COLLABORATION: Engineering design has been completed under demanding constraints

Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer
Published : 15 Oct 2002 17:01

UK team designs lander for Mars

A UK led consortium consisting of Astrium Limited, formerly Matra Marconi Space, the Open University and the University of Leicester has collaboratively designed the entry, descent and lander systems for Beagle 2, Europe’s first spacecraft scheduled to land on another planet. Its mission will be to land on Mars and carry out experiments to search for sign of life on the planet, and to conduct geochemical and atmospheric analysis.

The lander is due to blast off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan in May 2003 on board the Mars Express spacecraft. Several days before the entering orbit around Mars, the Beagle 2 will be ejected from the spacecraft on a trajectory towards the planet’s atmosphere. From there it will enter the atmosphere and descend to land on the surface.

The design challenges facing the consortium were compounded by the need to keep within extremely demanding mass, size and form constraints, to a very tight time schedule, and with limited financial resources.

“In a nutshell,” said lead designer Paul Kemshall, “our challenge was to complete our task faster, cheaper and better than any previous similar project. We therefore rely heavily on the collaborative design, engineering and manufacturing facilities provided by EDS’ Unigraphics product development software, and Teamcenter Engineering product data management systems.”

During the development process, the EDS software was used extensively to calculate mass properties, determine moments of inertia and centre of gravity, and to perform structural analysis of individual components so as to arrive at the optimum design in terms of strength and weight. It was also used to create a ‘virtual’ model of the complete spacecraft in order to ensure that every component and sub-assembly fitted and operated correctly, before anything was actually manufactured.

With the design work complete, Beagle 2 has now reached the manufacturing stage.

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