Structural Analysis of the ROSETTA Lander

Abstract

The ROSETTA Lander is part of ESA’s cornerstone mission ROSETTA aimed at the exploration of the comet Wirtanen and will be flown pick-a-back on the ROSETTA Orbiter. The structure for the lander is designed and built at the DLR Institute of Structural Mechanics in Braunschweig. The challenge in the structural design of the lander was to find a minimum weight structure that could accommodate all payload, meet the stringent thermal requirements on the comet, and sustain the mechanical loads during launch. The obvious choice was a structure fabricated almost entirely from sandwich plates with carbon fiber reinforced face sheets. In this paper the current lander structure, the structure evolution, and the use of MSC/PATRAN and MSC/NASTRAN for the design analyses are briefly described.