ISS Team Plans around Human Factors in Mars Mission Competition

The human factor poses the greatest challenge to a manned mission to Mars, an Illinois Space Society (ISS) group of undergraduates learned as they competed and grabbed third place in a national space exploration competition.

Mars habitat

"Once you factor humans into the picture, everything becomes more complicated and more expensive," said team leader Braven Leung. "Keeping a crew alive in space requires so much more effort than just sending out probes. That's why we've done rovers and satellites in the past. To do humans, we'd have to take technology and mission planning to a whole new level, which is really exciting, but kind of slow at the same time. The margin for failure here is very small; that's why there's a lot of deliberate procedures and protocol that really drag out the timeline. It's a trade-off between safety/reliability vs. time/cost."

The group of nine students, mostly from Aerospace Engineering at Illinois, sought to answer the challenge with designs for better space suits, radiation shielding, and a biomass chamber.

"For a while, our catchphrase used to be 'Iron Man is going to Mars!'" Leung said, as the team members referenced the innovative exosuit they proposed to enhance and preserve the physical performance of a crew during their time in space. "You can be surprised at how fast muscle and bone mass deteriorates in zero G. You'd need to combat that especially since a trip to Mars and back would exceed at least 18 months. Again, the human focus was big and we wanted to make sure that the people we sent would be safe."

The ISS project dubbed NERIO-I (Nuclear Explorations for Realizing Interplanetary Objectives-I) was one of nine chosen to compete in the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) program. This was the first time an Illinois team competed in the program. Other universities selected for the early summer competition were California State, Clarkson, Drexel, Pennsylvania State, the University of Florida, the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, and West Virginia University.

RASC-AL offered several topics for competition, and Leung explained the members' attraction to the Mars mission. "It's a hot topic for NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and the space community, as this is the target for our next leap in the space era.

"The idea has been around for so long, and it seems like we've been waiting forever for this to happen," he continued. "One of the reasons a manned mission won't happen in the next decade or so is because there are still some critical technologies that need to be developed. Better propulsion, cheaper, efficient access to space, and radiation shielding are a few areas that need some improvement if we want to see ourselves on Mars. Thus, our group set out to learn more about what it takes to land people on the elusive red planet."

The ISS team had these mission constraints:

• Four-person crew minimum
• 30-day minimum Mars surface stay
• Maximum two-year total mission
• No more than five cargo launches of a 130-mT (LEO) payload launch vehicle with a 10-meter-diameter payload shroud
• Leveraging NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) in the mission analysis, or justifying a different launch system if it were determined NASA's SLS was not the best option
• One crew launch

Among the innovations the ISS team proposed were nuclear electric propulsion, improved radiation shielding and countermeasures, human technology advances, and a biomass chamber unit to pave the way for extended deep-space excursions. The team's full report is available here.

Six members of the team traveled with their advisor, AE Prof. Bruce Conway, for the four-day competition in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Their award was based on the quality of the 40-minute presentation in which all team members took part, as well as technical factors.

Here are the ISS team members who participated:

• Braven Leung, AE, Team Leader/Systems Engineer/Assist Structural Engineer - responsible for running logistics for the entire team, overseeing all subsystem design in the project, and assisting in mission structure design.
• Jason Allen, AE, Orbital Mechanics - responsible for determining the requirements such as fuel
• Stanley Chan, AE, Human Factors/CAD Modeler - responsible for technologies and regimens to best support the mission's human crew, and creating CAD models for the mission.
• Jobin Kokkat, AE, Launch Systems/Assist Human Factors - responsible for conducting trade studies on different options for access to space, assist in designing technolgies and regimens to best support the mission's human crew.
• Timothy Lanham, AE, Communications - responsible for laying out the communication network between ground control and the crew, and configuring uplinks and downlinks.
• Julia Liu, AE, Thermal Systems - responsible for ensuring all critical components operate between tolerable temperature ranges for the duration of the mission, and ensuring habitable temperatures for the crew.
• Christopher Lorenz, AE, Structural Engineer - responsible for configuring transfer vehicle, the Martian base, and mass budget.
• Anthony Park, NPRE (Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering Department) Power Systems - responsible for laying out the specifications of the reactor design, solar array, etc.; and creating the mission power budget and power diagram/schematics.
• Dayne Rogers, AE, Orbital Mechanics/CAD Modeler - responsible for determining the requirements such as fuel and delta v's for reaching Mars, as well as orbital trajectories; and for creating CAD models for the mission.