Mars Prospector: Leading the way to in-situ resource utilization on the Red Planet

摘要

With the growing prospect of humans once again venturing beyond Earth orbit to establish planetary outposts, the identification and assessment of in-situ resources at planned destinations is paramount. Currently, opportunities for assessing such resources depend on space-agency planning and mission cycles that generally focus on science return rather than addressing a specific need. The authors present a novel concept for rapidly implementing a resource-prospecting orbiter at Mars using a spacecraft bus and instruments already at high technology readiness levels. The Mars Prospector mission concept is focused on assessing known but inadequately characterized resources for utilization at future human landing sites on the Red Planet. The mission is designed around the multi-modular spacecraft bus currently being built for the Emirates Mars Mission. Two primary instruments are a multi-band radar sounder that will assess the presence, depth, and concentration of buried water ice and an imaging spectrometer that will identify and map exposures of useful minerals, especially hydrated minerals amenable to extraction of water. All components are to be derived from existing hardware, reducing the risks and long development times inherent to science-focused missions. In addition, by concentrating the mission goals on prospecting in well-defined areas, we will reduce the typical far-reaching operational requirements for planetary orbiters, thereby simplifying engineering, integration, and operations. A substantial optimization can be obtained by operating in a non-polar orbit restricted between 60°S and 60°N, thus enabling rapid increases in coverage density of the main areas of interest. This focused mission concept is made possible by the existing knowledge of vast water resources in terms of buried ices as glaciers and ground ice at mid-latitudes and of hydrated minerals that are more broadly distributed. However, further probing is required to better assess the accessibi