Solar power could provide all the energy needed for an extended mission to Mars, according to a new study. The evolution in solar cell technology means that the sun could even power a permanent settlement on the Red Planet, say scientists.
Solar does as well or is comparable to nuclear power when it comes to energy on Mars, according to scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. It does have downsides in that it must be stored for use at night, which lasts about the same length of time as on Earth. Production can also be stifled by the red dust that covers the planet.
NASA’s 15-year-old Opportunity rover, powered by solar panels, stopped working after a massive dust storm in 2019.
Solar panels are however better because they are far lighter and at times more efficient than nuclear.Humans on Mars would need to use the only raw materials available — water ice, atmospheric gases, the Martian soil and sunlight — to make everything they need for survival. Researchers like those in CUBES, based at UC Berkeley, are working on ways to turn these raw materials into food, medicine, fuel and structural materials. This flow chart shows how in situ resource utilization (ISRU) turns the raw materials into a form that can be used to synthesize food and pharmaceuticals (FPS) and manufacture biopolymers (ISM) for use by the crew. Waste is collected and reused (loop closure, or LC) to maximize efficiency and reduce the cost of supply logistics from Earth. (Illustration by Aaron Berliner and Davian Ho, UC Berkeley)
“Photovoltaic energy generation coupled to certain energy storage configurations in molecular hydrogen outperforms nuclear fusion reactors over 50 percent of the planet’s surface, mainly within those regions around the equatorial band, which is in fairly sharp contrast to what has been proposed over and over again in the literature, which is that it will be nuclear power,” says Aaron Berliner, a bioengineering doctoral student at the university and one of the paper’s two first authors, in a statement.
Adds co-first author Dr. Anthony Abel, a graduate student in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering: “If humanity collectively decides that we want to go to Mars, this kind of systems-level approach is necessary to accomplish it safely and minimize cost in a way that’s ethical. We want to have a clear-eyed comparison between options, whether we’re deciding which technologies to use, which locations to go to on Mars, how to go and whom to bring.”
“Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom, over time creating rippled textures left in rock,” NASA said.
The Curiosity Rover was traversing through an area of Mars called the “sulfate-bearing unit” (Source: NASA)
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Curiosity Rover has discovered new evidence that an ancient lake existed in a region of Mars, which was earlier believed to be drier.
The rover was traversing through an area of Mars called the “sulfate-bearing unit”, and researchers previously thought would show evidence of “mere trickles of water, as scientists believed the rocks there formed as the surface of the red planet was drying out”. Instead, they found some of the clearest event of ancient waters.
As I climb up Mt. Sharp, I’m exploring layers of the Martian timeline. Currently, I’m in the “Marker Band.” Up ahead, I can see something like a landslide, so I’m hoping to get a closer look at some “younger” material later this year.
“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. “We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this — and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry.”
“Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom, over time creating rippled textures left in rock,” NASA said.
Having climbed nearly a half-mile above the Mount Sharp’s base, the rover found that these rippled rock textures preserved in what’s nicknamed the “Marker Band” – a thin layer of dark rock that stands out from the rest of Mount Sharp, the agency said. As it climbed higher, it travelled over rocks that would have formed more recently. That’s why researchers didn’t expect to see such clear markers of a large body of water, the agency added.
Curiosity has attempted to extract samples from some of the rocks, but they proved too hard for the rover’s drill, according to NASA.
The SLS rocket and Orion have undergone critical tests to ensure they’re ready for flight.
The mission, Artemis 1, is an uncrewed flight test before flying astronauts in future missions.
NASA’s first big moon rocket since the Apollo missions roared past the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, blasting off on its maiden voyage.
The mission, called Artemis I, aims to send an Orion spaceship around the moon and back. It’s the first of three flights meant to culminate in landing humans on the surface of the moon for the first time since 1972. Eventually, NASA plans to use the new rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS), to set up a permanent base on the moon.
“This is now the Artemis generation,” Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, said at a press briefing on August 3. “We were in the Apollo generation, but this is a new generation, this is a new type of astronaut. And to all of us that gaze up at the moon, dreaming of the day humankind returns to the lunar surface, folks, we’re here. We are going back and that journey, our journey, begins with Artemis I.”
NASA’s ambitious 21st century lunar campaign requires powerful and advanced space hardware in the SLS mega-rocket, including its boosters and core stage, and the high-tech crew vehicle called Orion. Here’s how NASA built these powerful pieces of equipment.See More
The agency is teaming up with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to make a rocket that could reach Mars in record time. They aim to test that rocket by 2027.
“With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever – a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday.
Is NASA planning to test a nuclear-powered rocket engine?Unmute
NASA’s recent successful Artemis I mission to the moon was only the first step in its plans to advance human space exploration. The agency aims to put humans on Mars, for the first time, by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
Early missions to the red planet would only last about 30 days, so making sure that travel time is minimized is crucial.
Not only would they be able to carry a heavier workload, but they would also travel quicker than their chemical counterparts, per the press release.
Transit to Mars using a nuclear-powered rocket could take four months, a lot shorter than the usual nine months for older rocket models, Reuters reported.
NASA has also funded an application to develop a concept for a new type of nuclear-thermal propulsion system. If that concept proves to work, it could reduce travel time to Mars to just 45 days, per the concept application.
A new system could create oxygen, nitrogen, and other crucial supplies from Mars’ atmosphere.
An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new way to produce oxygen on Mars — by blasting carbon dioxide molecules apart inside a plasma reactor.
The challenge: Future Mars astronauts will need enough food, water, and breathable air to last the duration of their missions, but the cost of shipping all the needed resources to Mars from Earth would be astronomical (pun intended).
Instead, we need to source as many resources as we can from the Red Planet — and conveniently enough, Mars has plenty of oxygen in its atmosphere. Inconveniently, it’s in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2), so we’ll need to split the compound and extract the oxygen.
“When bullet-like electrons collide with a carbon dioxide molecule, they can directly decompose it.”VASCO GUERRA
NASA has already proven that it’s possible to produce oxygen on Mars with MOXIE (the “Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment”), a gilded instrument on board the Perseverance rover that uses electricity to split CO2 into oxygen and carbon monoxide.
To work, a MOXIE-like machine needs to pressurize and heat the Martian air, though. That adds to its size, and bigger instruments mean higher launch costs and less room for other cargo.
Plasma power: There’s more than one way to split a molecule, though, and a new plasma-based system might lead to the development of a better, more compact life-support system.
Plasma reactors use electric fields to excite molecules in a gas, causing electrons to break free from atoms. For their study, the researchers demonstrated how an accelerated beam of those electrons could be used to split CO2 molecules in a reactor filled with simulated Martian air.
“When bullet-like electrons collide with a carbon dioxide molecule, they can directly decompose it or transfer energy to make it vibrate,” said lead author Vasco Guerra of the University of Lisbon. “This energy can be channeled, to a large extent, into carbon dioxide decomposition.”
“The natural conditions on Mars are nearly ideal to [in-situ resource utilization] by plasmas.”VASCO GUERRA
The benefits: The plasma reactor was able to convert about 30% of the air in it into oxygen, and unlike MOXIE, it didn’t need to adjust temperature or pressure to work, either — that means a Mars-ready version of the tech might be less bulky.
“The natural conditions on Mars are nearly ideal to [in-situ resource utilization] by plasmas,” Guerra told Gizmodo. “In particular, the atmospheric composition, the ambient pressure, and temperature all play in favor of a plasma process.”
The plasma-based system could also be tweaked to extract other elements from Mars’ atmosphere, giving astronauts a source of nitrogen for fertilizer, for example.
“This versatile system may one day play a critical role in the development of not only life-support systems on Mars but also feedstock and base chemicals for processing fuels, building materials, and fertilizers,” said Guerra.
Looking ahead: The researchers estimate that a 13-pound plasma reactor running for one hour on Mars could generate enough oxygen for 28 minutes of breathing for one astronaut. For comparison, the 37-pound MOXIE is designed to produce 20 minutes’ worth of oxygen per hour.
However, the team has only demonstrated that its plasma reactor can separate oxygen from simulated Martian air — it hasn’t developed a fully functional instrument that could actually be sent to Mars for testing.
The suits, supplied by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace, will be used in NASA’s upcoming Artemis lunar missions and will protect space travellers from micrometeoroids, moon dust and even vomit
An artist’s illustration of two suited crew members working on the lunar surface. The one in the foreground lifts a rock to examine it while the other photographs the collection site in the background. Credit: NASA
Sooner or later, humans will set foot on the moon again—perhaps by the middle of this decade if NASA’s Artemis program proceeds as planned. And beyond that, public or private crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s or 2040s no longer seem solely confined to science fiction. But what will astronauts be wearing when they take those steps on other worlds? Procuring giant rockets and futuristic spacecraft for Artemis has been the most well-publicized hurdle for NASA to overcome, but its efforts to design new spacesuits for the moon have proved equally challenging. Since 2007 the space agency has spent an estimated $420 million on new suit designs without actually fielding any. Finally, after all those unsuccessful attempts, last month NASA announced it has opted to outsource the work and has selected two companies to craft the next generation of haute couture for the high frontier.
Those companies—Axiom Space in Texas and Collins Aerospace in North Carolina—will each independently develop new spacesuits as part of NASA’s Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) contract. NASA has budgeted a total of $3.5 billion through 2034 for that combined work and plans to purchase its suits from the two companies as a service, which will free both to make and market additional suits for non-NASA commercial missions as well. Following demonstrations of the suits in Earth orbit, they will be used for the first Artemis landing, which is currently scheduled for 2025. That mission, dubbed Artemis III, will feature two astronauts, one man and one woman, who will don suits from one of the two companies to venture out onto the lunar surface. Whichever company isn’t chosen for that first landing will instead supply suits for later Artemis missions.
“This is a historic day for us,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in a press conference announcing the award on June 1. “History will be made with these suits when we get to the moon.”
Troubled Development
The selection of these two companies followed a 2021 call put out by NASA for new spacesuit proposals because the existing Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) suit used on the International Space Station (ISS) is too bulky and rigid for lunar-surface forays. More than 40 companies registered their interest, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, but only Axiom and Collins submitted finished proposals by the December 2021 deadline. In a source selection statement released later in June, NASA gave high ratings to both Axiom’s proposed suit, called the AxEMU, and the currently unnamed suit proposed by Collins.
By design, this public-private partnership will allow both suit manufacturers to also offer their services outside the space agency, potentially to visitors to private space stations such as one Axiom is currently developing. “Axiom will use the AxEMU to support all of our customers,” says Mark Greeley, Axiom’s xEVAS Program Manager. “The AxEMU is capable of supporting [spacewalks] in any environment our customers desire,” he says. Collins is planning for the same. “We don’t want this just to be a bespoke design for NASA,” says Dan Burbank, senior tech fellow at Collins and a former astronaut. “This should be a commercially appropriate suit that will meet the needs of private astronauts as well.”
Personnel perform mobility tests for a prototype of the Collins Aerospace spacesuit in a company facility. Credit: Collins Aerospace
Getting to this stage has been an arduous process. In 2012 NASA unveiled its Z-1 prototype spacesuit, which bore a green-and-white design that could have made future moonwalkers resemble Buzz Lightyear. It was later redesigned as the Z-2, but development stalled. In 2019 NASA presented its attempt intended for the Artemis missions, dubbed the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU), but an audit by the agency’s Office of Inspector General found the suits would not be ready for the Artemis landings; it cited lingering issues with costs and technical problems. “There was concern that this was a never-ending and unsustainable process,” says Cathleen Lewis, a space historian at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. That doesn’t mean NASA’s in-house spacesuit pursuits will go to waste—both Axiom and Collins will have access to all of that previous work. “They could decide how much of NASA’s designs they wanted to use,” says Lara Kearney, manager of the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.
The exact designs of the two companies’ spacesuits are still under wraps. The selection process dictated that both of them had to show their suits could meet about 80 requirements set by NASA, however. “We then left it open to them to decide what their design looked like,” Kearney says. These requirements relate to the unique objectives of the Artemis missions and their intended difference from the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s. Artemis astronauts will spend more time than their predecessors on the lunar surface and will explore more diverse locations, including the dark depths of craters that could contain water ice. Those aspirations demand more mobility than the awkward waddling and clambering provided by the Apollo program’s suits and more adaptability, too: instead of serving an all-male (and all-white) cadre of moonwalkers, the new suits must meet the needs of NASA’s far more diverse modern astronaut corps. “We have to think about diversity,” says Amy Foster, a space historian at the University of Central Florida. “I don’t want anybody being cut out of the opportunity to fly on Artemis because their body type doesn’t fit a suit.”
Versatile and Built to Last
Among the requirements, the suits need to allow at least six lunar-surface excursions to be conducted per mission. At least one will occur per day, and each will last more than eight hours. Astronauts must be able to enter and exit the suits without assistance, and the total prep time for venturing outside a lander or habitat must be no more than 90 minutes.
Both Axiom and Collins are designing their suits to be rear-entry. This means that rather than putting a suit on within an airlock and then exiting a spacecraft, as is done with spacesuits currently on the ISS, these new designs could be attached externally to a special NASA-prototyped airlock called a suit port. “You could literally back into a hatch, bond the outer portion of your [suit] to this structure and then open the hatch,” Burbank says. This helps reduce the amount of potentially harmful lunar regolith, or moon dust, that is tracked back inside. Using a suit port “eliminates the regolith hazard,” Burbank says. “None of the exterior of the suit sees the interior of the spacecraft.”
Illustration of Axiom Space’s Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit, which the company is currently developing in Houston, Texas. Credit: Axiom Space
Reflecting in part NASA’s objective for Artemis to send the first people of color and the first women to the moon, the new suits must, in a sense, also be “one-size-fits-all”—capable of interchangeable use across multiple missions by a diverse group of astronauts with a wide range of physiques. Each suit must allow for 90 percent of the male and female population to wear it, which includes anyone as short as four feet, 10 inches (1.5 meters) or as tall as 6 feet, four inches (1.9 meters) with a weight of 94 to 243 pounds (42 to 110 kilograms). “NASA tried to do an all-women spacewalk [in 2019] and they had to keep postponing it because they didn’t have the right-sized suits,” says Michael Lye, a spacesuit designer at the Rhode Island School of Design. “The new suits by Axiom and Collins will fit a much wider variety.” How both companies plan to meet this requirement is currently undisclosed.
Another key objective of the Artemis missions is to collect plenty of samples for subsequent study. The suits must have accessories to achieve this goal, including hammers, rakes, chisels and handheld flashlights. They are also intended to be extremely maneuverable and incorporate a movable torso and joints that will allow astronauts to move more naturally across the low-gravity, rugged lunar landscape. “During the Apollo days, there was no ability to allow your hips to move counter to your shoulders,” Burbank says. “You literally could not take your hips out of alignment with your shoulders. You can do that with this spacesuit.” The suits will also have a lower mass than Apollo-era designs, making them easier to use for extended periods. “I’ve done push-ups in the new suit,” Burbank says. “That would be unimaginable in the existing suits we have right now.”
Uncharted Waters
NASA has plenty of other high bars for the suits to hit, some of them unprecedented. They must not subject the astronauts to any sounds above 115 decibels, comparable to the noise made by a leaf blower. They must be sturdy enough to bring the chance of micrometeoroids piercing the exteriors down to just one in 2,500. Inspired by the ceremonial unfurling of American Stars and Stripes by each set of Apollo moonwalkers (and the difficulty of hammering poles into the surprisingly tough lunar terrain), the suits must include tools to help Artemis crew members carry and plant a flag. And stomach-churningly, the suits must be able to somehow clear up to half a liter of vomit from a moonwalker’s eyes, nose and mouth in the event that they regurgitate inside their helmet.
Illustration of an astronaut clad in a Collins Aerospace spacesuit on the lunar surface. Credit: Collins Aerospace
The suits must also remain functional after being left on the lunar surface—initially for 210 days as per NASA’s requirements but eventually for as long as three years. This could allow astronauts on future missions to revisit previous landing sites and reuse the suits left behind rather than having to bring their own. “Depending on the landing sites, we could be able to go and collect and reuse them,” Kearney says. Both Axiom and Collins are also looking at additional technologies to include inside the suits, such as digital heads-up displays inside the helmet. “The vision we have is to display information to the crewmember about the health of the suit, health of themselves and [crewmates], path to their rover, all those kinds of things,” Burbank says. “You could have the ability to interweave infrared imagery as well.”
Perhaps most importantly, the suits must be designed for a bold new era of lunar exploration. The Apollo missions conservatively focused on the sunlight-bathed equatorial regions of the near side of the moon, but Artemis missions will venture into more daunting locales at the moon’s south pole. Here astronauts may explore some of the moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs)—craters angled in such a way that the sun never reaches their depths. Inside, temperatures can plunge to –400 degrees Fahrenheit (–240 degrees Celsius), twice as cold as the lowest surface temperatures found elsewhere on the moon during its two-week-long lunar night. Observations from lunar orbit have shown that PSRs are probably rich in water ice, either frozen on the surface or mixed into the lunar soil, which could be accessed and used as drinking water or rocket fuel. NASA has required that the new suits could operate in these frigid locations for at least two hours, which will give astronauts a chance to prospect there.
“There’s hundreds of millions of tons of water ice buried in relatively shallow depths at the south pole,” Burbank says. “Water for human presence on the moon is essential. So you’re going to need spacesuits to actually do the resource extraction.”
It is not just the moon where astronauts may don these garments. Per NASA’s instructions, both are being designed with future modifications for eventual missions to Mars in mind. “The AxEMU is heavily architected to support Martian [extravehicular activities],” Greeley says, noting that while “some development remains,” the company is investigating how to cope with that planet’s tenuous atmosphere and its more substantial gravitational field. First up, though, will be the frenzied-but-methodical sprint to prepare the suits’ lunar variants for that first, long-awaited Artemis moon landing. Development delays with the requisite rockets may make that notional 2025 deadline slip, of course—which could be for the best because readying such ambitious suits in such a short time frame seems challenging, to say the least. “There’s a lot of work to be done,” Lewis says. But whenever humans do set foot on the moon again, that work should ensure they have shiny new garments to do it in, vomit removal system and all.
The radiant energy budget is a fundamental metric for planets. Based on the observations from multiple missions, we provide a global picture of Mars’ emitted power. Furthermore, we estimate the radiant energy budget of Mars, which suggests that there are energy imbalances at the time scale of Mars’ seasons. Such energy imbalances provide a new perspective to understanding the generating mechanism of dust storms. Mars’ radiant energy budget is assumed to be balanced at all time scales in current models and theories, but our analyses show that the energy budget is not balanced, at least at the time scale of Mars’ seasons. Therefore, current theories and models should be revisited with the newly revealed energy characteristics.
Abstract
The radiant energy budget of a planet is essential to understanding its surface and atmospheric processes. Here, we report systematic measurements of Mars’ emitted power, which are used to estimate the radiant energy budget of the red planet. Based on the observations from Mars Global Surveyor, Curiosity, and InSight, our measurements suggest that Mars’ global-average emitted power is 111.7 ± 2.4 Wm−2. More importantly, our measurements reveal strong seasonal and diurnal variations of Mars’ emitted power. The strong seasonal variations further suggest an energy imbalance at the time scale of Mars’ seasons (e.g., ∼15.3% of the emitted power in the Northern autumn for the Southern Hemisphere), which could play an important role in generating dust storms on Mars. We also find the 2001 global dust storm decreased the global-average emitted power by ∼22% during daytime but increased the global-average emitted power by ∼29% at nighttime. This suggests that global dust storms play a significant role in Mars’ radiant energy budget.
NASA’s Mars Ascent Vehicle will attempt a wildly unconventional liftoff to bring Red Planet samples back to Earth
Illustration of the key robotic components of the Mars Sample Return mission, including NASA’s Perseverance (left), the European Space Agency’s Sample Fetch Rover (center) and the Sample Retrieval Lander (right). The latter will carry NASA’s Mars Ascent Vehicle.
Within a decade, a small rover on Mars will pick up samples of rock left by a previous mission. It will then load them into a rocket secured within a small platform on a flat patch of the planet’s surface. Once the rocket’s hatch has closed, the platform will toss it upward on its side, a bit like a thrown American football. The rocket’s engines will ignite, propelling it into Martian orbit—where a waiting spacecraft will grab its invaluable samples for ferrying back to Earth and into the hands of researchers eager to study them for signs of past life on the Red Planet. One might call this wild interplanetary shuffle the most epic game of catch ever conceived, but scientists simply refer to it as Mars Sample Return.
“It’s never been done before,” says Chris Chatellier of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), lead engineer of part of the launch system that will bring the samples back home. But it has been dreamed of—and planned—for decades.
The first step occurred with the landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater on Mars one year ago to explore the site’s eons-old river delta, targeted as one of the most likely locales to harbor any remnants of life from when the planet was a warmer, wetter world. Using an extendable arm and drill inside the crater, Perseverance has started collecting samples that likely date back billions of years. “We believe the samples will tell us whether there used to be life at the surface of Mars,” says NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen, who oversees the space agency’s science missions. Ultimately Perseverance will place dozens of samples in small cigarlike tubes, caching them on the surface to await future collection.
The general outline for how this collection will take place is already clear, but key details remain undetermined. For example, where—and in how many locations—will the samples be cached?What will the “fetch rover” that will collect them—to be built by the European Space Agency (ESA)—look like? And perhaps most crucially, how will the samples successfully rocket off the surface of Mars and back to Earth? “This launch off another planet will be history-making,” Zurbuchen says. “With it comes answers to our neighboring planet that cannot otherwise be addressed.”
The details on that crucial last question have now moved a significant step forward. Last month NASA selected the U.S. aerospace firm Lockheed Martin for a potentially $194-million contract to build the three-meter-long Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), a relatively small rocket meant to propel Perseverance’s samples into orbit. Already, engineers are hard at work designing the MAV’s components, which must overcome multiple challenges unique to this first-of-its-kind mission. The Red Planet’s gravity, while only a third of Earth’s, must be overcome. Mars’s thin atmosphere, 100 times as tenuous as Earth’s, will make the launch unlike any on our planet—or from the airless moon or asteroids, where previous successful sample-returns have taken place. And the MAV’s all-or-nothing launch, millions of kilometers from Earth, must be both autonomous and flawless.
Video featuring prototype testing of NASA’s Mars Ascent Vehicle launch system and several other key components for returning samples from the Martian surface.
NASA says the MAV will launch to Mars in 2026 or later, and some have forecasted that the likely date will be 2028. It will be stored inside a landing platform not unlike those of predecessors such as NASA’s InSight lander. InSight touched down on Mars in 2018, performing a propulsive landing rather than relying on the more complex Sky Crane system required for the heavier Perseverance rover and its kin, Curiosity. The journey to Mars will be slow, 28 months in all, to ensure that the MAV touches down during local summer in or near Jezero. “The spacecraft needs to arrive at the proper season at Mars so that it doesn’t encounter dust storms,” says Dave Murrow, Lockheed Martin’s business development lead for deep space exploration.
After safely passing through the atmosphere, the lander will aim to land within a region of the crater that is as benign as possible in order to facilitate an easier subsequent liftoff. “We’ll be looking for a nice, flat landing site without many rocks,” Murrow says. The actual site will be selected in the coming years. The lander, devoid of scientific instrumentation, will be designed to protect the MAV on the surface, deploy ESA’s fetch rover and finally launch the sample-filled MAV back to orbit.
One major challenge will be ensuring that the aluminum-based fuel used by the MAV’s propulsion systems, provided by the U.S. aerospace company Northrop Grumman, does not freeze. Temperatures on the Martian surface average about –60 degrees Celsius, so the lander will need to warm the MAV, likely by using solar-powered electric heaters inside an insulated canister aptly called an “igloo.” This approach, engineers believe, should allow the MAV to linger on the surface for up to one Earth year, hopefully offering sufficient time for the fetch rover to retrieve Perseverance’s samples from one or more surface caches.
Then the real fun begins. Over the past few years, Chatellier and his team at JPL have been grappling with the surprisingly hard problem of how, exactly, to launch a small rocket from Mars. “We started with the basic idea of pointing [the MAV] on a rail and launching it off a platform,” Chatellier says. But the rail would need to be heavy and almost as long as the lander itself. “The concern was there’s not a lot holding the lander down,” says Angela Jackman, project manager of the MAV program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Without the counterweight of a heavy rail, the exhaust plume from the launching MAV could kick the entire platform up into the air to strike the rocket. Earthbound testing of such a system in simulated Mars-like gravity and atmospheric conditions would also be very challenging.
So the team instead settled on another idea: What if the rocket could be tossed several meters above the surface, allowing more clearance for blastoff? “Although it might seem counterintuitive to throw up an unlit rocket, it actually does simplify the design and test process quite a bit,” Chatellier says. Such a “cold launch” system is not unprecedented: the U.S. Air Force’s Peacekeeper missiles, in service from 1987 to 2005, were lofted out of silos using steam pressure before their engines were ignited. The approach for MAV is also similar to a standard missile launch from a fighter jet, except “we’re just throwing it up off the ground,” Chatellier says.
The result is a launch system called VECTOR, or Vertically Ejected Controlled Tip-Off Release. For the past two years the JPL team has been testing a mock-up of the MAV with VECTOR, completing 23 “throws” in total so far, with cables catching the rocket in midair. (The system in its entirety, including the ignition of the rocket, will only be fully used for the first time on Mars.) VECTOR is designed to hurl the MAV skyward from Mars at about five meters per second using a force comparable to a strong human punch. As the MAV ignites its engine, one second post-toss, VECTOR will also help aim the craft, causing a rotation that tilts it up by 45 degrees from a horizontal orientation midair to allow the MAV’s two-stage rocket to propel the basketball-sized sample capsule to a 400-kilometer-high orbit above the planet. With any luck, Perseverance will still be operational and watching from a safe distance away, offering everyone back on Earth a virtual front-row seat for this first-ever Martian launch.ADVERTISEMENT
If all goes well, shortly thereafter a European-built spacecraft will swoop in to scoop up the sample capsule in Martian orbit, stowing it for the journey home. After departing from Mars,the capsule will purposefully crash land in the Utah desert in the early 2030s with its durable samples intact.
Audacious as it may be, VECTOR appears to be the best way to get the half-kilogram’s worth of samples Perseverance will collect back to Earth. “Everyone thought Sky Crane was crazy,” Chatellier says. “VECTOR has drawn similarities to that.” In the coming years he and his team hope to have completed about 50 tests of system so that it will be ready for launch to Mars in 2028. There are still other details to be worked out, including the finer mechanics of how the rocket will be hurled aloft, but the goal is to have a system that can cope with whatever conditions Mars throws at it. There will be no second chances. “We want to make sure we have a robust design so that, even on the worst possible day on Mars, we know the system is still going to work,” Chatellier says.
The dream of Mars Sample Return is now on the cusp of becoming reality, perhaps scarcely a decade away, aided by a deceptively simple idea: land a small rocket on Mars, toss it into the thin, cold air and launch it back to space. Even if the materials it ultimately helps return show no signs of life, the result will be no less historic. “We nerd out all the time on this,” Jackman says. “What we’re going to do is just amazing.”
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