Candidate Architectures for a European Mission to Mars

Abstract

During the last decade, several initiatives have been taken to define scenarios to prepare for and support the human exploration of Mars. Such exploration can only be via a stepped approach, with technological innovations, and only within the framework of global international cooperation. European participation could be effective in many ways, one of which would be to provide a self-contained and cooperative mission in scientific, technological or logistic domains. This is the approach which the European Space Agency has selected for a study, with the aim of identifying these missions and analysing them up to the definition of the elements constituting the mission.

Out of a total of 24 different missions, the industrial team has selected five concepts that have been studied in depth: the automatic exploration and analysis of Mars with both robotic outpost and Mars surface operations phases, a Mobile Pressurized Laboratory to support the human exploration of Mars, the in situ production of resources, a Utility Truck for the assembly of infrastructure, and a biology greenhouse. This paper focuses on two of these concepts, and presents the corresponding mission architecture along with an identification of the challenging technologies and potential research innovations.