Assessment of the Mars 2020 Entry, Descent, and Landing Simulation
David W. Way, Soumyo Dutta, Carlie H. Zumwalt, David J. Blette
Abstract
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-0421.vid On February 18, 2021, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter success- fully landed inside Jezero Crater. At 1026 kg, Perseverance is the largest, most sophisticated rover ever delivered to another planet. This event marked the ninth successful landing and fifth rover to be delivered at Mars. The Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories II (POST2), a trajectory simulation tool, was the prime entry, descent, and landing (EDL) performance simulation for Mars 2020. This paper presents a few initial comparisons between EDL flight telemetry and the simulation predictions. In general, approximately 90% of the EDL as-flown values were within ±3σ (standard deviations) of the pre-flight simulation predictions, and the the anomalies are discussed in the paper. These comparisons are important in order to under- stand how each of the individual models and the integrated simulation as a whole performed. This information is fed forward to future missions, which benefit from the knowing where additional resources or study are needed and where uncertainties may be reduced to enable improved performance.