Mission Design and Navigation for Uranus Aerocapture Leveraging Super Heavy-Lift Launch Vehicles

Aerocapture is an orbit insertion maneuver that utilizes the target body's atmosphere to decelerate. Compared to standard propulsive insertion, this technology allows for higher arrival velocities and can reduce required launch mass, enabling shorter time of flights and more regular launch windows; or provide room for additional science payload. This paper presents the past year of a two year Early Career Initiative (ECI) funded by the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate to investigate the use of aerocapture for a Flagship-class Uranus mission. It explores the application of super heavy-lift launch vehicles, which leverage the benefits of aerocapture even further, enabling direct to Uranus solutions with 4-6 year time of flights while navigable to entry with flight path angle delivery accuracies between 0.1$^{\circ}$ and 0.2$^{\circ}$ 3-sigma. To complete the aerocapture timeline, the design of the target Uranus orbit and probe release strategy post atmosphere exit is also outlined. To correct for atmosphere exit dispersions a novel autonomous cleanup maneuver using onboard knowledge is last presented.