Study of Rotor-Jetpack-Wind Aerodynamic Interaction for Mid-Air Helicopter Delivery on Mars

Mid-Air Helicopter Delivery (MAHD) is a new Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) architecture for enabling future Martian helicopter-only missions (e.g., Mars Science Helicopter (MSH)), that offer much greater in situ mobility compared to traditional rover missions at lower cost. This EDL concept utiliz...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	2023 IEEE Aerospace Conference pp. 1 - 16
Main Authors:	Veismann, Marcel, Raffel, Jan, Leipold, Malicia, Wanner, Julius, Tosi, L. Phillipe, Izraelevitz, Jacob, Devost, Matthew, Young, Larry, Touma, Thomas, Shah, Parthiv, Weiss, Adam, Reveles, Nicolas, Ostoich, Chris, Raffel, Markus, Burdick, Joel, Gharib, Morteza, Delaune, Jeff
Format:	Conference Proceeding
Language:	English
Published:	IEEE 04-03-2023
Subjects:	Aerodynamics Computational fluid dynamics Fluid flow measurement Helicopters Rotors Time-frequency analysis Wind speed
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	Mid-Air Helicopter Delivery (MAHD) is a new Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) architecture for enabling future Martian helicopter-only missions (e.g., Mars Science Helicopter (MSH)), that offer much greater in situ mobility compared to traditional rover missions at lower cost. This EDL concept utilizes a delivery jetpack to slow down the rotorcraft free fall after separation from the parachuting backshell, thus avoiding unfavorable rotorcraft descent aerodynamics, and provides suitable aerodynamic conditions for helicopter take-off in mid air. While Martian rotorcraft operation has been successfully demonstrated by the Ingenuity system, the mid-air helicopter take-off from a self-propelled jetpack platform has been identified as one of the critical aspects of this EDL strategy. This paper presents the development of an experimental sub-scale test-bench to assess the aerodynamic interactions between the MSH, a jetpack analogue system, and the wind to evaluate the technical feasibility of MAHD. Aerodynamic measurements and various qualitative and quantitative flow visualizations were performed in a (1 atm / 1 g) environment and compared to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation for validation. We also demonstrate in-flight capabilities of wind sensing as well as active trimming of the rotorcraft under relative crosswinds using an integrated force-torque sensor to be placed between rotorcraft and jetpack.
DOI:	10.1109/AERO55745.2023.10115979