The Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn
3:00 PM on 2008-01-22
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is designing the Mars Science Laboratory mission to land a large rover on the surface of Mars. To meet the science requirements and to provide sufficient deceleration of the payload, the parachute is larger and must open at higher speed than in any previous Mars mission. Thus, the new parachute must be qualified for use. A potentially cost-effective approach is to use computational fluid dynamics to understand the capsule-parachute dynamics, and to show that the canopy will provide adequate drag. At the University of Minnesota, we are developing a new code that couples a finite element model of the parachute structural dynamics with a CFD code for the fluid motion. This tool is being validated through a series of experiments in NASA wind tunnels. I will talk about the status of this work, with emphasis on how the capsule wake interacts with the canopy to cause large-scale unsteadiness and strongly varying aerodynamic loads.