The Future of Mars Exploration

Dr Anita Sengrupta is an Aerospace Engineer working for NASA and has been involved in the design of the parachute which helped land Curiosity on Mars in 2012.

Recognise opportunity, ask questions, and push yourself — Anita Sengrupta

You can watch the talk in full below.

Anita took the audience through the tremendous complexities associated with a landing mission to Mars through an incredible video where NASA’s engineers described the process step by step. One of the key moments is the time needed for a message from Mars to reach Earth, described as ‘the 7 minutes of terror’, to know whether a landing is successful or not.

Next, Anita explained to the audience the key reasons behind NASA’s interest in exploring Mars. As she noted, Mars is a planet that has transformed a lot through time and, like Venus, it was once very similar to the Earth. By understanding how and why it changed, we might get an insight into what will happen to Earth. Also, we will be looking for somewhere to live other than Earth and this might be suitable, for example the moons could act as bases which facilitate communication with earth or as depots for further missions into deep space. Moreover, there is active geological history on the planet which we want to find out what happened there. Perhaps more importantly, NASA has found frozen water and mud on Mars.

Evolution of technology is what moves things forward, according to Anita, and the greater data is gathered to understand how Mars works, the better instruments we can develop to help us learn more when there. Technology has helped advance on particular difficult task, that is, NASA’s landing prediction accuracy; for example, in 1976, NASA aimed for a landing area which was 174 miles x 62 miles, whilst in 2012 they aimed for a landing area which was 12 miles x 4 miles.

Future issues that require novel solutions:

• Power — there is a need for the development of advanced power systems to enable explorative activities on the planet
• Landing site selection (Mars is pretty similar to Earth so there is potential)
• Autonomous systems (future rovers can keep safe and fulfill missions)
• How do we put larger payloads on the surface?
• Environmental control systems (probably underground to protect from radiation)
• Surface mobility
• In Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU), relating to Power, Radiation Protection, Water, Fuel and Extremophiles
• Growing food
• Landing on the planet and getting through the ice to explore the ocean is the huge engineering challenge which is on the horizon.