The landing leg technology is one of the critical elements with low TRL in view of future European planetary exploration programs and a specific predevelopment program has to start early and has to run in parallel to the future mission project phases, to timely achieve the requested maturity and to mitigate the development risk. In particular numerical simulations and early breadboard testing with scaled models are to be planned to prove the functional concepts before in a next step of complexity tests with a complete 1:1 Lander demonstrator can be done. The paper will provide an introduction in the activities linked with the numerical simulation and breadboard tests foreseen in the predevelopment of landing legs concepts as one critical technology for future European lunar or planetary exploration programs.
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