the ground. [3][4][5] Besides, the Mars landing mission needs to endure a long stage including launching from the earth, in-orbit flying, and landing. Therefore, landers will probably occur fault which leads to the safety problem of landers.…”

Making an Onboard Reference Map From MRO/CTX Imagery for Mars 2020 Lander Vision System

“…These scientifically compelling regions were also highly likely to contain landing hazards including scarps, canyons, mesas, dune fields, rock fields, and smaller craters. Mars 2020 used the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) system (Steltzner et al., 2013). This system generates an inertial position by propagating an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) from the ground navigation position fixed prior to entry.…”