Study of Rotor-Jetpack-Wind Aerodynamic Interaction for Mid-Air Helicopter Delivery on Mars

Mid-Air Helicopter Delivery (MAHD) is a new Entry,Descent and Landing (EDL) architecture for enabling futureMartian helicopter-only missions (e.g., Mars Science Helicopter(MSH)), that offer much greater in situ mobility compared totraditional rover missions at lower cost. This EDL conceptutilizes a delivery jetpack to slow down the rotorcraft after separation from the backshell for avoiding unfavorable rotorcraftdescent aerodynamics and provides suitable aerodynamic conditions for helicopter take-off in mid air. While Martian rotorcraftoperation has been successfully demonstrated by the Ingenuitysystem, the mid-air helicopter takeoff from a self-propelledjetpack platform has been identified as one of the critical aspectsof this EDL strategy. This paper presents an experimentalsub-scale study to assess the aerodynamic interactions betweena Mars Science Helicopter (MSH), a jetpack analogue systemand the wind to evaluate the technical feasibility of MAHD.Various qualitative and quantitative flow visualizations wereperformed in a (1 atm / 1 g) environment and compared tocomputational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation for validation.We also demonstrate in-flight capabilities of wind sensing as wellas active trimming of the rotorcraft under relative crosswindsusing an integrated force-torque sensor between rotorcraft andjetpack.