IN-FLIGHT AERODYNAMIC AND MASS PROPERTIES IDENTIFICATION DESIGN FOR MARS AEROBRAKING

Aerobraking is a revolutionary technique that has been used successfully in recent Mars missions. But consideration of significant risk and cost has led to the development of autonomous aerobraking design. This paper proposes a novel method of estimating varying aerodynamic and mass properties in-flight to improve the onboard capacity for corridor controller design. The identification approach is divided into two steps: executing mass properties identification at the apoapsis walk-in and adjustment maneuvers first, and then implementing aerodynamic property estimation during atmospheric passes. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is simple and effective, making it suitable for on-board real-time computation.