Surrogate Modeling of Aerodynamic Loads on the Dragonfly Lander in Flight

This paper describes the surrogate models of aerodynamic loads on the Dragonfly lander, a rotorcraft designed to fly on Saturn's moon, Titan. The extreme dissimilarity between Titan's environment and Earth's necessitates replacing some traditional design steps in ground and flight testing with simulation and analysis. The program's digital twin of the lander requires fast approximation of Computational Fluid Dynamics predictions of aerodynamic loads on the vehicle in flight, which is accomplished using Gaussian Process Regression.