Successful Robotic Rover Mission to Eve

[digtron]

After experimenting with the 30 second challenge (whose difficulty I drastically underestimated), I found out that I had created a compact rocket that could easily get me on an orbit with the sun. This design however ran out of fuel soon after achieving that orbit so I made a few modifications to allow it to travel much farther. I have a final picture of the rocket below with a basic explanation on how it's staged. After adding a few more fuel tanks to the original design, as well as a final stage with an atomic rocket motor, I had a complete rocket to reach far away planets. Seeing as this was my second real attempt to get to another planet, after my first manned Duna mission ended up with me having to strand a Kerbal in space while the other one went onto Duna to finish the mission, I decided to go with a robotic mission to test my new design. I quickly came up with a small rover that I attached atop the atomic rocket complete with all science equipment and a parachute for my descent. I didn't know whether or not the atomic rocket would be powerful enough to land the rover by itself on another planet so I decided to set my destination as Eve so that the thick atmosphere could be used in tandem with the parachute on my rover to ensure a successful landing if I were able to reach the planet. After finally launching, I found that my new design had worked better than I could have imagined, and as a result, I still had a lot of fuel left after getting an orbit around the sun. It took a lot of experimenting but I finally managed to create a flight plan that got me an encounter with Eve. Finally after a long journey of mainly waiting to get to the right point for the maneuver to get the encounter with eve, I managed to get trapped by the gravity and atmosphere of Eve which slowed me down most of the way, from a fast 4k m/s to a nice 250 m/s. The parachute worked like a charm and I landed on Eve without a hitch, rover fully intact and ready to explore with all of it's scientific instruments and nicely parked next to a large body of whatever liquid exists on Eve.

A picture of the rocket setup that got my robotic rover to Eve, and then some.

The rocket has 5 main stages, 2 of which are used up very quickly in the takeoff process. When the rocket first takes off, the 9 main engines at the bottom of the rocket (might be hard to see but it's 9, 3x3) are all activated at the same time. The way the rocket works is that the corner rockets are attached to the ones on the sides which are attached to the one in the middle. In that same order, there are fuel lines attaching each rocket to each other. With this, the engines on the corners are quickly used up when taking off because all of the fuel is being fed into the middle side engines which then feed it into the middle one. This makes it so that when the amount of fuel used up in total in the rocket is equal to that of the corner tanks, they are empty so that I can decouple the engines and shed the weight of the empty engines which would otherwise still exist if not setup in this fashion. A bit later, but still pretty quickly, the engines on the sides of the middle engine are used up as well so that I can then detach those whereupon I am left with a single large engine in the middle that is fully fueled. At this stage I have a trajectory that will take me to the Mun, and since it doesn't take a lot of fuel to get past this, the last middle engine can easily and shortly be used to get me the rest of the way out of the influence of Kerbin. I then planned a maneuver that would get me an encounter with Eve, it ended up being about 1 million km away but that's good enough at that point. I used the rest of the fuel in the middle rocket to get on that encounter. I then detached this stage which brought me to my second to last stage which is the atomic rocket that is above below the rcs ports and rcs fuel tanks. The atomic rocket was amazing, and I think I could have used this to land on any other planet, atmosphere or not, but I'll have to test that for myself. Once I got to the point of encounter with Eve, I did a 5 minute retrograde burn to get me to an orbit around Eve with a periapsis of 50k km. This distance from Eve was enough to get me into the atmosphere and slow me down from 4k to 250 m/s. I then detached from the atomic rocket into my last stage which is just my rover and a parachute which I used to softly land me on the surface of Eve. The descent with the parachute was a bit annoying because the atmosphere is 3x thicket on Eve so that it slowed me down all the way to 2m/s on the last 400m of the descent, but I can't complain, it did it's job perfectly!

A picture of the final stage of my rocket rapidly slowing down as it enters the thick atmosphere of eve (over 3x as thick as on Kerbin which works charms with the parachute)

A picture of the rover after detaching from the final rocket stage and waiting for the parachute to fully deploy. (I could have slowed down with the final stage since I was only going about 40m/s but I had no need to and it might have only interfered with the rover deploying onto the surface).

My tiny robotic rover standing proudly on the surface of Eve.

Just recently also had a very similar and successful mission to Moho using the same craft and nearly all of the same techniques. The main difference with this mission was that I had to use the second to last stage with the engines attached to the rover to land on the planet because there is no atmosphere to slow down the rover with the parachute. I felt this mission didn't need another post because it would mainly be a lot of repeat stuff. I might add a picture a bit later.

Edited June 21, 2013 by digtron
Added Moho Mission Statement at the end