Autonomous guidance and decision-making for planetary aerobraking

Aerobraking is a propellant-saving option for orbit insertion at planetary destinations with atmospheres relative to fully-propulsive direct orbit insertion. An aerobraking campaign consists of a propulsive insertion into a high-energy orbit, followed by many passes through the upper atmosphere, where drag is used to reduce orbital energy until the desired orbit is reached. Relative to a fully propulsive insertion maneuver, aerobraking enables a drastic reduction in the required propellant. However, aerobraking is operationally intensive, requiring constant supervision by a ground team for 2-11 months and intensive use of the already oversubscribed Deep Space Network. While a 6-month aerobraking campaign was acceptable 20 years ago, the fast pace requested by the new space market, more cost-constrained missions, and newer, low-cost smallsat concepts may benefit from fast and low-cost insertion capabilities. This dissertation explores the effect of autonomous planning capability and drag passage guidance in aerobraking. In this context, an autonomous planning capability in aerobraking would abate the operational costs and free the mission from human ground cost, inefficiency, and error. Furthermore, the long aerobraking mission time might be considered the main disadvantage for orbit insertion, especially for low-cost satellites, which often have a short lifetime. Guidance algorithms and autonomous control capability in the drag passage are developed to shorten the aerobraking mission, improving the aerobraking performance at the single passage level. While the autonomous aerobraking planning and the autonomous guidance and control in drag passages represent two different and independent forms of system-level autonomy, their synergetic use enables a low-cost, fast and safe orbit insertion capability and a trusted autonomous system.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Aerospace Engineering

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Falcone, Giusy

Contributors dc:contributor

• Putnam, Zachary
• Bretl, Timothy
• Langbort, Cedric
• Ornik, Melkior
• Sirignano, Justin

• aerobraking
• autonomous aerobraking
• entry guidance
• decision-making
• Mars Odyssey
• Mars exploration
• insertion capabilities

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright© 2022 Giusy Falcone and Zachary R. Putnam

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115415

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115415