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We assess the possibility of reducing the travel time of a crewed mission to Mars by examining four different propulsion methods and keeping the mass at departure under 2500 tonne, for a fixed architecture. We evaluated representative…
To-date, all human economic activity has depended on the resources of a single planet, and it has long been recognized that developments in space exploration could in principle open our closed planetary economy to external resources of…
Mars exploration motivates the search for extraterrestrial life, the development of space technologies, and the design of human missions and habitations. Here we seek new insights and pose unresolved questions relating to the natural…
Multiple nations are planning activity on the Moon's surface, and to deconflict lunar operations we must understand the sandblasting damage from rocket exhaust blowing soil. Prior research disagreed over the scaling of the erosion rate,…
This study estimates the cost of building lunar landing pads and examines whether any construction methods are economically superior to others. Some proposed methods require large amounts of mass transported from the Earth, others require…
Currently, commercially available intelligent transport robots that are capable of carrying up to 90kg of load can cost \$5,000 or even more. This makes real-world experimentation prohibitively expensive and limits the applicability of such…
We explore the likelihood that early remains of Earth, Mars, and Venus have been preserved on the Moon in high enough concentrations to motivate a search mission. During the Late Heavy Bombardment, the inner planets experienced frequent…
The potential of Martian lava tubes for resource extraction and habitat sheltering highlights the need for robots capable to undertake the grueling task of their exploration. Driven by this motivation, in this work we introduce a legged…
A technologically mature colony on Mars can produce and deliver at least 1 million tons of liquid hydrogen per year to one or more propellant depots at Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Production of 1 $kg$ of hydrogen at Marian colony and its…
A future lunar habitat, as part of the Artemis program, will require a significant amount of logistics infrastructure. Cargo that is transported to the Moon will need to be moved from a landing site to other key locations that may be up to…
Mars is the next destination after Earth to support terrestrial life. Decades of Mars exploration has fascinated space explorers to endeavour for a human expedition. But human Mars enterprise is complicated than conventional mission as the…
The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) proposes to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid and position it in a lunar distant retrograde orbit (DRO) for later study, crewed exploration, and ultimately resource exploitation. During the Caltech Space…
The successes of previous and current Mars rovers have encouraged space agencies worldwide to pursue additional planetary exploration missions with more ambitious navigation goals. For example, NASA's planned Mars Sample Return mission will…
Establishing a human settlement on Mars is an incredibly complex engineering problem. The inhospitable nature of the Martian environment requires any habitat to be largely self-sustaining. Beyond mining a few basic minerals and water, the…
We investigate the prospects for the past or current existence of habitable conditions deep underneath the surfaces of the Moon and Mars as well as generic bound and free-floating extrasolar rocky objects. We construct a simple model that…
In recent years, there has been a significant surge of interest in Mars exploration, driven by the planet's potential for human settlement and its proximity to Earth. In this paper, we explore the performance of the LoRaWAN technology on…
Mars lacks a substantial magnetic field; as a result, the solar wind ablates the Martian atmosphere, making the surface uninhabitable. Therefore, any terraforming attempt will require an artificial Martian magnetic shield. The fundamental…
NASA mandate is a human mission to Mars in the 2030s and sustained exploration of Mars requires in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Exploiting the Martian water cycle (alongside perchlorate salts that depress the freezing point of water to…
Due to its absence of an atmosphere and relative geological inertness, the Moon's surface records past impacts of objects from the Solar system and beyond. We examine the prospects for discovering extrasolar material near the lunar surface…
Space agencies have been incessantly working to propose a sustainable architecture for human Mars mission. But, before proceeding to a giant leap and accomplishing those mission intent, it is significant to know the extent of possibility to…