Recent missions reveal that rubble-pile asteroids usually have a wide distribution of bare rocks in various scales. The dynamical evolution of a lander interacting with such rough surfaces is still an open problem. This article investigates the influence of the explicitly refined rocky terrains on the natural landing motion of a cuboid asteroid lander. The methodology for constructing the local terrains with centimeter-sized to meter-sized rocks is developed based on manipulating the original polyhedron shape model. Local rocky terrains refined with different-sized rocks (20 cm, 40 cm, 80c m, and 1 m) are generated. Moreover, hypothetical local terrains in different numbers of 1-m-sized rocks are presented to assess their influence on the landing motion. Numerical simulations are performed to characterize the dynamical behavior of the lander in rocky terrains. The distributions of the first and second touchdown positions, the transfer time, and the locomotion distance are taken as the three key indicators for examining the motion difference in these rocky terrains. The mechanism for the landing motion is analyzed by considering the collision slope. The results are expected to provide guidelines for the lander deployment and the path planning of a rover on rocky asteroids .

中文翻译：

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小行星立方着陆器生成的局部岩石地形自然着陆模拟

最近的任务表明，碎石堆小行星通常具有广泛分布的各种规模的裸岩。着陆器与这种粗糙表面相互作用的动力学演化仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。本文研究了明确细化的岩石地形对长方体小行星着陆器自然着陆运动的影响。在操纵原始多面体形状模型的基础上，开发了用厘米到米大小的岩石构建局部地形的方法。生成了用不同大小的岩石（20 cm、40 cm、80 cm 和 1 m）细化的局部岩石地形。此外，还提出了不同数量的 1 米大小岩石中的假设局部地形，以评估它们对着陆运动的影响。进行数值模拟以表征着陆器在岩石地形中的动力学行为。以第一次和第二次触地位置的分布、转移时间和运动距离作为考察这些岩石地形运动差异的三个关键指标。通过考虑碰撞坡度分析了着陆运动的机理。研究结果有望为着陆器部署和漫游车在岩石小行星上的路径规划提供指导。