Preliminary Design and Analysis of the ARES Atmospheric Flight Vehicle Thermal Control System

VEHICLE CONFIGURATION The airplane's fuselage length and wingspan were driven by the need to fit inside the entry aeroshell, which was sized to fit the Delta II launch shroud, and by a project decision to limit the number of deployments in order to increase reliability. The airplane has one fold in each wing and another where the twin tail booms attach to the end of the fuselage. The Delta II payload capability did not initially pose a limitation; the mass of the airplane was driven by how much it could carry and still pull out of the entry dive and into level flight. Figure 1 shows the airplane in both the stowed-for-launch and the deployed configuration. The Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey (ARES) is a proposed 2007 Mars Scout Mission that will be the first mission to deploy an atmospheric flight vehicle (AFV) on another planet. This paper will describe the preliminary design and analysis of the AFV thermal control system for its flight through the Martian atmosphere and also present other analyses broadening the scope of that design to include other phases of the ARES mission. Initial analyses are discussed and results of trade studies are presented which detail the design process for AFV thermal control. Finally, results of the most recent AFV thermal analysis are shown and the plans for future work are discussed.