Mission Applications of a HIAD for the Mars Southern Highlands
Recent discoveries of evidence of a flowing liquid in craters throughout the Mars Southern Highlands, like Terra Sirenum, have spurred interest in sending science missions to those locations; however, these locations are at elevations that are much higher (0 to +4 km MOLA) than any previous landing site (-1 to -4 km MOLA). New technologies may be needed to achieve a landing at these sites with significant payload mass to the surface. A promising technology is the hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (HIAD); a number of designs have been advanced but the stacked torus has been recently successfully flight tested in the IRVE-2 and IRVE-3 projects through the NASA Langley Research Center. This paper will focus on a variety of mission applications of the stacked torus type attached HIAD to the Mars southern highlands.