Mision design for a wright brothers' centennial mars airplane mission in 2003

摘要

Plans are underway at NASA and JPL to explore Mars on a global scale. Landers, penetrators, orbiters, and sample return are all included in the current roadmap. Airborne exploration can also be added, to provide broad and close-up views of inaccessible regions, such as the poles and canyons. Discovery proposals were submitted to NASA in 1998 detailing missions carrying planes or gliders. This paper is a summary of the mission design performed for sending gliders to mars in 2003 as secondary payloads, on an Ariane GEO mission whose primary payloads would be communication satellites. In this analysis, a unique opportunity was uncovered whereby the gliders would arrive at Mars on December 17, 2003, or exactly 100 years after the Wright Brothers' first recognized flight at Kitty Hawk, NC. The launch process used to transfer the carrier spacecraft from the geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) Earth escape will be described, as well as the development of a 3 to 5 month launch period, and the site accessibility regions at Mars, based on lighting, entry, and telemetry constraints. Finally, these resutls are applied to potential future Mars launch opportunities through 2009.