Over the past several years, a number of candidate scenarios for the human exploration of Mars have been advanced. These have had a range of mission objectives, scope, scale, complexity and probable cost. The Exploration Programs Office (ExPO) has developed a reference Mars exploration program and a means of comparing it to other proposed Mars programs. The reference program was initiated in a workshop of Mars exploration advocates which defined two objectives of equal importance for early Mars exploration - understanding Mars and understanding the potential of Mars to support humans. These goals were used to define a set of transportation and surface elements that could carry out a robust exploration program. The approach to comparing alternate architectures has three principal parts: (1) Bringing the architectures into rough commonality in terms of surface mission objectives and hardware capabilities; (2) Providing a common level of human support for flights to and from Mars; and (3) Comparing the complexity of the elements needed to carry out the program and using partial redundancy to approximate the same statistical probability of mission success. This top-level approach has been applied to the ExPO reference program, the 'Mars Directs strategy (Zubrin, 1991) and the Stanford International Mars Mission (Lusignan, 1992).


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Mission objectives and comparison of strategies for Mars exploration


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    AIAA, AHS, and ASEE, Aerospace Design Conference ; 1993 ; Irvine, CA, United States


    Publication date :

    1993-02-01


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




    Mission objectives and comparison of strategies for Mars exploration

    DUKE, MICHAEL / KEATON, PAUL / WEAVER, DAVID et al. | AIAA | 1993


    Mars Human Exploration Objectives

    Briggs, Geoff | NTRS | 1998


    Scientific objectives and payloads of Tianwen-1, China’s first Mars exploration mission

    Zou, Yongliao / Zhu, Yan / Bai, Yunfei et al. | Elsevier | 2020


    Ice Dragon: A Mission to Address Science and Human Exploration Objectives on Mars

    C. R. Stoker / A. Davila / G. Sanders et al. | NTIS | 2012


    Mars 2020: Mission, Science Objectives and Build

    Soares, Carlos E. / Boeder, Paul A. | NTRS | 2020