Overloading of Landing Based on the Deformation of the Lunar Lander

Along with the progress of sciences and technologies, a lot of explorations are taken in many countries or organizations in succession. Lunar, the natural satellite of the earth, become a focus of the space discovery again recently because of its abundant resource and high value in use. Lunar exploration is also one of the most important projects in China. A primary objective of the probe in lunar is to soft-land a manned spacecraft on the lunar surface. The soft-landing system is the key composition of the lunar lander. In the overall design of lunar lander, the analysis of touchdown dynamics during landing stage is an important work. The rigid-flexible coupling dynamics of a system with flexible cantilevers attached to the main lander is analyzed. The equations are derived from the subsystem method. Results show that the deformations of cantilevers have considerable effect on the overloading of the lunar lander system.