Modeling and Analysis of Tethered System Dynamics for Venus Aerobots and Towed Probes

Venus, the Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, provides a unique natural laboratory for studying plane tary and climate processes. Because of its corrosive atmosphere, high temperatures, and pressures, Venus’s atmosphere represents an extreme and challenging environment for scientific exploration. One of the most promising approaches to studying the Venusian atmosphere and its surface is to use an “aerobot” carrying scientific instruments. An aerobot is an autonomous buoyant balloon that could navigate Venus’s atmo sphere, staying at an altitude of around 52 km where temperatures and pressures are comparable to Earth’s troposphere. This paper introduces mechanical models and flight simulators, developed to evaluate various system architectures to support the technological development of a possible Venus Aerobot mission. Two different modeling approaches of the tether dynamics are considered, specifically a Lumped-Mass approach and the Decoupled Natural Orthogonal Matrix (DeNOC) recursive approach. The models and simulators described in this paper enable preliminary system-level analysis of the flight-chain dynamics, encompassing inflated balloons, gondolas suspended by tethers, and bodies towed with tethers.