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[23]Science / Science & Exploration

NASA’s 1966 plan for a mission to Mars

Serious plans for a surface exploration of Mars were underway as early as
1966 …

  by David S. F. Portree, wired.com - Apr 7, 2012 6:16 pm UTC
  [24]Login to bookmark [25]64

  [aeronutronic5-4f7f9f1-intro.jpg]
  Image courtesy of Philco Aeronutronic/NASA

  Piloted spaceflight planning typically emphasizes transportation; that
  is, methods of traveling from Earth to some destination and back again.
  Other than landing and liftoff, astronaut activities on the surface of
  a target world normally receive little attention. This is not too
  surprising at the present stage of spaceflight development, given the
  many challenges inherent in moving humans between worlds.

  What is more surprising is that, as early as 1965, NASA’s Marshall
  Space Flight Center (MSFC) turned its attention to the scientific tasks
  astronaut-scientists might perform on Mars. In that year, as part of an
  ongoing series of Mars mission studies that began in 1962 with the
  EMPIRE manned Mars/Venus flyby/orbiter study, the Huntsville,
  Alabama-based NASA center contracted with Avco/RAD to study manned Mars
  surface operations. This truly was far-sighted thinking; when MSFC
  paired with Avco/RAD, NASA, with President John F. Kennedy’s
  end-of-decade deadline for a manned moon landing fast approaching, had
  barely begun to pay serious attention to the scientific tasks that
  Apollo astronauts would perform on the moon.

  Paul Swan, who had worked with Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan in 1964 to
  identify landing sites for automated Voyager Mars landers, was
  Avco/RAD’s study leader. In a summary paper presented at the March 1966
  Stepping Stones to Mars meeting (the last major Mars-focused
  engineering meeting until the 1980s), Swan and three of his Avco/RAD
  colleagues explained that an "understanding of the possibilities and
  limitations of [human explorers on Mars] should serve both to keep our
  eyes on a far horizon, and to guide our footsteps on the early stepping
  stones which must be negotiated."

  The first successful robotic Mars probe, 261-kilogram Mariner IV, had
  flown past the planet on July 15, 1965, while the Avco/RAD engineers
  performed their study, and they included in their report references to
  its findings. They noted, for example, that Mariner IV had imaged
  overlapping craters (implying a lack of erosion, hence little water)
  and had found no evidence of a martian magnetosphere (implying that
  solar flare radiation would reach its surface unchecked). In general,
  however, the Avco/RAD team adhered to the optimistic pre-Mariner IV
  view of Mars, which was based on a century of Earth-based telescopic
  observations. Their Mars was, for example, etched by a mysterious
  network of slender, linear canals, though no such features appeared in
  Mariner IV images.
  Map of Mars from August 1960 based on observations using Earth-based
  telescopes. At the time Avco/RAD engineers performed their study, this
  was the best all-planet Mars map available.
  Map of Mars from August 1960 based on observations using Earth-based
  telescopes. At the time Avco/RAD engineers performed their study, this
  was the best all-planet Mars map available.
  U.S. Air Force.

  Despite this apparent flaw, Avco/RAD’s planning methodology remains
  relevant today. In fact, it can be argued that, by planning the
  scientific exploration of a "fictional" Mars, Swan and his colleagues
  demonstrated that their methodology could be applied to any world
  humans might choose to explore.

  Swan’s team acknowledged that the decision to send men to Mars might be
  taken "for reasons of international competition, for domestic political
  considerations, or to stimulate the economy," but hastened to add that
  such justifications should not be permitted to influence the science
  activities that would take place during manned Mars exploration. They
  assumed that science would dictate engineering requirements for Mars
  spacecraft, space suits, and rovers, rather than political directives.
  Though necessarily simplistic, this approach put aside uncertainty.

  The Avco/RAD team identified three potential overarching scientific
  focii for the first manned Mars mission: exobiology, planetology, and
  exploitation. The first of these was, they wrote, “basic and
  compelling,” and might in fact provide a justification for a manned
  Mars mission that could stand on its own (that is, in the absence of
  underlying political and economic motives). Planetology would focus on
  the history and present state of Mars as a planet. Exploitation would
  entail prospecting for resources and determining hazards ahead of a
  follow-up long stay-time manned Mars mission.

  Mars, the team told the Stepping Stones conference, would not be
  explored as Earth has been explored. On Earth, scientists can usually
  visit a field site, gather data, return to the lab to study the data
  and formulate new questions, and then return to the field site to
  perform new investigations. Because the cost of exploring Earth is
  small compared to that of exploring Mars, terrestrial exploration can,
  in other words, be iterative and open-ended.

  Mars astronaut-scientists, on the other hand, would need to gather
  rapidly as much data at their landing site as possible, because the
  large number of interesting potential landing sites and the difficulty
  and cost of reaching Mars would make unlikely an early return to any
  site visited. To accommodate this fundamental constraint, Avco/RAD
  called for every manned Mars mission to conduct a range of experiments
  that would metaphorically cast a wide fine-meshed net over its landing
  site with the aim of capturing "variable amounts of different kinds of
  information over wide dynamic ranges."

  The team noted that the likely existence of "totally...unanticipated
  phenomena" would complicate data gathering. To illustrate this, Swan
  and his colleagues asked their audience to consider "the plight of the
  Martian astronaut-scientist who finally manage[d] to reach Earth, but
  completely failed to anticipate magnetic fields greater than a few
  gammas, and therefore also magnetospheres, Van Allen belts...and all
  other phenomena associated with the mere existence of the Earth’s
  magnetic dipole."

  The Avco/RAD team then peeled Mars like an onion; that is, they divided
  the planet and its surroundings into concentric spheres of scientific
  interest. Innermost was the endosphere, the molten spherical body of
  the planet bounded by its lithosphere (the crust, including the solid
  surface). Next was the hydrosphere, which included all water within and
  on the lithosphere, in the atmosphere, and in the biosphere. The
  biosphere would comprise Mars’s living things, which, the team
  explained, would probably have "an intimate relationship to the
  lithosphere, the hydrosphere, and the atmosphere."

  The atmosphere, next out from the planet’s center, would include "all
  the neutral, gaseous molecules out to the shock wave in the solar
  wind," while the electro/magnetosphere would include the ionosphere,
  radiation belts, and any magnetic field that might have eluded Mariner
  IV’s magnetometer. Last and farthest from Mars’s center was the
  gravisphere, which would contain the moons Phobos and Deimos and any
  dust belts that might encircle the planet. Avco/RAD also listed solar
  physics as an area of scientific interest for manned Mars missions;
  that is, any "solar phenomena observed while using the planet as a base
  of operations."

  Swan’s team proposed two manned Mars mission scenarios designed to
  explore these spheres of scientific interest. The first, the "minimal"
  missions, would occur between 1976 and 1986 and would use Apollo-level
  (that is, 1970) technology. The second, the "extended" mission, which
  was tentatively scheduled to occur in the 1982-1986 time period, would
  require technologies beyond the Apollo state of the art.

  The four minimal-mission surface crewmembers would explore a landing
  site within 30° of the martian equator for 21 days during a period when
  the biosphere at the site was at "peak growth." While the four surface
  astronaut-scientists did their best to keep up with "a very active
  schedule" of wide-ranging data-gathering, two men would orbit Mars on
  board the mission "mothership," the command module. Among other tasks,
  they would deploy automated probes to investigate the martian moons and
  any dust belts. Time near Mars for the minimal mission would total 40
  days.

  The Avco/RAD team expected that, in addition to the Mars-orbiting
  command module, the minimal mission would need three landed modules.
  These would reach the landing site on common-design landers. The
  modules would include a drum-shaped, 9500-pound "main shelter," where
  the four surface astronauts would live and work; a two-man, 8700-pound,
  20-foot-long pressurized Molab rover capable of three five-day,
  500-mile surface traverses over the course of a 21-day surface mission;
  and a 1550-pound "garage" module for storing the Molab, 2050 pounds of
  Molab expendables, and 3000 pounds of science equipment.

  The surface crew would remain sequestered from all martian life
  throughout their stay. After every Mars walk, space-suited
  astronaut-scientists would undergo decontamination, and samples they
  gathered would remain sealed in quarantine until they were returned to
  Earth and shown to be safe. This degree of caution would be necessary,
  the Avco/RAD team wrote, because determining conclusively the degree of
  pathogenicity of martian life would probably not be possible during a
  three-week surface stay. If the surface crew became exposed to a
  virulent martian bacterium, for example, its effects would probably not
  have time to become readily apparent before they rejoined their
  colleagues in orbit. The crew in orbit might then become exposed, then
  the infection might be transmitted to Earth.

  Avco/RAD’s second type of manned Mars mission, the extended mission,
  would see 42 men occupy three 14-man surface bases for 300 days while
  four men remained on board a command module in orbit. Because the
  surface crews would remain on Mars for 300 days, they might witness a
  large portion of the seasonal life cycle of any native organisms at the
  base sites. While the small army of surface explorers ranged over the
  regions surrounding their base sites, the four astronaut-scientists in
  Mars orbit would rendezvous with and explore Phobos and Deimos.

  The three bases would be "so situated as to provide access to all major
  features of interest," Swan’s team explained. Northern Syrtis Major
  Base would support Molab traverses to Libya and Aeria ("two northern
  desert regions"), while a base in Hellas (an "unusually bright and
  somewhat anomalously colored desert region") would enable access to Zea
  Lacus, where five canals intersected. The third base would be sited
  among the south pole’s snowy Mitchell Mountains. (Neither the canals of
  Zea Lacus nor the Mitchell Mountains actually exist.)

  At least six common-design landers would deliver eight modules to each
  base site, for a total of eighteen landers and 24 modules on Mars. For
  redundancy, two 80-kilowatt nuclear reactors would supply each base
  with electricity and two main shelters with regenerative life support
  would house each base crew. A pair of "storage and maintenance
  shelters" at each base site would house two 22,000-pound, two-man
  Molabs capable of 30-day, 1500-mile traverses and a total of 34,000
  pounds of Molab expendables and science equipment.

  Reference:

  "Manned Mars Surface Operations," Paul R. Swan, Raymond B. Hanselman,
  Richard L. Ryan, and Richard F. Suitor, A Volume of Technical Papers
  Presented at the AIAA/AAS Stepping Stones to Mars Meeting, pp. 69-86;
  paper presented in Baltimore, Maryland, March 28-30, 1966.

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