Soft landing stability analysis of a Mars lander under uncertain terrain

Safe soft landing of the lander is vital to the Mars surface exploration mission. Analysis and verification of the landing stability under uncertain terrain play an important role in lander design. However, the effect of uncertain terrain is ignored in most existing studies, making the analysis incomprehensive and increasing the risk of landing failure in practice. In this paper, a Mars lander with 10 attitude control thrusters is introduced and its dynamics model is then established considering plastic deformation parts and nonlinear contact forces. The effectiveness and accuracy of the dynamics modeling method are verified by experiments with an average relative error of 10%. In order to carry out the dynamics simulation with high-fidelity terrain, a terrain generation method based on statistical data is proposed. Through Monte Carlo simulation under a 50 m × 50 m randomly generated landing terrain, the stability of the lander and the effects of attitude control thrusters are analyzed. The results show that the failure rate is 5.5%, in which the primary failure forms are overturning and abnormal attitude. When the landing simulations are repeated without thrusters, the stable ratio decreases from 94.5% to 90.7%, suggesting the positive effects of attitude control thrusters in improving landing stability under rough terrain.