Turbulence for extraterrestrial aviation: Gust specification for Dragonfly's powered flights

Abstract

Simple discrete and continuous gust models are presented for the lower atmosphere of Titan, for verification of the design of the Dragonfly rotorcraft. Models used for terrestrial airworthiness certification, essentially empirical in character, cannot be applied directly due to the different properties of Titan's atmosphere. The origins of terrestrial specifications are reviewed, and appropriate first-principles physical scalings are applied to the relevant parameters. A discrete ‘random-walk’ turbulence formulation is presented which offers simple implementation for numerical flight simulations. The model has applicability to other missions.