Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms and abbreviations
- PART I Engineering issues specific to entry probes, landers or penetrators
- 1 Mission goals and system engineering
- 2 Accommodation, launch, cruise and arrival from orbit or interplanetary trajectory
- 3 Entering atmospheres
- 4 Descent through an atmosphere
- 5 Descent to an airless body
- 6 Planetary balloons, aircraft, submarines and cryobots
- 7 Arrival at a surface
- 8 Thermal control of landers and entry probes
- 9 Power systems
- 10 Communication and tracking of entry probes
- 11 Radiation environment
- 12 Surface activities: arms, drills, moles and mobility
- 13 Structures
- 14 Contamination of spacecraft and planets
- PART II Previous atmosphere/surface vehicles and their payloads
- PART III Case studies
- Appendix Some key parameters for bodies in the Solar System
- Bibliography
- References
- Index
1 - Mission goals and system engineering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms and abbreviations
- PART I Engineering issues specific to entry probes, landers or penetrators
- 1 Mission goals and system engineering
- 2 Accommodation, launch, cruise and arrival from orbit or interplanetary trajectory
- 3 Entering atmospheres
- 4 Descent through an atmosphere
- 5 Descent to an airless body
- 6 Planetary balloons, aircraft, submarines and cryobots
- 7 Arrival at a surface
- 8 Thermal control of landers and entry probes
- 9 Power systems
- 10 Communication and tracking of entry probes
- 11 Radiation environment
- 12 Surface activities: arms, drills, moles and mobility
- 13 Structures
- 14 Contamination of spacecraft and planets
- PART II Previous atmosphere/surface vehicles and their payloads
- PART III Case studies
- Appendix Some key parameters for bodies in the Solar System
- Bibliography
- References
- Index
Summary
Before journeying through the various specific engineering aspects, it is worth examining two important subjects that have a bearing on many more specific activities later on. First we consider systems engineering as the means to integrate the diverse constraints on a project into a functioning whole. We then look at the choice of landing site for a mission, a decision often based on a combination of scientific and technical criteria, and one that usually has a bearing on the design of several sub-systems including thermal, power and communications.
Systems engineering
Engineering has been frivolously but not inaptly defined as ‘the art of building for one dollar that which any damn fool can build for two’. Most technical problems have solutions, if adequate resources are available. Invariably, they are not, and thus skill and ingenuity are required to meet the goals of a project within the imposed constraints, or to achieve some optimum in performance.
Systems engineering may be defined as
the art and science of developing an operable system capable of meeting mission requirements within imposed constraints including (but not limited to) mass, cost and schedule
The modern discipline of systems engineering owes itself to the development of large projects, primarily in the USA, in the 1950s and 1960s when projects of growing scale and complexity were undertaken. Many of the tools and approaches derive from operational research, the quantitative analysis of performance developed in the UK during World War II.
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- Planetary Landers and Entry Probes , pp. 3 - 13Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007