Medium-Scale Mars Cargo Delivery Leveraging Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerators

Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator technology continues to be of interest to NASA as an enabling technology for improved performance of entry, descent, and landing missions on various planetary destinations. HIAD technology has been developed through several Earth-based ground and flight test, with recent commercial interest supporting launch vehicle recovery and reuse. Many past studies have also identified HIAD as a key enabling technology for human-scale missions to Mars. However, the significant investment to reach human-scale systems has been prohibitive. This paper considers a medium-scale Mars cargo delivery capability leveraging HIAD. This approach results in up to a four times increase in landed payload compared to exiting state of the art Mars EDL technologies, while maintaining a smaller scale that is more fiscally viable, bridging the gap between existing developments, and potential future human-scale systems.