Research/ PLANETARY ROBOTICS
Mars 2020 Navigation Performance
Sean Wagner, Mark Ryne, Neil Mottinger, Sarah Elizabeth McCandless, Tim McElrath, Tomas Martin-Mur, Eric Gustafson, Julie Kangas, Mau Wong, Mark Jesick, Jill Seubert, Gerhard Kruizinga
Perseverance (Mars 2020)named in title, abstract · Ingenuity Mars Helicopternamed in abstract · Curiosity (MSL)named in abstract
No official subject categories from arXiv, OpenAlex or NTRS for this paper.
On February 18, 2021, the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter demonstration landed at Jezero Crater. The Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) architecture, largely the same used to land Curiosity at Gale Crater on August 6, 2012, required high-fidelity flight dynamics simulation with two independent tools to verify performance. The process for creating the EDL simulation using the Dynamics Simulator for Entry, Descent and Surface landing (DSENDS) tool will be discussed, along with its use for for independent verification of the EDL statistical analysis results and reference trajectory simulation. Analysis and usage details both in development and cruise, along with post-landing assessment of the prediction performance of the simulation, will also be discussed.