Modeling Viscoelastic Planetary Aerobot Tethers Using Fractional Derivatives and Anelastic Displacement Fields

What is it about?

Some exploration missions to other worlds such as Venus will use balloons to move above the surface. Scientific instruments will be suspended from these balloons using tethers. The dynamic behavior of the tethers is important and this paper addresses the modeling of damping and creep of such tethers. The subject computational model runs more than 50 times faster than the standard approach.

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