Question

You have been hired to plan a mission to Mars. Your employer knows very little about space travel; they simply want to be the first individual to send a mission to Mars. They have vast but not unlimited resources. Your first step is to educate them about the realities of space flight and the pros and cons of various options.

A. Give at least one advantage for each option. For example, answer both “What is an advantage of one-way over round trip travel?” and “What is an advantage of round trip over one way?” Try to be as specific as you can.

(a) One way vs. round trip

(b) Crewed vs. Uncrewed

(c) Hohmann vs. fast transfer

(c) Landing vs. orbiting

B. Your employer says “If you were to send a mission to Mars, what kind would it be? Describe it for me.”

C. After listening to your presentation, your employer says “What I really want to do is to land a spacecraft on Mars and dig down into the surface to find water. Can you tell me how to do this with minimal cost? Also, once I have the water, how might I use that to benefit future Mars missions?”   What is your response?

Answer 1

A. (a) One way vs. round trip: The main advantage of round trip mission over one way is that we can get our people back to earth and they can bring some samples of soil, rocks etc. with them which can be tested in our laboratories on the earth. But a round way mission is too much expensive and subject to a number of complications. The reason is that a round trip needs more fuels to bring the spacecraft back.

On the other hand, one way trip will be less expensive and we can send people to Mars who are willing to build their colony there. In fact this can be effective in reduction of the population of the earth and saving our environmental system.

(b) Crewed vs. uncrewed: Uncrewed or unmanned space missions are less expensive and subject to no risk of human life. Acording to some experts, we can learn almost everything about the solar system or outer space by using uncrewed or mechanized space probes or robots.

However, according to some scientists, there can be no alternative of human intelligence. The humans in a crewed or manned space mission can handle many unexpected challenges which a robots can not.

(c) Hohmann vs. fast transfer: These are two different methods of transferring a satellite or a space craft from a circular orbit to a different circular orbit. In the case of Mars mission, we need either of them to transfer the spacecraft from a circular orbit around the earth to a circular orbit around the Mars.

Hohmann transfer is a slow process but fuel-efficient and less expensive. On the other hand fast transfer transfers the spacecraft much faster but it is quite expensive.

(d) Landing vs. orbiting: After placing the spacecraft in an orbit around the Mars, it can send us photographs of different regions and surfaces of the planet, which can be quite useful for our research.

However, landing on the Mars is much more desirable than just orbiting as it will give us a much more closer view and options to collect various samples from the planet. But it is subject to a high risk. If the landing is not smooth (a soft landing), the spacecraft can be damaged.

B. The type of a possible space mission: The type of the space mission mostly depends on the available budget. At a moderate budget (not so big and not so low), I would like to send an unmanned (so that there is no risk to human life) spacecraft which will be transferred to an orbit around Mars by using Hohmann transfer (cost effective) and it will land on the planet (so that a robot can dig down the surface to find out water) . Also, I will prefer a round trip mission so that we can reuse the spacecraft for future missions.

C. Finding the water at minimal cost: The most cost effective way to find water will be to use a kitchen microwave to heat some regolith (loose soil covering rocks) collected from the surface of the Mars. The heat will eventually vaporize the ice and then be condensed and collected on a chilled plate.

Once sufficeint amount of water is collected, it can be used as fuels to bring the spacecraft back or for future space missions.