An Integrated Hybrid Transportation Architecture for Human Mars Expeditions

Merrill, Raymond G.; Chai, Patrick; Qu, Min

doi:10.2514/6.2015-4442

Cited by 19 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Long-duration habitation for in-space and planetary surfaces represents a major capability within in the capability-driven Evolvable Mars Campaign. Habitats must be able to support four crewmembers for 300-1100 days in challenging environments with limited resupply, no crew abort, and long communication delays; all within N constrained mass, volume, and power budgets 2,3,4,5 . In addition to these constraints, there are several characteristics of the EMC mission architecture which drive specific habitation design strategies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolvable Mars Campaign Long Duration Habitation Strategies: Architectural Approaches to Enable Human Exploration Missions

Simon

Toups

Howe

et al. 2015

AIAA SPACE 2015 Conference and Exposition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Evolvable Mars Campaign (EMC) is the current NASA Mars mission planning effort which seeks to establish sustainable, realistic strategies to enable crewed Mars missions in the mid-2030s timeframe. The primary outcome of the Evolvable Mars Campaign is not to produce "The Plan" for sending humans to Mars, but instead its intent is to inform the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate near-term key decisions and investment priorities to prepare for those types of missions. The FY'15 EMC effort focused upon analysis of integrated mission architectures to identify technically appealing transportation strategies, logistics build-up strategies, and vehicle designs for reaching and exploring Mars moons and Mars surface. As part of the development of this campaign, long duration habitats are required which are capable of supporting crew with limited resupply and crew abort during the Mars transit, Mars moons, and Mars surface segments of EMC missions. In particular, the EMC design team sought to design a single, affordable habitation system whose manufactured units could be outfitted uniquely for each of these missions and reused for multiple crewed missions. This habitat system must provide all of the functionality to safely support 4 crew for long durations while meeting mass and volume constraints for each of the mission segments set by the chosen transportation architecture and propulsion technologies. This paper describes several proposed long-duration habitation strategies to enable the Evolvable Mars Campaign through improvements in mass, cost, and reusability, and presents results of analysis to compare the options and identify promising solutions. The concepts investigated include several monolithic concepts: monolithic clean sheet designs, and concepts which leverage the co-manifested payload capability of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) to deliver habitable elements within the Universal Payload Adaptor between the SLS upper stage and the Orion/Service module on the top of the vehicle. Multiple modular habitat options for Mars surface and in-space missions are also considered with various functionality and volume splits between modules to find the best balance of reducing the single largest mass which must be delivered to a destination and reducing the number of separate elements which must be launched. Analysis results presented for each of these concepts in this paper include mass/volume/power sizing using parametric sizing tools, identification of unique operational constraints, and limited comments on the additional impacts of reusability/dormancy on system design. Finally, recommendations will be made for promising solutions which will be carried forward for consideration in the Evolvable Mars Campaign work.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolvable Mars Campaign Long Duration Habitation Strategies: Architectural Approaches to Enable Human Exploration Missions

Simon

Toups

Howe

et al. 2015

AIAA SPACE 2015 Conference and Exposition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The total mass estimate for the habitat, cargo, propellant, PEV, and Phobos taxi is approximately 56,550 kg. Figure 16 shows the cargo payload delivery capability using a chemical/SEP hybrid delivery vehicle for launch dates in the 2030s [6,37]. These numbers assume that the delivery vehicle drops off the taxi in HMO and then uses the SEP to spiral the HAB and PEV to Phobos orbit.…”

Section: Mission Architecture Masses and Delivery Capabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Human exploration missions to phobos prior to crewed mars surface missions

Gernhardt

Abercromby

Bekdash

et al. 2016

2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Phobos is a scientifically interesting destination which offers engineering, operational and public outreach activities that could enhance subsequent Mars surface missions. A Phobos mission would serve to facilitate the development of the human-based Mars transportation infrastructure, unmanned cargo delivery systems, as well as habitation and exploration assets that would be directly relevant to subsequent Mars surface missions. It would also potentially provide for low latency teleoperations (LLT) of Mars surface robots performing a range of tasks from landing site validation to infrastructure development to support future crewed Mars surface Missions. A human mission to Phobos would be preceded by a cargo predeploy of a Phobos surface habitat and a pressurized excursion vehicle (PEV) to Mars orbit. Once in Mars orbit, the habitat and PEV would spiral to Phobos using solar electric propulsion (SEP)-based systems. When a crewed mission is launched to Phobos, it would include the remaining systems to support the crew during the Earth-to-Mars orbit transit and to reach Phobos after insertion into a high Mars orbit (HMO). The crew would taxi from HMO to Phobos in a spacecraft that is based on a MAV to rendezvous with the predeployed systems. A predominantly static Phobos surface habitat was chosen as a baseline architecture. The habitat would have limited capability to relocate on the surface to shorten excursion distances required by the PEV during exploration and to provide rescue capability should the PEV become disabled. PEVs would contain closed-loop guidance and provide life support and consumables for two crewmembers for two weeks plus reserves. The PEV has a cabin that uses the exploration atmosphere of 8.2psi with 34% oxygen. This atmosphere enables EVA to occur with minimal oxygen prebreathe before crewmembers enter their EVA suits through suit ports, and provides dust control to occur by keeping the suits outside the pressurized volume. When equipped with outriggers, the PEV enables EVA tasks without the need to anchor. Tasks with higher force requirements can be performed with PEV propulsion providing the necessary thrust to counteract forces. This paper overviews the mission operational concepts, and timelines, along with analysis of the power, lighting, habitat stability, and EVA forces. Exploration of Phobos builds heavily on the development of the cis-lunar proving ground and significantly reduces Mars surface risk by facilitating the design, development and testing of habitats, MAVs, and pressurized rover cabins that are all investments in Mars surface assets.

show abstract

“…A second concept, referred to as the 'Hybrid' option [13], utilizes a joint SEP and storable chemical propulsion stage to deliver both crew and cargo to Mars (both crew and cargo missions are constrained to fixed departure windows). The Hybrid option also allows for refueling and reuse of in-space propellant stages, reducing the need to launch new stages for subsequent crewed missions to Mars.…”

Section: Evolvable Mars Campaign Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The exploration of Mars launch & assembly simulation

Cates

Stromgren²,

Mattfeld³

et al. 2016

2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Advancing human exploration of space beyond Low Earth Orbit, and ultimately to Mars, is of great interest to NASA, other organizations, and space exploration advocates. Various strategies for getting to Mars have been proposed. These include NASA's Design Reference Architecture 5.0, a near-term flyby of Mars advocated by the group Inspiration Mars, and potential options developed for NASA's Evolvable Mars Campaign. Regardless of which approach is used to get to Mars, they all share a need to visualize and analyze their proposed campaign and evaluate the feasibility of the launch and on-orbit assembly segment of the campaign. The launch and assembly segment starts with flight hardware manufacturing and ends with final departure of a Mars Transfer Vehicle (MTV), or set of MTVs, from an assembly orbit near Earth. This paper describes a discrete event simulation based strategic visualization and analysis tool that can be used to evaluate the launch campaign reliability of any proposed strategy for exploration beyond low Earth orbit. The input to the simulation can be any manifest of multiple launches and their associated transit operations between Earth and the exploration destinations, including Earth orbit, lunar orbit, asteroids, moons of Mars, and ultimately Mars. The simulation output includes expected launch dates and ascent outcomes i.e., success or failure. Running 1,000 replications of the simulation provides the capability to perform launch campaign reliability analysis to determine the probability that all launches occur in a timely manner to support departure opportunities and to deliver their payloads to the intended orbit. This allows for quantitative comparisons between alternative scenarios, as well as the capability to analyze options for improving launch campaign reliability. Results are presented for representative strategies.

show abstract

An Integrated Hybrid Transportation Architecture for Human Mars Expeditions

Cited by 19 publications

References 11 publications

Evolvable Mars Campaign Long Duration Habitation Strategies: Architectural Approaches to Enable Human Exploration Missions

Evolvable Mars Campaign Long Duration Habitation Strategies: Architectural Approaches to Enable Human Exploration Missions

Human exploration missions to phobos prior to crewed mars surface missions

The exploration of Mars launch & assembly simulation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About