Beyond current EDL Technologies on Mars: Evaluation of ARMADA Concepts

The Entry, Descent and Landing System (EDLS) is one of the main system drivers for an interplanetary mission aiming at landing a payload on a planetary surface. It contains three main subsystems with distinct functions designed for the Entry, the Descent and the Landing phases. Each of these subsystems has specific constraints. The first objective of the EDLS is to land safely a payload with a given mass and geometry onto the planetary's surface. Toward that end, the EDLS must decelerate the Descent Module from interplanetary velocities (about a few km/s) to typically less than a few tens of m/s and land the payload within close proximity of the pre-defined landing site (ideally a few hundreds of meters). In the frame of an ESA's GSP study, GMV, in collaboration with the University of Bologna and EADS-Astrium, is carrying out a project whose main objective is to assess the feasibility of using an autorotation system, named ARMADA, as a component of the entry, descent and landing system. Even though Mars is assumed as the main planetary target, a preliminary assessment for landing on Venus or Titan is also made. ARMADA replaces all deceleration systems for the DM (parachutes, airbags, and retrorockets) except for the heat shield. In consequence, the Entry, Descent and Landing scenarios used for past missions cannot be applied to ARMADA directly, but have to serve as a starting point for deriving a mission scenario suitable for an autorotation landing. For the scope of this project the ARMADA reference scenario is primarily based on an Exomars scenario. Eventually, the study aims at assessing the performance of the ARMADA concept with respect to flight proven, traditional EDL systems. To that end, a set of criteria relevant to the EDLS performance has been derived. A systematic survey/identification of potential ARMADA concepts has been carried out during the first phases of the project and this survey is presented here. This identification has been followed by an assessment of the suitability of each concept for the reference scenario and a trade-off analysis that concluded with a proposal on the best-estimated concept and a backup option. This paper intends to offer an overview of the steps performed up to now and the obtained results.