An Automated Scheme to Determine Design Parameters for a Recoverable Reentry Vehicle

摘要

The NRV (Nosetip Recovery Vehicle") program is designed to recover the nose section from a sphere cone reentry vehicle after it has flown a near ICBM re¬entry trajectory. Both mass jettison and parachutes are used to reduce the velocity of the RV near the end of the trajectory to a sufficiently low level that the vehicle may land intact. The design problem of determining mass jet¬tison time and parachute deployment time in order to ensure that the vehicle does land intact is considered in this paper. The problem is formulated as a min-max optimization problem where the design parameters are to be selected to minimize the maximum possible deviation in the design criteria due to uncer¬tainties in the system. The results of the study indicate that the optimal choice of the design parameters ensures that the maximum deviation in the design criteria is within acceptable bounds. This analytically ensures the feasibility of recovery for NRV.