Effect of parking orbit period on aerocapture for manned Mars missions

Aerocapture has previously been identified as a critical technology for manned Mars missions. A wide range of parking orbits is available into which an aerobraking vehicle could be captured, and earlier authors have advocated different target orbits for various reasons. The choice of the parking orbit impacts the amount of energy which must be dissipated during the atmospheric trajectory. The effect of this choice on the entry corridor width, the required vehicle L/D, and the aerothermal environment are explored in this paper.