AEOLUS: A System Concept for Precise Delivery of Mars Scientific Instrumentation

The AEOLUS system concept is proposed to deliver science instruments with great precision to the surface of Mars. This capability is regarded as an important next step in bringing Mars evolutionary processes into greater focus by allowing investigation of specifically targeted sites. By the use of existing maneuvering vehicle technology, terrain guidance hardware, and other vehicle subsystems this mission appears feasible with a minimum amount of development and risk. The conceptual system design presented in this paper is capable of delivering a variety of instrumentation types (the first phase is a penetrator/flight experiment, followed by a rover mission) with 3 sigma accuracies of approximately 1 km compared with the typical Mars Pathfinder landing ellipse of 150 km. This allows the utility of small rovers to greatly increase as the goal is to develop a system such that the rover range exceeds the landing ellipse of the delivery system. The proposed mission using available technologies in combination with a novel approach to transportation, results in attractive mission costs from $35M-$50M. The system name "AEOLUS" (Greek god of the air and wind) was chosen since it would represent controlled flight in another planetary atmosphere.