Optimising Landing-site Selection for ExoMars

Only 6 out of 16 missions to the surface of Mars have been successful, all have been NASA missions. The landing sites of all the successful missions have been carefully selected in a process where: 1) scientists propose candidate landing sites, 2) engineers check whether these sites allow for a safe landing, and 3) over a few iterations, the number of sites is brought down to the final site and a back-up. ExoMars will be the first lander to Mars designed by the European Space Agency. It will explore Mars in search of signs of past and present life. An extensive landing-site selection process is required to find a landing site that is safe from both an engineering perspective and that will help to answer the mission’s science objectives. This research has identified four developments that decrease the efficiency of the current landing-site selection process: 1) there is more and more data available on Mars, which makes combining and analysing all this data manually no longer possible; 2) the technical capabilities of the landing system are increasing, which makes a larger part of the surface available; 3) the questions posed in the scientific and exploration objectives become more and more specific, which sets more stringent requirements on where these questions can be answered; and 4) the Martian surface turned out to be more variable in composition than was previously thought. This study recommends a set of improvements in the form of a decision support system (DSS) that assists experts in the landing-site selection process. The DSS developed for this research includes two prototypes 1) a method that emulates the pattern recognition of a trained, terrain-analysis expert (i.e. a geologist) on a computer, called the terrain fingerprinting method (TFM); and 2) a platform that provides the interface through which all stakeholders in the landing site selection process (scientists, engineers, students, managers) can efficiently interact. This study concludes that I) the TFM can be used to find a landing site that optimises both the safety of the mission and the possibility for scientific return at the site. II) A central platform is required in order to empower the landing site selection community by sharing higher level data products, tools (e.g. TFM software tools), a forum, and documentation. III) The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is the central authority in the planetary sciences community in the USA providing standardisation support, the lack of such a central authority in Europe will negatively affect the process of landing-site selection by European scientists for all future planetary landers. And IV) for the various stakeholders to effectively collaborate and interact in the process of landing-site selection, standardisation of elements related to geographically referenced planetary data is essential.Astrodynamics and Satellite SystemsAerospace Engineerin