Speaker
Description
PLACEHOLDER William Bontemps/Augustin Jacques/Claudia Asteggiano/Vito Laneve
The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Mission (EXM-RFM) aims to send the first European Rover to Mars with the objective to search for evidence of past and present forms of life. The spacecraft architecture consists of a Carrier Module and an Entry Descent and Landing Module (EDLM) composed of an Aeroshell and a Landing Platform, which hosts the Rosalind Franklin Rover. In the current mission design, the cruise to Mars will take approximately 26 months, and during this time the Lander is only allowed to use a limited amount of power provided by the Carrier Module. The Lander is intending to land in the Oxia Planum site and shall survive for at least two Martian days to allow the rover's safe deployment and egress. As the Lander is not equipped with solar arrays, after separation from the Carrier Module it only relies on secondary batteries to provide power to the Rover and to maintain its key units under thermal control. This results in one key challenge for the thermal design of the Landing Platform: minimizing the heater power/energy consumption during all the phases of the Lander's life, while ensuring that no overheating occurs in the hot phases of the mission. From the Cruise phase to the Entry of the Martian atmosphere, the Lander is in a vacuum environment. It can therefore rely on well-known passive thermal control technologies, such as multi-layer insulation (MLI), low emissive surface finishes, and radiators to reject excessive heat. Only electrical heaters will be used as an active thermal control. Upon entering the Martian Atmosphere, MLI blankets are filled with air, making them less thermally efficient to insulate the Lander. The presence of air also results in the presence of convective heat exchange. In order to avoid high heat losses of the on ground operating units, convection suppression tents have been implemented. As the heat losses through convection are still a major unknown factor in the Lander design, a number of other options have been investigated to allow tuning of the thermal insulation on the Lander in response to the results of the thermal test planned in 2026.
This presentation will provide an overview of the Landing Platform thermal design and detail the trades-offs performed in the process of achieving a thermal architecture that minimizes the heater power and energy consumption in all the phases of the Lander's life.
