Mars Ascent Vehicle Design for Human Exploration

Polsgrove, Tara; Thomas, Dan; Sutherlin, Steven; Stephens, Walter E.; Rucker, Michelle A.

doi:10.2514/6.2015-4416

Cited by 28 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…). From the perspective of saving mass on the outbound journey, the single most significant need is for propellant for a Mars Ascent Vehicle (Polsgrove ; see Fig. 7.1).…”

Section: Objective 7: Evaluate the Type And Distribution Of In Situ Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Results from an ISRU baseline study (Kleinhenz and Paz ) conducted for the Evolvable Mars Campaign showing the benefits of ISRU propellant production. Case 0: the propellant mass needed for a Mars ascent vehicle (Polsgrove ). Case 1: oxygen is produced from the Mars atmosphere and methane is transported from Earth.…”

Section: Objective 7: Evaluate the Type And Distribution Of In Situ Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The potential science and engineering value of samples delivered to Earth by Mars sample return

Beaty¹,

Grady²,

McSween³

et al. 2019

Meteorit & Planetary Scien

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Executive Summary Return of samples from the surface of Mars has been a goal of the international Mars science community for many years. Affirmation by NASA and ESA of the importance of Mars exploration led the agencies to establish the international MSR Objectives and Samples Team (iMOST). The purpose of the team is to re‐evaluate and update the sample‐related science and engineering objectives of a Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign. The iMOST team has also undertaken to define the measurements and the types of samples that can best address the objectives. Seven objectives have been defined for MSR, traceable through two decades of previously published international priorities. The first two objectives are further divided into sub‐objectives. Within the main part of the report, the importance to science and/or engineering of each objective is described, critical measurements that would address the objectives are specified, and the kinds of samples that would be most likely to carry key information are identified. These seven objectives provide a framework for demonstrating how the first set of returned Martian samples would impact future Martian science and exploration. They also have implications for how analogous investigations might be conducted for samples returned by future missions from other solar system bodies, especially those that may harbor biologically relevant or sensitive material, such as Ocean Worlds (Europa, Enceladus, Titan) and others. Summary of Objectives and Sub‐Objectives for MSR Identified by iMOST This objective is divided into five sub‐objectives that would apply at different landing sites. 1.1 Characterize the essential stratigraphic, sedimentologic, and facies variations of a sequence of Martian sedimentary rocks. 1.2 Understand an ancient Martian hydrothermal system through study of its mineralization products and morphological expression. 1.3 Understand the rocks and minerals representative of a deep subsurface groundwater environment. 1.4 Understand water/rock/atmosphere interactions at the Martian surface and how they have changed with time. 1.5 Determine the petrogenesis of Martian igneous rocks in time and space. This objective has three sub‐objectives: 2.1 Assess and characterize carbon, including possible organic and pre‐biotic chemistry. 2.2 Assay for the presence of biosignatures of past life at sites that hosted habitable environments and could have preserved any biosignatures. 2.3 Assess the possibility that any life forms detected are alive, or were recently alive. Summary of iMOST Findings Several specific findings were identified during the iMOST study. While they are not explicit recommendations, we suggest that they should serve as guidelines for future decision making regarding planning of potential future MSR missions. The samples to be collected by the Mars 2020 (M‐2020) rover will be of sufficient size and quality to address and solve a wide variety of scientific questions. Samples, by definition, are a statistical representation of a larger entity...

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“…). From the perspective of saving mass on the outbound journey, the single most significant need is for propellant for a Mars Ascent Vehicle (Polsgrove ; see Fig. 7.1).…”

Section: Objective 7: Evaluate the Type And Distribution Of In Situ Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Objective 7: Evaluate the Type And Distribution Of In Situ Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

The potential science and engineering value of samples delivered to Earth by Mars sample return

Beaty¹,

Grady²,

McSween³

et al. 2019

Meteorit & Planetary Scien

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Based on the most recent system analysis done for the current Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), the MAV will arrive on the surface of Mars years in advance to liquefy enough liquid oxygen to allow for a return: (23,000 kg) 12 . In order to produce enough liquid oxygen, a liquefaction rate of 2.2 kg/hr is required assuming a duration of 15 months.…”

Section: Liquefaction System Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To maintain zero-boil-off within the tanks, insulation mass and performance can be traded for refrigeration system mass and performance. The trades used the thermal models developed for the Mars Ascent Vehicle studies 12,17 using the same ground rules and assumptions for redundancy. No power impacts and availability implications were included in this study, this is a conservative assumption because for all cases the cryocooler power would be reduced.…”

Section: Thermal Insulation Tradesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Liquefaction and Storage of In-Situ O₂on the surface of Mars

Hauser

Johnson²,

Sutherlin

2016

8th Symposium on Space Resource Utilization

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The In-Situ production of propellants for Martian and Lunar missions has been heavily discussed since the mid 1990's. One portion of the production of the propellants is the liquefaction, storage, and delivery of the propellants to the stage tanks. Two key technology development efforts are required: large refrigeration systems (cryocoolers) to perform the liquefaction and high performance insulation within a soft vacuum environment. Several different concepts of operation may be employed to liquefy the propellants based on how and where these two technologies are implemented. The concepts that were investigated include: using an accumulator tank to store the propellant until it is needed, liquefying in the flow stream going into the tank, and liquefying in the flight propellant tank itself. The different concept of operations were studied to assess the mass and power impacts of each concept. Additionally, the trade between insulation performance and cryocooler mass was performed to give performance targets for soft vacuum insulation development. It was found that liquefying within the flight propellant tank itself adds the least mass and power requirements to the mission.

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“…15 The reference area for MAV aerodynamics and the speed of sound input were taken from reference [12].…”

Section: Iva Design Of Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improvement of Automated POST Case Success Rate using Support Vector Machines

Zwack

Dees

2017

AIAA SPACE and Astronautics Forum and Exposition

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During early conceptual design of complex systems, concept down selection can have a large impact upon program life-cycle cost. Therefore, any concepts selected during early design will inherently commit program costs and affect the overall probability of program success. For this reason it is important to consider as large a design space as possible in order to better inform the down selection process.For conceptual design of launch vehicles, trajectory analysis and optimization often presents the largest obstacle to evaluating large trade spaces. This is due to the sensitivity of the trajectory discipline to changes in all other aspects of the vehicle design. Small deltas in the performance of other subsystems can result in relatively large fluctuations in the ascent trajectory because the solution space is non-linear and multi-modal. 1, 2In order to help capture large design spaces for new launch vehicles, the authors have performed previous work seeking to automate the execution of the industry standard tool, Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories (POST). This work initially focused on implementation of analyst heuristics to enable closure of cases in an automated fashion, with the goal of applying the concepts of design of experiments (DOE) and surrogate modeling to enable near instantaneous throughput of vehicle cases.3 As noted in [4] work was then completed to improve the DOE process by utilizing a graph theory based approach to connect similar design points.The conclusion of the previous work illustrated the utility of the graph theory approach for completing a DOE through POST. However, this approach was still dependent upon the use of random repetitions to generate seed points for the graph. As noted in, 4 only 8% of these random repetitions resulted in converged trajectories. This ultimately affects the ability of the random reps method to confidently approach the global optima for a given vehicle case in a reasonable amount of time. With only an 8% pass rate, tens or hundreds of thousands of reps may be needed to be confident that the best repetition is at least close to the global optima. However, typical design study time constraints require that fewer repetitions be attempted, sometimes resulting in seed points that have only a handful of successful completions. If a small number of successful repetitions are used to generate a seed point, the graph method may inherit some inaccuracies as it chains DOE cases from the non-global-optimal seed points. This creates inherent noise in the graph data, which can limit the accuracy of the resulting surrogate models.For this reason, the goal of this work is to improve the seed point generation method and ultimately the accuracy of the resulting POST surrogate model. The work focuses on increasing the case pass rate for seed point generation. It is expected that by vastly improving the pass rate, more successful repetitions will be completed in the same time frame, resulting in a higher probability that the global optima is found. This ultimately transl...

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Mars Ascent Vehicle Design for Human Exploration

Cited by 28 publications

References 10 publications

The potential science and engineering value of samples delivered to Earth by Mars sample return

The potential science and engineering value of samples delivered to Earth by Mars sample return

Liquefaction and Storage of In-Situ O₂on the surface of Mars

Improvement of Automated POST Case Success Rate using Support Vector Machines

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Mars Ascent Vehicle Design for Human Exploration

Cited by 28 publications

References 10 publications

The potential science and engineering value of samples delivered to Earth by Mars sample return

The potential science and engineering value of samples delivered to Earth by Mars sample return

Liquefaction and Storage of In-Situ O2on the surface of Mars

Improvement of Automated POST Case Success Rate using Support Vector Machines

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Product

Resources

About

Liquefaction and Storage of In-Situ O₂on the surface of Mars