Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) instrument reached Mars in February 2021 onboard Perseverance rover as part of NASA-JPL Mars 2020 mission. Among its suite of sensors, it has two non-redundant wind sensors to measure Mars wind speed and direction, accommodated around Perseverance Remote Sensing Mast (RSM). Due to the rover asymmetric geometry, a complex boundary layer is formed around them, affecting their measurements. As there are few facilities in the world with enough test sections to test the complete rover and characterize these effects in Martian conditions, there has never been a complete tested model capable of reinterpreting data affected by rover perturbations on sensor measurements. While numerical methods can help to interpret a boundary layer, a high number of simulations are needed to build a global interference model. We propose an approach based on a high fidelity and successfully validated CFD model of Perseverance rover simulated with FloEFD 2019 in order to infer the freestream velocity for the first time. The first part of this work presents a detailed aerodynamic characterization study based on a large number of simulations that are run at the atmospheric conditions expected at Jezero (landing site of Perseverance), covering the entire horizontal incidence range of winds on Mars. The analysis reveals that horizontal plane incident winds present low interferences with differences of less than 20% with respect to the freestream. The rest of directions in the horizontal plane have always one sensor exposed to the freestream with the same condition of the low interference zone, and a small and bounded high interference zone is formed due to the rover rear geometry.
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Martínez-Esteve et al. (2025) studied this question.
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