Mars Exploration Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Ensuring the safe and controlled production of food during long-term manned missions is among the most important goals that future space crews will need to attain. Even using automation for crew time savings and food production... more

Ensuring the safe and controlled production of food during long-term manned missions is among the most important goals that future space crews will need to attain. Even using automation for crew time savings and food production optimization, a series of crew procedures will be required to start plant cultivation experiments in space or in analog environments, evaluate quality and safety factors, and measure biomass output and crew time requirements. But how can the educational process help to transform the younger generation into future space specialists? During the analog missions in the analog space station Habitat Marte, based in Rio Grande do Norte State, Brazil, the crew manage an aquaponic system for food crops (BioHabitat greenhouse) directly relevant to space habitats (Moon and Mars), and equally promising for regions affected by droughts. Though still an emerging technique for food production, aquaponics also promotes scientific literacy. It is a great tool for science education at all levels, from primary though vocational and university audiences. A school module provides several ways to enrich science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classes. Through a “hands-on” approach it also enables students to learn about the research process and brings to light “meaning-making” which is a process of direct experience of an individual. Aquaponics can thus become a pleasant and effective way for students to study STEM content. In addition to expanding education on the environment, sustainability and coding, the Habitat Marte Educational Program (HMEP) seeks to bring the academy closer to the productive sector and communities, promoting the strategies of Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) to improve an efficient process of food production, through courses, technical visits and workshops, focusing on space spin-offs to vulnerable communities and youth advancement.

ll libro ripercorre la storia di Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, l'insigne astronomo italiano, indagando, attraverso i testi di più autori, le diverse fasi della sua attività umana ed esplorativa: dalla fanciullezza e gioventù... more

ll libro ripercorre la storia di Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, l'insigne astronomo italiano, indagando, attraverso i testi di più autori, le diverse fasi della sua attività umana ed esplorativa: dalla fanciullezza e gioventù saviglianese alla prolungata direzione dell'Osservatorio di Brera, attraverso le scoperte compiute durante le opposizioni di Marte ed i numerosi suoi lavori scientifici pubblicati in tutto ilo mondo (qui ordinati per la prima volta in modo sistematico)

Astronauts live and work in highly unusual and challenging environments where they must withstand multiple stressors. Their abilities to maintain positive psychological outlooks and good interpersonal relations are crucial for personal... more

Astronauts live and work in highly unusual and challenging environments where they must withstand multiple stressors. Their abilities to maintain positive psychological outlooks and good interpersonal relations are crucial for personal well-being and mission success. From the inception of the space program, psychologists, psychiatrists, human factors experts, and other professionals have warned that the psychological stressors of space should be treated as a risk factor and that the risk would increase as missions involved larger, more diversified crews undertaking increasingly long flights. Thus, they called for research leading to the development and application of effective countermeasures. Although psychology played a significant role at the inception of the space program, for many years thereafter certain areas of psychology all but disappeared from NASA. Interest in psychosocial adaptation was rekindled in the mid-1990s when astronauts joined cosmonauts on the Russian space st...

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... more

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... more

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... more

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.

This article presents the Mars project, developed by the LabCine at Mackenzie Presbyterian University with support from the MackPesquisa grant. The project aims to produce a 4K film on the planet Mars to be transmitted by advanced... more

This article presents the Mars project, developed by the LabCine at Mackenzie Presbyterian University with support from the MackPesquisa grant. The project aims to produce a 4K film on the planet Mars to be transmitted by advanced photonic networks. Some of the specific objectives we can list are:  Exercise scientific and educational narrative, from giant scale images;  Test computer editing features, packaging and storage; In addition, the project aims to work out the routing of scientific topics considering images in the highest definition and discuss how the production protocols of UHD images from remote locations from which the human eye can not observe in person, are developed.

Candidate human missions to Mars, including NASA's Design Reference Architecture 5.0, have focused on conjunction-class missions with long crewed durations and minimum energy trajectories to reduce total propellant requirements and... more

Candidate human missions to Mars, including NASA's Design Reference Architecture 5.0, have focused on conjunction-class missions with long crewed durations and minimum energy trajectories to reduce total propellant requirements and total launch mass. However, in order to progressively reduce risk and gain experience in interplanetary mission operations, it may be desirable that initial human missions to Mars, whether to the surface or to Mars orbit, have shorter total crewed durations and minimal stay times at the destination. Opposition-class missions require larger total energy requirements relative to conjunction-class missions but offer the potential for much shorter mission durations, potentially reducing risk and overall systems performance requirements. This paper will present a detailed comparison of conjunction-class and opposition-class human missions to Mars vicinity with a focus on how such missions could be integrated into the initial phases of a Mars exploration ca...

In Brazil, it is still a challenge to motivate children and youth to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. We believe that Space can be a trigger to inspire engagement with scientific aerospace careers, a... more

In Brazil, it is still a challenge to motivate children and youth to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. We believe that Space can be a trigger to inspire engagement with scientific aerospace careers, a promising area to new jobs. This research has already identified some relevant initiatives in operation in Rio Grande do Norte State (Brazil), such as: Mars Society Brazil, Space Forum, and Habitat Marte. The Mars Society Brazil was established during the first semester of 2019. Since its creation, students have become a crucial part of the activities demonstrating enthusiasm and commitment. The Society is an important driving force in establishing an agenda of debates, skills development, and popularization of research and science. Mars Society Brazil, under the coordination of a professor, is evaluating strategies to enlarge the group and to present a higher impact in the local scientific community. The Mars Society Brazil community, among many activities planned, offers use of scientific NASA and ESA public tools to explore deeper learning about Space. The group is using Facebook and WhatsApp to build a sense of community. The empowerment of students has been a key and positive element to Mars Society Brazil operations. They are committed to defining a clear roadmap to apply space science in their daily lives and in research. Rio Grande do Norte Space Forum is another activity developed to share knowledge and content related to Space. Since inaugural activities in August 2018, six meetings have brought debates and lectures by representatives from academia, government, and industry. The Mars analog research station, Habitat Marte, has also developed lectures and invited technical visits that also help to share an awareness about Space. The initiatives above are helping to generate a common and active community that shares complementary knowledge contributing to the creation of an integrated vision for Space in Brazil.

This book explores some of the contributions of psychology to yesterday's great space race, today's orbiter and International Space Station missions, and tomorrow's journeys beyond Earth's orbit. Early missions into space were typically... more

This book explores some of the contributions of psychology to yesterday's great space race, today's orbiter and International Space Station missions, and tomorrow's journeys beyond Earth's orbit. Early missions into space were typically brief, and crews were small, often drawn from a single nation. As an intensely competitive space race has given way to international cooperation over the decades, the challenges of communicating across cultural boundaries and dealing with interpersonal conflicts have become increasingly important, requiring different coping skills and sensibilities from "the right stuff" of early astronauts.

The history of human Mars mission planning from the early 1950s through the 1960s is examined. For centuries, Mars has been an object of fascination and, since the 1800s, sciencefiction authors have imagined what it would be like for... more

The history of human Mars mission planning from the early 1950s through the 1960s is examined. For centuries, Mars has been an object of fascination and, since the 1800s, sciencefiction authors have imagined what it would be like for humans to travel to that planet. Space enthusiasts have shared this dream and as early as the 1950s were presenting feasible proposals for human missions to Mars. Since the creation of NASA, the Agency has maintained the idea of human Mars missions as an important long-term goal. Throughout its history, NASA has conducted studies aimed at landing an astronaut on Mars. NASA’s current strategic plan still includes this goal. Therefore, it is important to look at previous planning efforts to see what work has been accomplished and to discover lessons that future planners can apply to their programs.

This paper identifies breakpoints for various power and propulsion technologies, with a special focus on fission-based sources in support of NASA's Mars exploration program. Transportation, orbital, and surface missions are addressed... more

This paper identifies breakpoints for various power and propulsion technologies, with a special focus on fission-based sources in support of NASA's Mars exploration program. Transportation, orbital, and surface missions are addressed through an assessment architecture developed for this study. This architecture is based on three key considerations; decomposition of generic Mars missions into phases, a lumped parameter approach, and a bounding case analysis. With these simplifications breakpoints are identified beyond which new technologies, such as nuclear fission power, are required to achieve mission objectives. It is found that in-space propulsion and power generation are sized by launch vehicle delivery limits and trajectory options. Similarly, power levels for surface-based reactors are affected by transportation system and EDL limits imposed by current technologies. After summarizing the breakpoints for today's state of the art, development targets are identified to enable space-based nuclear power and propulsion systems to perform at their full potential.

The journey to explore our red neighbor will entail the application of all our terrestrial lessons learned and of some we have yet to discover. A Mars mission represents the extreme in terms of both distance and uncharted environment. The... more

The journey to explore our red neighbor will entail the application of all our terrestrial lessons learned and of some we have yet to discover. A Mars mission represents the extreme in terms of both distance and uncharted environment. The selection, monitoring and support of Mars bound crews will challenge existing technology and knowledge. The human, at the center, represents the greatest strength and the greatest weakness for a Mars mission. Human response to confined and isolated environments has been shown to be characterized by serious stressors and a Mars mission will represent the most extreme of such environments. The impact of such stressors on coping, performance, motivation, behavior, cognitive functioning and psychological well-being must be taken into account. The extraordinary duration of the mission poses special challenges in planning for mission support since very different needs may be driven by particular phases of the mission. Selection, monitoring and! support w...

Self-supporting colony for 1000 people. Project for Mars Society contest 2019.