Flight dynamics modeling and analysis for a Mars helicopter

Flight dynamics modeling for the Mars helicopter faces great challenges. Aerodynamic modeling of coaxial rotor with high confidence and high computational efficiency is a major difficulty for the field. This paper builds an aerodynamic model of coaxial rotor in the extremely thin Martian atmosphere using the viscous vortex particle method. The aerodynamic forces and flow characteristics of rigid coaxial rotor are computed and analyzed. Meanwhile, a high fidelity aerodynamic surrogate model is built to improve the computational efficiency of the flight dynamics model. Results in this paper reveal that rigid coaxial rotor can bring the Mars helicopter sufficient controllability but result in obvious instability and control couplings in forward flight. This highlights the great differences in flight dynamics characteristics compared with conventional helicopters on Earth.