Ringsail parachutes for Planetary Entry Applications

Increasing landed mass for planetary entry missions imposes new requirements, challenges, and, in some cases, obsolescence of existing technologies for Planetary Entry Applications. The Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) architectures used for Apollo, Pioneer Venus, and Viking have in many ways reached their limit with regards to prior demonstration and current capability to requalify. For example, NASA's Constellation Orion Crew return vehicle and Mars Science Laboratory have had to undertake their own technology development efforts to pioneer or requalify thermal protection, deceleration, and landing attenuations systems, all required for a successful EDL mission phase. In addition, potential future missions, such as Mars Sample return, Venus and Titan entry probes, and human robotic precursor missions to Mars, require technological advancements and investments to become a reality. The choice of which technology to advance is a trade of risk, cost, and, near versus far term mission application. Of these technologies, parachute systems are one of the lowest cost and mass efficient technology options to solve the problems of the terminal descent phase. Yet, minimal experimentation with other parachute architectures has been attempted in the past three decades for unmanned planetary entry architectures.