Atmospheric Data System Sensor Placement Optimization for Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing

The Mars Science Laboratory contains an atmospheric data system that takes measurements of the pressure distribution on the entry body during the hypersonic and supersonic descent phases of flight. The pressure data can be combined with other onboard sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and radar altimeters, to estimate the flight's trajectory, aerodynamics, and atmospheric profile. The number of sensors and their locations for the atmospheric data system can be optimized to increase the accuracy of the postflight reconstruction. Pressure-port placement optimization methodologies using the estimation residual and a surrogate of the observability matrix are presented, and the results of the optimization for Mars entry, descent, and landing vehicles are shown. The results of the optimization exhibited some sensor configurations that can improve upon the reconstruction performance of the Mars Science Laboratory baseline and also pointed to the number of sensors that define the point of diminishing returns with respect to estimation quality. These techniques can be subsequently applied in the design of instrumentation suites of future entry, descent, and landing vehicles.