Predicting the Dust Environment During Powered Descent on Mars

A JPL Center Innovation Fund (CIF) sponsored workshop was held at the Keck Institute for Space Studies, located in Pasadena, CA. Attendees represented both academia and NASA, and a combination of modelers and experimentalists were able to attend. The one-day workshop discussed a variety of topics related to modeling plume-surface interactions, and in general, there was a consensus that additional efforts need to be invested into this field as soon as possible in order to support modeling efforts of future high-mass payloads using powered descent to land on targets, with a near-term emphasis on Mars and the Moon. An emphasis needs to be placed on obtaining relevant validation data for modelers, to ensure that the complicated physics associated with plume-surface models are being captured accurately in the different computational frameworks that are currently being developed. Attendees all agreed that that relevant ground tests be conducted, numerical models validated, and high-fidelity flight data be obtained to improve prediction efforts in this discipline.

The workshop led to coordinated JPL/MSFC CIF Advanced Concept proposals which were selected for funding in FY19. This technical discipline has been gathering interest by the Agency Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) Leads. As a result, a technical interchange meeting (TIM) on plume-surface interaction discipline was scheduled for the early November 2018 at NASA MSFC. This will combine challenged posed by both science-based and human-class landing missions. This will focus on the three-legged stool, but will lean more heavily on the obtaining flight data and developing flight instrumentation.