6-DoF Uranus Aerocapture Trajectory Analysis
Rohan Deshmukh, Pardhasai Chadalavada, Soumyo Dutta, Rafael Lugo
Abstract
The Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission has been identified as the highest priority flagship mission for this decade. Delays in launch opportunities may make existing fully-propulsive orbit insertion mission types unfeasible. Aerocapture can potentially alleviate these challenges while providing a solution flexible to different launch opportunities. While the space technology that aerocapture leverages have been flight-proven, aerocapture as-a-whole has not been formally demonstrated. This paper presents a 6-DoF aerocapture simulation framework that is inspired from the Mars Science Laboratory but tailored towards Uranus aerocapture. Nominal and Monte Carlo trajectory results are compared to existing 3-DoF solutions to understand the information learned from increasing the modeling level-of-fidelity.