A Crushable Shell for Small Body Landers

Kurzfassung

This year the DLR built Mobil Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) will decouple from the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft to perform surface science at the asteroid (162173) Ryugu. The MASCOT lander itself doesn’t need a special damping system for touchdown since the asteroid is relatively small (\O 900 m) and therefore the surface gravity respectively the landing velocity is very low (few cm/s). In a next step DLR is developing further nano lander technologies for larger celestial bodies with respective higher surface gravity and therefore higher impact velocities. Previous investigations have shown that for larger bodies the landing velocity is in the range of 4 m/s which produces high shock loads. A possible low complex and lightweight solution of damping the shocks is the use of a crushable shell around the lander. This crushable shell could be made out of aluminum honeycomb core with a High Performance Polyethylene cover sheet. The idea is to convert the kinetic energy into deformation work of the shell and reduce the shock load to the instrument platform. The design is particularly advantageous since no moving parts nor other mechanisms are required, thus making the system very robust and fail safe. This paper is concentrating on a hardware test campaign recently done at DLR’s Landing \& Mobility Test Facility (LAMA). It will show the design of the shell, the test setup and the results of the campaign.