Analysis and Development of System-Configurations for the Inflatable Reentry and Descent Technology (IRDT)
Abstract
By planning future entry missions it is very helpful to get a fast preliminary estimation of the system mass. This allows an early beginning of the development phase of the entry system. This work contains the development of the Access program CIRDS (Catalogue for Inflatable Reentry and Descent Systems), that gives as output the preliminary estimation mass distribution for a new entry system. The IRDT (Inflatable Reentry and Descent Technology) is a conical shaped inflatable heat shield with a flexible ablative thermal protection cover. The program CIRDS calculates for a given ballistic entry mission an IRDT configuration with the highest payload ratio. Referring to an existing IRDT system CIRDS is based on a scaling model that estimates the mass and dimensions of the subsystems depending on the system scale. Furthermore the program contains overall five different IRDT configurations, the basic configuration and four developed system variations. Comparing the CIRDS simulation results with some existing IRDT systems a positive verification of the scaling model has been achieved. Finally several possibilities for upgrading the program CIRDS have been worked out. The most important one is the expansion from a ballistic entry model to guided and controlled one. Referring to a NASA study for several entry missions into Mars atmosphere with guidance and control, several analyses have been performed, that show the possibility of atmospherical entries with guidance and control for the IRDT system.
- Publication:
-
IAF abstracts, 34th COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- 2002
- Bibcode:
- 2002iaf..confE.994G