Study of feasibility of a mission to Mars using aerocapture technique
Tutor/a - Director/a
Estudiant
Belart Bayo, Oscar
Tipus de document
Projecte/Treball Final de Carrera
Data
2012
rights
Accés obert
Editorial
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Titulacions
UPCommons
Resum
Aerocapture is a brand new technique of orbit insertion, which consists in the energy
depletion of a spacecraft using atmospheric drag. This decelerates the space vehicle
and changes its trajectory from hyperbolic orbit to elliptic orbit. Then two propulsive
maneuvers must be performed in order to obtain the desired final orbit.
This project seeks to assess the viability of aerocapture. It includes an implementation
of a simulation tool so-called AECASIM1 that is able of simulating the aerocapture
maneuver. This software contains simple environment and vehicle models that help
to describe the desired aerocapture problem for its analysis. PredGuid guidance algorithm
was implemented and adapted to this project's objectives and scenario. In order
to analyse the performances of this maneuver, four essential parameters were varied
and some conclusions about their influence on aerocapture were drawn. Furthermore,
capturable corridors were constituted with respect to the different parameter variations
and were also compared between them, in order to distinguish the best possible configuration.
Finally, a comparison with regular propulsive methods was performed. It revealed
that with aerocapture technique great fuel savings can be achieved. For the studied
case, this allows to increase the vehicle mass about a 77% and hence to rise payload
mass or to reduce the initial mass approximately by a half, reducing with this the costs
of the mission.
