1Feasibility Studies on Guidance and Global Path Planning for Wind-Assisted Montgolfière in Titan

Abstract—Recent studies have proposed the use of a hot-air (Mont-golfière) balloon for possible exploration of Titan, Mars and Venus. One of NASA’s Outer Planet Flagship mission concepts is the Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM), which would be a joint NASA-ESA partnership that plans to employ a Montgolfière along with a lake lander and an orbiter. This Montgolfière would circle Titan, investigating how Titan and Saturn operate as a system and determining how far prebiotic chemistry has developed. This paper provides a new method to analyze global path planning with balloons on Titan. The main objective of this study is to determine whether the balloon could reach a particular location of interest from a given initial position at its insertion point in the atmosphere using the wind fields on Titan. This study is the first comprehensive analysis and quantitative assessment of balloon guidance in Titan that proactively uses wind for global path planning. The paper will investigate and characterize the guidance and path-planning performance of Montgolfière balloons in Titan’s atmosphere for lower-atmosphere and surface exploration in the presence of variable wind fields using TitanWRF(Titan Weather Research and Forecasting) model. The study focuses on determining the altitude profile that a balloon could follow, using variable wind fields, in order to reach its target most quickly. Our results show that a simple unpropelled Montgolfière without horizontal actuation would be able to reach a broad array of science targets within the constraints of the wind field. The study also indicates that even a small amount of horizontal thrust allows the balloon to reach any area of interest on Titan, in a fraction of the time needed by the unpropelled balloon. The results show that using the Titan wind field allows a balloon to significantly extend its scientific reach, and that a Montgolfière (unpropelled or propelled) is a highly desirable architecture that can significantly enhance the scientific return of a future Titan mission. I