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 Future science and human exploration missions to Mars and other planets will require dramatic improvements in our current capability to land large payloads safely on these worlds. The state of the art for successfully landing payloads on Mars is less than 1 metric ton in weight with a landing accuracy of approximately 100 km of the desired target site that is further restricted to lower altitudes. Technologies to enable delivery of higher masses to higher altitudes with greater accuracy are being developed. Plans for human and large science missions to Mars require nearly two orders of magnitude increase in landed mass. The main challenge is that the Mars atmosphere causes significant thermal heating, but is too thin to enable deceleration to manageable terminal velocities. These factors are daunting challenges for the system designer, as is the requirement for precise targeting at landing points of scientific interest and/or rendezvous with pre-positioned landed assets.
Solving the problem of safely landing large payloads on the surface of Mars requires analysis of a number of technology options over the entire reentry speed range (from high hypersonic to subsonic). The Hypersonics Project is a co-funder with the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) and the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) of an OCE-sponsored high-fidelity, multi-year EDL systems-analysis trade study aimed at identifying promising technologies for hypersonic entry and supersonic descent through the Mars atmosphere. The Hypersonics Project, in turn, uses this and other studies to guide its investments in technologies, computational tools, and physics modeling for PAES applications The technical scope of the disciplines ranges from foundational research to multi-disciplinary analysis and optimization:
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