MORPHING HYPERSONIC WAVERIDER FOR MARS ENTRY

The primary contemporary challenge for planetary entry is the landed payload surviving the intense heating and deceleration during atmospheric entry. Mars exploration to date has included ballistic and lifting capsules, but no high-lift entry vehicles. The Equilibrium Glide approximation for the trajectory of a lifting entry vehicle suggests that the key to minimizing entry heating and deceleration is to increase the entry vehicle size relative to its mass and increase its lift coefficient. More detailed analysis of entry physics suggests that the lift-to-drag ratio is also of high significance for determining the severity of heating and deceleration. The highest-lift and highest lift-to-drag vehicles known in the high-speed regimes of entry vehicles are hypersonic waveriders, a class of vehicles constructed using a design flow field and knowledge of high-speed aerodynamics and possessing the distinct characteristic of an attached shock all along their leading edges. While classically designed for a specific, single Mach number, prior work has demonstrated the ability of specific lower surface distortions to enable high performance across a wide Mach number range, known as "morphing waveriders." This concept has been evaluated for its potential use in entry vehicles for Earth's atmosphere and demonstrated to outperform conventional lifting capsules and the NASA Space Shuttle. The present work continues this entry vehicle exploration with the use of morphing waveriders applied for entry into Mars' atmosphere. The simple vehicle, aerodynamics, and entry dynamics models are presented and compared to the entry of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) capsule with good agreement. Next, a comparison is made between the MSL capsule and a morphing waverider for interplanetary transport entry conditions, where the waverider is demonstrated to produce a trajectory with more benign heating and deceleration than a conventional lifting capsule.