The effects of the diurnal atmospheric variability on entry, descent and landing on Mars

Abstract

Landing on Mars is extremely challenging task due to the fact that the Martian atmosphere is the most hostile environment in the Solar system to perform the entry, descent and landing (EDL) process, because it is thick enough to create substantial heating of the entry vehicle but not thick enough to reduce its velocity to the one necessary for safe landing. Beside this, the atmosphere is very dynamic mainly due to high eccentricity of the Martian orbit, obliquity of the orbital to the equatorial plane and close alignment of the winter solstice and the orbital perihelion. Although seasonal variations of atmospheric parameters are significantly larger than the diurnal, it is very important to analyze diurnal cycles as they can significantly change vertical and horizontal atmospheric profiles in very short time intervals. This can present a serious threat to missions which have very precise timings and specific requirements such as the requirement for the daytime landing to enable ground images acquisition during the descent and landing phase. A 3-degrees-of-freedom trajectory integration routine was combined with the Mars Global Reference Atmospheric Model (Mars-GRAM) to identify the dependence of the EDL profiles on the diurnal cycles of atmospheric parameters throughout the Martian year. The obtained results show that the influence of the diurnal cycles is the largest at the equator and decreases relatively symmetrically towards the poles with a slightly stronger influence in the northern hemisphere. Also, there is a significant influence of the orbital position of Mars on the effect of diurnal atmospheric variations which causes that, around the orbital perihelion and winter solstice, there is some kind of inversion of the dependance of optimal entry timing on latitude of the landing site comparing to the rest of the Martian year.