6-DoF Uranus Aerocapture Trajectory Analysis

The Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission has been identified as the highest priority flagship mission for this decade. Delays in launch opportunities may make existing fully-propulsive orbit insertion mission types unfeasible. Aerocapture can potentially alleviate these challenges while providing a solution flexible to different launch opportunities. While the space technology that aerocapture leverages have been flight-proven, aerocapture as-a-whole has not been formally demonstrated. This paper presents a novel 6-DoF aerocapture trajectory analysis applied to Uranus. The paper presents the 6-DoF simulation framework, inspired from Mars Science Laboratory. Trajectory comparisons, including Monte Carlo simulations, to existing 3-DoF solutions are presented to understand the information learned from increasing the modeling level-of-fidelity.