Mars ISRU for Production of Mission Critical Consumables - Options, Recent Studies, and Current State of the Art

Abstract

In 1978, a ground breaking paper titled, "Feasibility of Rocket Propellant Production on Mars" by Ash, Dowler, and Varsi discussed how ascent propellants could be manufactured on the Mars surface from carbon dioxide collected from the atmosphere to reduce launch mass. Since then, the concept of making mission critical consumables such as propellants, fuel cell reactants, and life support consumables from local resources, commonly known as In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), for robotic and human missions to Mars has been studied many times. In the late 1990's, NASA initiated a series of Mars Human Design Reference Missions (DRMs), the first of which was released in 1997. These studies primarily focused on evaluating the impact of making propellants on Mars for crew ascent to Mars orbit, but creating large caches of life support consumables (water & oxygen) as a backup for regenerative life support systems for long-duration surface stays (>500 days) was also considered in Mars DRM 3.0. Until science data from the Mars Odyssey orbiter and subsequent robotic missions revealed that water may be widely accessable across the surface of Mars, prior Mars ISRU studies were limited to processing Mars atmospheric resources (carbon dioxide, nitrogen, argon, oxygen, and water vapor). In December 2007, NASA completed the Mars Human Design Reference Architecture (DRA) 5.0 study which considered water on Mars as a potential resource for the first time in a human mission architecture. While knowledge of both water resources on Mars and the hardware required to excavate and extract the water were very preliminary, the study concluded that a significant reduction in mass and significant enhancements to the mission architecture were possible if Mars water resources were utilized. Two subsequent Mars ISRU studies aimed at reexamining ISRU technologies, processing options, and advancements in the state-of-the-art since 2007 and to better understand the volume and packaging associated with Mars ISRU systems further substantiated the preliminary results from the Mars DRA 5.0 study. This paper will provide an overview of Mars ISRU consumable production options, the analyses, results, and conclusions from the Mars DRA 5.0 (2007), Mars Collaborative (2013), and Mars ISRU Payload for the Supersonic Retro Propulsion (2014) mission studies, and the current state-of-the-art of Mars ISRU technologies and systems. The paper will also briefly discuss the mission architectural implications associated with Mars resource and ISRU processing options.

The case forin situresource utilisation for oxygen production on Mars by non-equilibrium plasmas

“…Accordingly, it will minimise risks to the crew and mission, as well as reduce logistics, making it possible to increase the space-craft shielding and provide increased self-sufficiency. Moreover, it will reduce costs by demanding less launch vehicles to complete the mission [3][4][5][6].…”

Thermodynamic Modeling of In-Situ Rocket Propellant Fabrication on Mars

“…It is estimated that each kilogram of useful technology sent to Mars requires 7-11 kg of mass launched from Earth and translates to 5.6-8.8 kg of propellant needed per kilogram of material (Johnson et al, 2018). If transporting propellant from Earth to Mars to set up a local fuel depot, gear ratios become an important consideration during mission design (Leucht, 2018) and estimates show that Mars requires a gear ratio of 226:1 (Sanders et al, 2015). In other words, 226 kg of propellant is required to have 1 kg of propellant on Mars.…”

Martian biolith: A bioinspired regolith composite for closed-loop extraterrestrial manufacturing

“…For such missions, or perhaps even settlements, survival requires meeting basic human needs while Earth-independent. With an emphasis on in situ resource utilization [ 2 ], a sustainable extraterrestrial settlement must be a resource-efficient, closed ecological system [ 3 ].…”