A Conceptual Modeling Approach for Performance of Magnetohydrodynamic Drag During Planetary Entry

What is it about?

When vehicles arrive at planetary bodies such as Mars, they must slow down from speeds of over ten thousand miles an hour to zero in a matter of minutes in order to land safely on the surface. For Mars, this braking has historically been achieved through atmospheric drag. However, the atmosphere at Mars is very thin, and this has limited our ability to land the much larger payloads required by a human scale mission. We demonstrate an approach to electromagnetically enhance the drag at Mars for human scale missions by interacting with hot plasma generated during reentry.

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