Aerobraking has been used four times to decrease the apoapsis of a spacecraft in a captured orbit around a planetary body with a significant atmosphere utilizing atmospheric drag to decelerate the spacecraft. While aerobraking requires minimum fuel, the long time required for aerobraking requires both a large operations staff, and large Deep Space Network resources. A study to automate aerobraking has been sponsored by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center to determine initial feasibility of equipping a spacecraft with the onboard capability for autonomous aerobraking, thus saving millions of dollars incurred by a large aerobraking operations workforce and continuous DSN coverage. This paper describes the need for autonomous aerobraking, the development of the Autonomous Aerobraking Development Software that includes an ephemeris estimator, an atmospheric density estimator, and maneuver calculation, and the plan forward for continuation of this study.


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    Title :

    Autonomous Aerobraking: A Design, Development, and Feasibility Study


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    2011 AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference ; 2011 ; Girdwood, AK, United States


    Publication date :

    2011-07-31


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




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