Stagnation-Point Aeroheating Correlations for Mars Entry

This work details the development of new stagnation-point aeroheating engineering correlations for Mars entry vehicles. Convective and radiative heating relations were formulated over a wide range of entry conditions. These relations were based on computational fluid dynamics simulations informed by recent experimental testing and modeling enhancements. For convective heating, a relation similar to those proposed in previous works was developed that is accurate to within +/- 25% across the domain of relevant Mars entry conditions. For radiative heating, two different functional forms were developed: exponential and polynomial relations. Each of these relations, which represents two different levels of complexity for implementation, were able to predict the radiative heating within about +/- 25%. The correlations were tested by applying them to the Mars Pathfinder entry trajectory to demonstrate their applicability. These new correlations provide significant improvement over existing relations in terms of the accuracy, the domain of applicability, and the captured physics, including CO2 infrared radiation and thermochemical nonequilibrium.