Investigation of the Dragonfly Mission Lander, Backshell, Parachute Dynamics through Subscale Drop Tests

The Dragonfly mission will place a nuclear-powered rotorcraft on Titan by 2034. The entry, descent, and landing system of the Dragonfly mission includes a drogue parachute and main parachute. Just prior to Dragonfly lander release, while descending under the main pararchute the heatshield is jettisoned and the system descends under main parachute with the lander exposed to the Titan atmosphere. Subscale drop tests were used to investigate the system dynamics in the stowed and posed configurations. All models were geometrically scaled to 16.67 percent of the full-scale system. Key findings include that the dynamics of the system descending under the main parachute with the Dragonfly lander are bounding and non-growing during steady-state descent. It was found that the overall dynamics of the system in both the stowed and posed configurations are larger than those experienced by the full aeroshell configuration, but are of acceptable amplitudes to the program.