KENNEDY SPACE CENTER – Looking amazingly like a fish flying across the skies high above the Florida space coast, NASA’s unique Super Guppy aircraft loaded with the structural backbone for NASA’s next Orion crew module, swooped in for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center on Monday afternoon, Feb. 1.
NASA’s world famous Mars Exploration RoverOpportunity continues blazing a daily trail of unprecedented science first’s, still swinging her robotic arm robustly into action at a Martian “Mining Zone” on the 12th anniversary of her hair-raising Red Planet touchdown this week, a top rover scientist told Universe Today.
Furthermore its contributing invaluable experience to scientists and astronauts on learning how to grow plants and food in microgravity during future deep space human expeditions planned for NASA’s “Journey to Mars” initiative.
Exactly 12 Years ago this week, NASA’s now famous Spirit rover touched down on the Red Planet, starting a spectacular years long campaign of then unimaginable science adventures that ended up revolutionizing our understanding of Mars due to her totally unexpected longevity.
There are several space stories we’re anticipating for 2016 but one story might appear — to some — to belong in the realm of science fiction: sometime in the coming year Elon Musk will likely reveal his plans for colonizing Mars.
Early in 2015, Musk hinted that he would be publicly disclosing his strategies for the Mars Colonial Transport system sometime in late 2015, but then later said the announcement would come in 2016.
“The Mars transport system will be a completely new architecture,” Musk said during a Reddit AMA in January 2015, replying to a question about the development of MCT. “[I] am hoping to present that towards the end of this year. Good thing we didn’t do it sooner, as we have learned a huge amount from Falcon and Dragon.”
Big Rockets
As far as any details, Musk only said that he wants to be able to send 100 colonists to Mars at a time, and the “goal is 100 metric tons of useful payload to the surface of Mars. This obviously requires a very big spaceship and booster system.”
He has supposedly dubbed the rocket the BFR (for Big F’n Rocket) and the spaceship similarly as BFS.
Most online discussions describe the MCT as an interplanetary ferry, with the spaceship built on the ground and launched into orbit in one piece and perhaps refueled in low Earth orbit. The transporter could be powered by Raptor engines, which are cryogenic methane-fueled rocket engines rumored to be under development by SpaceX.
The Challenge of Landing Large Payloads on Mars
While the big rocket and spaceship may seem to be a big hurdle, an even larger challenge is how to land a payload of 100 metric tons with 100 colonists, as Musk proposes, on Mars surface.
As we’ve discussed previously, there is a “Supersonic Transition Problem” at Mars. Mars’ thin atmosphere does not provide an enough aerodynamics to land a large vehicle like we can on Earth, but it is thick enough that thrusters such as what was used by the Apollo landers can’t be used without encountering aerodynamic problems such as sheering and incredible stress on the vehicle.
With current landing technology, a large, heavy human-sized vehicle streaking through Mars’ thin, volatile atmosphere only has about 90 seconds to slow from Mach 5 to under Mach 1, change and re-orient itself from a being a spacecraft to a lander, deploy parachutes to slow down further, then use thrusters to translate to the landing site and gently touch down.
90 seconds is not enough time, and the airbags used for rovers like Spirit and Opportunity and even the Skycrane system used for the Curiosity rover can’t be scaled up enough to land the size of payloads needed for humans on Mars.
NASA has been addressing this problem to a small degree, and has tested out inflatable aeroshells that can provide enough aerodynamic drag to decelerate and deliver larger payloads. Called Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD), this is the best hope on the horizon for landing large payloads on Mars.
The Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3) was tested successfully in 2012. It was made of high tech fabric and inflated to create the shape and structure similar to a mushroom. When inflated, the IRVE-3 is about 10-ft (3 meter) in diameter, and is composed of a seven giant braided Kevlar rings stacked and lashed together – then covered by a thermal blanket made up of layers of heat resistant materials. These kinds of aeroshells can also generate lift, which would allow for additional slowing of the vehicle.
“NASA is currently developing and flight testing HIADs — a new class of relatively lightweight deployable aeroshells that could safely deliver more than 22 tons to the surface of Mars,” said Steve Gaddis, GCD manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in a press release from NASA in September 2015.
NASA is expecting that a crewed spacecraft landing on Mars would weigh between 15 and 30 tons, and the space agency is looking for ideas through its Big Idea Challenge for how to create aeroshells big enough to do the job.
With current technology, landing the 100 metric tons that Musk envisions might be out of reach. But if there’s someone who could figure it out and get it done, Elon Musk just might be that person.
2015 was an amazing year in space, as worlds such as Pluto and Ceres snapped into sharp focus. 2015 also underlined the mantra that ‘space is hard,’ as SpaceX rode the roller coaster from launch failure, to a dramatic return to flight in December, complete with a nighttime landing of its stage 1 Falcon 9 rocket back at Cape Canaveral. Continue reading “Space Stories to Watch in 2016”
Elon Musk’s dream and ultimate goal of establishing a permanent human presence on the Red Planet in the form of “A City on Mars” took a gigantic step forward with the game changing rocket landing and recovery technology vividly demonstrated by his firm’s Falcon 9 booster this past Monday, Dec. 21 – following a successful blastoff from the Florida space coast just minutes earlier on the first SpaceX launch since a catastrophic mid-air calamity six months ago.
Just in time for the holidays, NASA’sCuriosity rover is celebrating Christmas 2015 at a Red Planet Paradise – spectacular “Namib Dune.” And she marked the occasion by snapping her first ever color self-portrait with the mast mounted high resolution Mastcam 34 mm camera.
NASA managers have just made the difficult but unavoidable decision to scrub the planned March 2016 launch of the InSight lander, the agency’s next mission to Mars, by at least two years because of a vacuum leak that was just detected in the probes flawed seismometer instrument which cannot be fixed in time.