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Europe has embarked on a new programme of space exploration involving the development of rover, lander and probe missions to visit planets, moons and near Earth objects (NEOs) throughout the Solar System. Rovers and landers will require testing under simulated planetary, and NEO conditions to ensure their ability to land on and traverse the alien surfaces. ESA has begun work on a building project that will provide an enclosed and controlled environment for testing rover and lander functions such as landing, mobility, navigation and soil sampling. The facility will first support the European ExoMars mission due for launch in 2013. This mission will deliver a robotic rover to the Martian surface. This paper, the first of several on the project, gives an overview of its design configuration and construction phasing. Future papers will cover its applications and operations.

Much of the basic understanding of aerodynamics is a result of research conducted in the early part of the twentieth century. A prominent example is the understanding of the cause of the drag due to lift, or induced drag. In this explanation the drag due to lift is connected with the trailing vortices that can be seen behind a wing. In this paper an explanation is derived for the existence of all wing drag, including drag due to lift. The drag formulation arises from the relationship of surface pressure to entropy generated predominantly by vorticity in the flow field. This new formulation allows the total drag to be split into the contributions made by different flow features. It also leads to suggestions on how to reduce drag

One of the major constraints in developing practical adaptive wings is that they must be easy to install and maintain and be relatively inexpensive. This constraint implies that some recent proposals for wing “morphing”, such as those that require large geometric movements, will not be installed in a production air vehicle. The approach reported in this paper is to investigate ways of improving aerodynamic performance that do not require large geometric movements. The geometry changes used in the current research are leading and trailing edge “waves’ that have a deflection of 1%–2% of chord.

Aerodynamics is a non-linear, dynamic, system and thus has the capacity to produce different flows for the same boundary conditions. Generally both experiments and computational studies will give only one of these flows. The research presented in this paper is directed at developing a non-linear, dynamic, system that models aerodynamics satisfactorily but allows control of various aerodynamic elements so that the nature of possible, not necessarily probable, bifurcations and other forms of non-linear behavior can be studied. It is expected that such behavior may occur in the type of extreme aerodynamic conditions that are precursors to aircraft accidents.

Dynamic stall has been the subject of much research but there is still some uncertainty about several aspects. Almost all research to date has involved experiments or computational fluid dynamics, both, in essence, trying to duplicate the phenomena. The present research takes a different tack by trying to develop a phenomenological model that will allow greater insight into the relationship between various physical elements that are present in the flow. The research indicates a fairly simple explanation for dynamic stall and identifies the controlling factors.

There is a need to begin generating data on the testing and performance of high pressure inflatable structures in the space environment. This data is necessary to validate inflatable structures for future space exploration mission studies. The International Space Station can serve as a long term testbed for inflatable structures where multiple samples can be flown and evaluated over a period of several years. Precursor experiments can fly also on Space Shuttle missions to provide preliminary data quickly and economically. This paper describes new, small payload carriers that are being developed commercially for the Space Shuttle. It outlines a range of inflatable structure experiment topics that are suitable for both precursor and long term study.

Enhanced turbulence in an upwash fountain and fluid/acoustic resonance of an impinging axisymmetric jet are investigated by numerical simulations of the mean flow and the largest scales of the unsteady fluid motion. In the planar upwash, the simulated shear stress and spreading rate are three times greater than in a normal jet and are in good agreement with experimental data. Reynolds-stress transport mechanisms which lead to the enhanced turbulence are discussed, and a qualitative description of the large scale turbulent motions is proposed. A model for the pressure-strain term is determined to be a major source of error in Reynolds-stress transport modeling of the upwash. In an axisymmetric impinging jet at Mj = 0.9, resonant-like behavior with elevated levels of pressure fluctuations and dominance of a single frequency of vortex generation are observed. Vortex stretching is observed to be critical to the generation of noise in the impingement zone.