Earth-Mars cyclers for a sustainable human exploration of Mars

摘要

Since the early history of Space Exploration, Mars conquest has been the most important target. After Apollo mission's Moon landing, several concepts and projects, concerning a mission on the Red Planet, were developed. One of the most important contributes was given by Buzz Aldrin, who theorized the use of particular kind of orbits, called cycler orbits, as baseline for an enduring Mars colonization.A cycler orbit is a kind of orbit which repeats every integer multiple of synodic period and which encounters two bodies with a precise schedule. In the case, the bodies considered are Earth and Mars. It is possible to inject a space station in the cycler orbit which allows a continuous transfer of a crew from Low Earth Orbit to Mars Low Orbit and vice-versa. Small taxi vehicles are used to rendezvous the cycler station from the two bodies, significantly reducing the amount of propellant.In this paper a mission architecture based on this new concept was analysed, in order to develop an alternative mission profile compared to the actual architectures proposed for human missions. The work starts with an analysis of several classes of cycler. Through a trade-off analysis an unique class of cycler was identified as baseline for a further mission analysis. The mission analysis consists of an evaluation of orbital perturbation, the computation of ΔV required for injection and rendezvous manoeuvres and an identification of close approach windows of the cycler with the two planets, allowing an evaluation of mission duration.Eventually, the presented mission concept was compared with more classical concepts, focusing on a key figure to enable Mars colonization, sustainability.Finally the proposed architecture should be seen as a preliminary assessment of an alternative solution to the currently proposed enabling architectures for the Martian exploration.