A24 Investigation of touchdown with a landing gear for shock absorption

Abstract

Touchdown technology on target planet is important for detailed space exploration. Due to the limitation of mission time, safe landing in the vicinity of area of interest is essential even if the area is unsafe with slope or stepped surface. Conventional 4-leg landing gear has disadvantages for landing on slope because of tradeoff problem between shock absorption and attitude maintenance. In this paper, a novel landing gear is proposed for shock absorption and landing stability. Computer simulations of proposed landing gear in presence of horizontal velocity have demonstrated satisfactory performance.