Mars Exploration

Indisputably, we live at the dawn of a novel space exploration era, with the space sector undergoing significant changes. The International Space Station (ISS) is nearing the end of its lifespan and a competitive space industry is emerging. It is characterised by an ongoing redistribution of responsibilities between government agencies and private enterprise, with all stakeholders setting ambitious goals for future missions. Recently, interest in the next crewed space exploration mission has grown continuously. Driven by these developments, the Space Station Design Workshop (SSDW) 2017 in Stuttgart, Germany, posed the challenge to conduct the preliminary analysis and develop a viable proposal for the establishment of a permanent crewed space station in the vicinity of Mars by the year 2030. Two multinational, interdisciplinary teams of twenty students each were given one week to develop their own solutions and present them to experts from industry and academia. The authors, Team Blue, have outlined a design for a Mars surface station, called HUMANS2MARS. This proposal requires the development of mission-specific modules, while the launchers to be used include the foreseen state-of-the-art at the late 2020s, such as the Space Launch System from NASA and Falcon Heavy from SpaceX. Designing such a mission from scratch in one week posed great challenges, either innate in the technical and programmatic difficulties of the mission, or resulting from the time constraints and group dynamics of the project. The main technical challenges can be grouped into two sets. The first includes those related to mass and payload limitations of the mission and launching costs. The second consists of those related to the human element of the mission. Due to the hostile Martian environment, like the extreme radiation levels during transit and unexplored psychological pressure on the crew, the complexities associated with humans introduce significant uncertainties. Potential solutions to the problems discovered have been proposed and are presented in this paper-within the framework of a multicultural and interdisciplinary workshop. The major risks of the proposed mission are identified and possible mitigation strategies and backup scenarios are discussed, thus providing a starting point for future research and detailed studies. The complexity of the mission and nature of the SSDW require addressing a great variety of challenges under severe time constraints. A crucial factor in the success of this effort has been the multidisciplinary and diverse academic background of the participants. This enabled the team to overcome these numerous obstacles in often unconventional ways.

Earth is a safe haven bustling with movement, innovative ideas and creative minds, but we are also surely becoming over capacitated, and with our population growing more and more everyday, it is only a matter of time before Earth's resources can no longer sustain us, nor will there be any room for us to live in comfortably. Like in ancient times, humans have always looked for the skies for solutions to their problems, and that is what our scientists and researchers have also been doing, looking at the skies for a new alternative, and it seems like we have found one. Mars, the red planet, and Earth's neighbour, was recently discovered as a planet that could one day have the possibility to sustain human life. Humans on Mars will explore all the different aspects of human colonization on our neighbour, the little red planet.

Medium-range (here defined as under 100 km from a given habitat) extra-vehicular activity (EVA) on Mars will undoubtedly use some variety of mechanized all-terrain vehicles (ATV’s), but there will be times when it is desirable to transport small loads (here defined as under 300 kgf Earth mass 114 kgf Mars mass) without powered, mechanized aid. There is good reason, then, to design a simple vehicle capable of transporting small loads on Mars, similar to the Modular Equipment Transporter (MET) used to transport gear on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission. On Earth equipment is carried in backpack, but for the forseeable future, on Mars explorers will wear a backpack-like portable life support system (PLSS). We propose a ‘wheeled sledge’ or ‘Marscart’, towed with simple traces. This paper introduces the essential design elements and dimensions and presents considerations based the authors’ experience with pulling similar vehicles in Arctic and Australian expeditions. The basic ‘MarsCart’ design is based on lessons from these expeditions as well as lessons from a general anthropological
consideration of equipment design among mobile human societies in which low-tech but reliable tools are used to adapt to various environments for survival and exploration.