Dispersion Analysis in Hypersonic Flight During Planetary Entry Using Stochastic Liouville Equation

Abstract: A framework is provided for the propagation of uncertainty in planetary entry, descent and landing (EDL). The traditional Monte Carlo based dispersion analysis is overly resource-expensive for such high dimensional nonlinear systems and does not provide any methodical way to analyze the effect of uncertainty for mission design. It is shown that, propagating the density function through Liouville equation, is computationally attractive and suitable for further statistical analysis. Comparative simulation results are provided to bring forth the efficacies of the proposed method. Examples are given from the EDL domain to illustrate how one can retrieve statistical information of interest from an analyst's perspective.