Determination of Spacecraft Landing Footprint for Safe Planetary Landing

A methodology is developed based on a ballistic analysis to estimate the landing footprint associated with the powered terminal descent phase of a spacecraft soft landing. The analysis is based on an idealized two-impulse thrust maneuver and leads to an analytical expression for the elliptical boundary of the landing footprint. The objective is to develop a computationally efficient method to estimate the landing footprint for use in an on-board fuzzy-logic based inference engine for real-time hazard avoidance. The inference engine combines an estimate of the landing footprint with information about the safeness of the landing terrain to construct an overall landing site quality index. The landing site quality index is a critical parameter that enables the spacecraft to make intelligent real-time decisions about landing safely on unknown and hazardous terrains. The footprint generated from the ballistic analysis is also compared with the footprint resulting from numerically integrating a representative guidance law.