A water rich mars surface mission scenario

Human exploration and development of space is aimed at opening the space frontier by exploring, using, and enabling the development of space and expanding the human experience into the far reaches of space. This includes increasing human knowledge of nature’s processes using the space environment, exploring and settling the solar system, achieving routine space travel, and enriching life on Earth through people living and working in space. NASA’s Mars robotic explorations and the International Space Station provide extensive experience, research and technology (R&T), and infrastructure for other envisioned programs in support of human exploration and development of space. The missions to Moon by United States, Russia, China, India, and Japan have provided valuable data for the Moon. In addition, NASA has studied the development of a lunar habitat and human mission to Mars as possible future missions. These missions face common challenges of travel to these planets and for the survival of humans on the surface of the planets. With the human Mars mission being the first to such a distant planet, advanced technologies will be required to enable the mission and to provide cost effective and safer approaches. The R&T areas considered important for future human mission include advanced human support, renewable resources and utilization of planetary resources, space transportation, automation and robotics, space power, information processing and communications systems, sensors, and instruments.

This report investigates various methods of reducing the cost in space transportation systems for human Mars missions. The reference mission for this task is a mission currently under study at NASA. called the Mars Design Reference Mission, characterized by In-Situ propellant production at Mars. This study mainly consists of comparative evaluations to the reference mission with a view to selecting strategies that would reduce the cost of the Mars program as a whole. One of the objectives is to understand the implications of certain Mars architectures, mission modes, vehicle configurations, and potentials for vehicle reusability. The evaluations start with year 2011-2014 conjunction missions which were characterized by their abort-to-the-surface mission abort philosophy. Variations within this mission architecture, as well as outside the set to other architectures (not predicated on an abort to surface philosophy) were evaluated. Specific emphasis has been placed on identifying and assessing overall mission risk. Impacts that Mars mission vehicles might place upon the Space Station, if it were to be used as an assembly or operations base, were also discussed. Because of the short duration of this study only on a few propulsion elements were addressed (nuclear thermal, cryogenic oxygen-hydrogen, cryogenic oxygen-methane, and aerocapture). Primary ground rules and assumptions were taken from NASA material used in Marshall Space Flight Center's own assessment done in 1997.

Planetary protection is one of the key problems which will greatly affect the future human missions to Mars. Planetary protection has three major goals:1)The protection of extraterrestrial planet from terrestrial life contamination (forward contamination prevention);2) The protection of Earth from extraterrestrial life (back contamination prevention);3) The protection of the health and safety of astronauts. The international aerospace community has begun to formulate policies and conduct technical discussions on planetary protection for human Mars missions. In this review,the definition and legal base of planetary protection are introduced,and the planetary protection implementation of NASA Apollo program is reviewed,and the major contaminants,contamination pathway,and contamination control strategy for future human Mars missions are discussed.

This paper describes the various developments of robust systems for human mars mission. The engineering of highly reliable, robust systems for those human space missions, along with the creation of a livable, artificial environment on Mars, will provide a new arena for the innovation of future technologies, allowing scientific progress and creating economic growth. Studies of human Mars missions have been conducted in the last two decades by NASA, other space agencies, and non-government groups, including the Mars Society. NASA has developed a series of design reference missions to serve as guideposts toward sending a human crew to Mars and to provide a basis for comparing different approaches and criteria. In order to achieve Mars orbit insertion and descent to the surface, rather large accelerations are required, which if implemented through chemical propulsion, require very large propellant masses. The rich carbon supply on Mars also suggests a possibility of local production of such essentials as plastics, lubricants, and synthetic fabrics.

For most of the history of space exploration, human and robotic programs have been independent, and have responded to distinct requirements. The NASA Vision for Space Exploration calls for the return of humans to the Moon, and the eventual human exploration of Mars; the complexity of this range of missions will require an unprecedented use of automation and robotics in support of human crews. The challenges of human Mars missions, including roundtrip communications time delays of 6 to 40 minutes, interplanetary transit times of many months, and the need to manage lifecycle costs, will require the evolution of a new mission operations paradigm far less dependent on real-time monitoring and response by an Earthbound operations team. Robotic systems and automation will augment human capability, increase human safety by providing means to perform many tasks without requiring immediate human presence, and enable the transfer of traditional mission control tasks from the ground to crews. Developing and validating the new paradigm and its associated infrastructure may place requirements on operations design for nearer-term lunar missions. The authors, representing both the human and robotic mission operations communities, assess human lunar and Mars mission challenges, and consider how human-robot operations may be integrated to enable efficient joint operations, with the eventual emergence of a unified exploration operations culture.

Cryogenics and the human exploration of Mars

This chapter provides an overview of the aeroassist technologies and performances for Mars missions. We review the current state-of-the-art aeroassist technologies for Mars explorations, including aerocapture, aerobraking, and entry. Then we present a parametric analysis considering key design parameters such as interplanetary trajectory and vehicle design parameters (lift-to-drag ratio, ballistic coefficient, peak g-load, peak heat rate, and total heat load) for aerocapture, aerobraking, and entry. A new perspective on a rapid aerobraking concept will be provided. The analysis will include first-order estimates for thermal loading, thermal protection systems material selection, and vehicle design. Results and discussion focus on both robotic missions and human missions as landed assets and orbiters.

The effect of interstitial gaseous pressure on the thermal conductivity of a simulated Apollo 12 lunar soil sample

The following paper documents the results of a one‐year multi‐center NASA study on the prospect of sending humans to Jupiter’s moon, Callisto, using an all Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP) space transportation system architecture with magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thrusters. The fission reactor system utilizes high temperature uranium dioxide (UO2) in tungsten (W) metal matrix “cermet” fuel and electricity is generated using advanced dynamic Brayton power conversion technology. The mission timeframe assumes on‐going human Moon and Mars missions and existing space infrastructure to support launch of cargo and crewed spacecraft to Jupiter in 2041 and 2045, respectively.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created in 1958 to develop America's non-military space effort. But the early leaders of a self-consciously elite science and technology agency rarely saw Earth as a part of 'space' or solar system exploration. This is clear when examining NASA's relations with earthly applications in the late 1950s and 1960s and with fast-emergent environmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s. NASA consistently misread the importance of the most popular science-based political movement of the late twentieth century. NASA was advised from 1959 onwards that earthly concerns - and practical worldly benefits - were necessary to create broad and enduring support for space explorations. Despite this, NASA leaders consistently underestimated, ignored or spun-off Earth 'applications' in the formative period of America's civilian space programme. Power and prestige-focused human spaceflight, Moon and Mars missions, and human settlement of the solar system, became NASA's enduring 'human spaceflight culture'.

A subset of Earth-originating Mars double-flyby ballistic trajectories is documented. The subset consists of those trajectories that, after the first Mars flyby, perform a half-revolution transfer with Mars before returning to Earth. This class of free returns is useful for both human and robotic Mars missions because of its low geocentric energy at departure and arrival, and because of its extended stay time in the vicinity of Mars. Ballistic opportunities are documented over Earth departure dates ranging from 2015 through 2100. The mission is viable over three or four consecutive Mars synodic periods and unavailable for the next four, with the pattern repeating approximately every 15 years. Over the remainder of the century, a minimum Earth departure hyperbolic excess speed of , a minimum Earth atmospheric entry speed of , and a minimum flight time of 904 days are observed. The algorithm used to construct these trajectories is presented along with several examples.

General human health issues for Moon and Mars missions: Results from the HUMEX study

Perchlorates have been identified on the surface of Mars. This has prompted speculation of what their influence would be on habitability. We show that when irradiated with a simulated Martian UV flux, perchlorates become bacteriocidal. At concentrations associated with Martian surface regolith, vegetative cells of Bacillus subtilis in Martian analogue environments lost viability within minutes. Two other components of the Martian surface, iron oxides and hydrogen peroxide, act in synergy with irradiated perchlorates to cause a 10.8-fold increase in cell death when compared to cells exposed to UV radiation after 60 seconds of exposure. These data show that the combined effects of at least three components of the Martian surface, activated by surface photochemistry, render the present-day surface more uninhabitable than previously thought, and demonstrate the low probability of survival of biological contaminants released from robotic and human exploration missions.

Several observations of the total amount of water vapor in Mars atmosphere display diurnal variations. A possible explanation is an atmosphere/surface coupling that occurs through H2O exchange with the regolith, where adsorbed water molecules have been proposed as a consequent water reservoir. In order to test this hypothesis, experimental laboratory measurements of adsorption isotherms are needed together with adsorption kinetics measurements. Following our previous measurements of the adsorption isotherms of a series of Mars surface analog materials, we report here on kinetics measurements on the same samples at a temperature of 243 K (volcanic tuff, dunite, ferrihydrite, smectite, JSC‐Mars1). We observed that even for thin samples (1 mm), diffusion through the sample might influence the adsorption process and significant caution is required to infer kinetics parameters of strongly adsorbing samples. The kinetics parameters kd and dka/dP were extracted following the Langmuir theory. Results show that adsorption is fast but not instantaneous with regard to the diurnal time scale (kd = 10−2–10−3 s−1, dka/dP = 10−3–10−4 Pa−1 s−1). Large variations are found between the different samples, which suggest a possible geological control on the amount of exchangeable water between the regolith and the atmosphere. We estimate the impact of a noninstantaneous kinetics on the diurnal water vapor cycle by calculating the maximum amount of exchangeable water. We found that a significant amount of H2O can be trapped within the regolith, even in weakly adsorbing analog materials. The similarity in adsorption properties between the JSC‐Mars1 and ferrihydrite samples suggests that the adsorption properties of the latter are controlled by the presence of iron oxyhydroxide. These materials have strong adsorption capacities, and their presence on the Martian surface might explain the observed spatial correlation between the average surface humidity and the abundance of surface dust.

Urban and rural ultrafine (PM 0.1) particles in the Helsinki area