Multidisciplinary Modeling for Missionisation of Re-entry Vehicles

This work is part of the European H2020 ASCenSIon program. In this context, the global objective of this research is the definition and the development of a Mission Analysis and GNC missionisation tool for autonomous re-entry vehicles. Within ASCenSIon, missionisation has two scopes: the first concerns with the optimal adaptation of the solution for a specific mission, the second one addresses to evaluate the mission capabilties of a vehicle by means of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO). The focus of the paper is on the engineering modeling of the building blocks of the Multidisciplinary Design Analysis (MDA) framework, with the goal of identifying the disciplines and the design parameters needed to obtain robust re-entry trajectories. The design of a re-entry mission is, in fact, a multidisciplinary and complex scenario, which must take into account a broad set of Mission and System requirements. For this reason, an MDA environment with appropriate mathematical models of the problem has been developed to assess the mission performance with respect to the key design parameters. This paper gives an overview of the architecture of the tool, with particular attention on the implementation of the disciplines and their interactions, and presents an overview on MDO methodologies for solving the problem.