The Road to an International Architecture for Mars Sample Return: the iMARS~* Team view

摘要

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission represents a milestone in the exploration of the solar system and, in particular, in the investigation of the planet Mars and specific questions regarding its potential habitability. The ambitious scientific objectives, the planetary protection and contamination control issues as well as the overall technical difficulties to overcome put a huge challenge on the mission and system definition. With the gathered large expertises and from the lessons learned from past studies, our engineering sub-group has worked out a consensus on the drivers and bases of the needed mission architecture. The major requirements of the mission and their translation into engineering challenges are presented as well as the current consideration on a reference architecture.In particular, this paper documents the initial analyses performed to identify suitable mission architectures based on the evaluation of Earth-to-Mars and return trajectories, launch vehicle performances and mission element masses, to tradeoff landing accuracy/mobility requirements and to implement planetary protection and contamination control constrains.