Design of a Rocket-Powered Descent Jetpack Equipped with Parachute

This project focus on designing and simulating a scaled down of rover spacecraft mission used for descending operations with a rocket-powered jetpack after entering the atmosphere of Mars. The aim is to investigate the different phases of mars descending operations, to use the Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) code to verify the theoretical results obtained and to investigate the aerodynamic properties of the components (nozzle and parachute). The liquid propellant pump fed Hydrazine with Nitric Acid Oxidizer was found to be the optimum fuel for this design project. A steady state with K-epsilon turbulence model were simulated to solve the Navier-Stokes Equation. The observed results illustrate that the theoretical calculations match with the CFD results by an approximate of 2.9% error in drag coefficient of the parachute and 6.4% error in the thrust comparison of the nozzle.

I. Introduction

A rover spacecraft descending from an altitude of 12 km requires a lot of energy (propellant) to produce enough thrust allowing it to land safely. A descending from such altitude and with a downward velocity of approximately 1500 km/h would require a huge amount of fuel that will increase the overall weight by a lot thus making the descending mission inefficient. Instead, a parachute is equipped to lower the initial velocity to a minimum of 320 km/h at an altitude of 2 km before landing using the thrusters to the ground. The assumed payload (rover) is set at 150 kg.