Planetary penetrators: Their origins,history and future

Penetrators, which emplace scientific instrumentation by high-speed impact into a planetary surface, have been advocated as an alternative to soft-landers for some four decades. However, such vehicles have yet to fly successfully. This paper reviews in detail, the origins of penetrators in the military arena, and the various planetary penetrator mission concepts that have been proposed, built and flown. From the very limited data available, penetrator developments alone (without delivery to the planet) have required ∼$30M: extensive analytical instrumentation may easily double this. Because the success of emplacement and operation depends inevitably on uncontrollable aspects of the target environment, unattractive failure probabilities for individual vehicles must be tolerated that are higher than the typical ‘3-sigma’ (99.5%) values typical for spacecraft. The two pathways to programmatic success, neither of which are likely in an austere financial environment, are a lucky flight as a ‘piggyback’ mission or technology demonstration, or with a substantial and unprecedented investment to launch a scientific (e.g. seismic) network mission with a large number of vehicles such that a number of terrain-induced failures can be tolerated.     

硬式着陆器和半硬式着陆器

文章主要讨论两种类型的着陆器,即硬式着陆器和半硬式着陆器。介绍了利用动态分析方法探究作用在着陆器和平台上的冲击载荷及着陆缓冲装置的有效性的过程和结论,最后建议性的提出了着陆缓冲器的初样设计方案。