Conceptual design methodology and tools for human Mars landers: Mission analysis

Key goals of NASA’s Evolvable Mars Campaign (EMC) include expanding the human presence on Mars by 2030 to promote scientific progress, innovation and international collaborations. This interest requires the development of new EDL technologies to carry heavy payloads and support human presence. It is essential to create multifunctional and reusable landers that include the Martian Ascent Module (MAV), minimizing its weight to meet the requirements of human missions. This thesis work aims at developing mission analysis techniques to complement the conceptual design of a human Mars lander with the capability to ascend and descend from Martian orbit. The proposed methodology deals with the sizing of the lander in its systems and subsystems, integrating it with a mission analysis to evaluate its performance. Mission analysis, particularly for Martian ascent and descent, is the main topic covered by this thesis, and is useful to verify feasibility and provides useful variables for design refinement, such as velocity gain and losses. The mission analysis is initially implemented via a subroutine in MATLAB for quick and approximate evaluation, preparatory to the development of a more complex and representative model using ASTOS software to simulate both ascent and descent. The descent study also focuses on developing a realistic aerodynamic model to investigate EDL technologies. The models are validated using a reference vehicle in the literature by comparing the results between ASTOS and MATLAB. With a difference of less than 15 percent, the design routine is considered valid. This output, which provides the velocity increment for lander sizing, implies that future developments could use the mission analysis routine concurrently with the systems and subsystems sizing routine, continuously exchanging results until convergence is reached in estimating the velocity increment. The detailed integration with the sizing part is left as a future development to create a viable methodology for lander design that can be implemented in a tool.