In-space transportation for NASA’s Evolvable Mars Campaign

Percy, Thomas K.; McGuire, Melissa L.; Polsgrove, Tara

doi:10.2514/6.2015-4519

Cited by 24 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…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

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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.

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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

“…These guidelines and assumptions, as well as the transit habitat concept presented in this paper, are specific to an EMC mission architecture featuring a Hybrid Propulsion Stage which combines storable propulsion with a high power Solar Electric Propulsion system to perform interplanetary trajectory departure and insertion burns [4]. Other architectures leveraging other transportation stages mentioned in [3] are available, but are not reported in this paper due to their lack of extensive vetting.…”

Section: Guidelines and Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

NASA's advanced exploration systems Mars transit habitat refinement point of departure design

Simon

Latorella

Martín

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE Aerospace Conference

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This paper describes the recently developed point of departure design for a long duration, reusable Mars Transit Habitat, which was established during a 2016 NASA habitat design refinement activity supporting the definition of NASA's Evolvable Mars Campaign. As part of its development of sustainable human Mars mission concepts achievable in the 2030s, the Evolvable Mars Campaign has identified desired durations and mass/dimensional limits for long duration Mars habitat designs to enable the currently assumed solar electric and chemical transportation architectures. The Advanced Exploration Systems Mars Transit Habitat Refinement Activity brought together habitat subsystem design expertise from across NASA to develop an increased fidelity, consensus design for a transit habitat within these constraints. The resulting design and data (including a mass equipment list) contained in this paper are intended to help teams across the agency and potential commercial, academic, or international partners understand: 1) the current architecture/habitat guidelines and assumptions, 2) performance targets of such a habitat (particularly in mass, volume, and power), 3) the driving technology/capability developments and architectural solutions which are necessary for achieving these targets, and 4) mass reduction opportunities and research/design needs to inform the development of future research and proposals. Data presented includes: an overview of the habitat refinement activity including motivation and process when informative; full documentation of the baseline design guidelines and assumptions; detailed mass and volume breakdowns; a moderately detailed concept of operations; a preliminary interior layout design with rationale; a list of the required capabilities necessary to enable the desired mass; and identification of any worthwhile trades/analyses which could inform future habitat design efforts. As a whole, the data in the paper show that a transit habitat meeting the 43 metric tons launch mass/trans-Mars injection burn limits specified by the Evolvable Mars Campaign is achievable near the desired timeframe with moderate strategic investments including maintainable life support systems, repurposable structures and packaging, and lightweight exercise modalities. It also identifies operational and technological options to reduce this mass to less than 41 metric tons including staging of launch structure/packaging and alternate structural materials.

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“…One of these concepts is based upon the use of solar electric propulsion (SEP) to deliver cargo to the Mars system and chemical propulsion to deliver the crew. This concept is referred to as the 'Split' option [12], since crew and cargo each utilize different propulsion systems.…”

Section: Evolvable Mars Campaign Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The exploration of Mars launch & assembly simulation

Cates

Stromgren²,

Mattfeld³

et al. 2016

2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference

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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.

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In-space transportation for NASA’s Evolvable Mars Campaign

Cited by 24 publications

References 6 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

NASA's advanced exploration systems Mars transit habitat refinement point of departure design

The exploration of Mars launch & assembly simulation

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