A review of airbag landing system for spacecraft

To ensure the safety of astronauts and equipment during landing, the airbag landing system is commonly utilized to attenuate the impact response of the spacecraft. However, the complex impact dynamics and multi-disciplinary coupling pose significant challenges to mission design. This paper first investigates the typical design scheme of the airbag landing system for manned spacecrafts to obtain basic insight. A comprehensive review of the past research works on the airbag landing system is then carried out from three aspects: dynamic modeling, performance optimization, and experimental study. The airbag landing system for spacecraft is a rigid-flexible-gas coupling system, which can be modeled through multi-body dynamics or finite element method. Different venting structures and optimization methods are introduced to improve the cushioning performance. Experimental setups for drop test and airbag test are developed to verify the design feasibility. Finally, this paper proposes key issues in the dynamics analysis and design optimization of the airbag landing system for future study.