My first space analog mission
What does a virtual space analog mission at Habitat Marte look like and more …
The summer of 2020 was a turning point for a bundle of reasons - Covid19 being the most obvious. Another momentous event for me was some friends introducing me to Professor Julio Rezende1 and his team at Habitat Marte in Brazil.
Habitat Marte is a space analog station located in the municipality of Caiçara do Rio do Vento in Brazil. It is ~100km from Natal, capital of the state of Rio Grande do Norte. Missions that were generally conducted with in-person participants transformed to being completely virtual this summer - and although that transformation happened for reasons that are less than ideal (aka a pandemic), I was grateful and humbled by the opportunity to participate.
If this is the first time you’re encountering the terms space analogs or analog missions, flip over to Space Analog Missions on the whats and whys of space analog missions. The remainder of this article will make a lot more sense!
Q. How does a virtual analog mission at Habitat Marte work?
7 individuals with a passion for space exploration and settlement are recruited from around the world to form an analog astronaut team. Each team member is given the responsibility to design and imagine a distinct facility within a human space habitat on Mars. The facilities include:
- Main Station
- Launch Centre
- Greenhouse
- Sanitation Centre
- Health Centre
- Engineering Station
- Power Station
Q. How long do missions last?
Typically, for 7 days.
Q. Does a mission have purpose?
Absolutely! Each virtual mission is themed: my first one - was about recycling on Mars. Our mission was to design and conceptualize the needs of 7 distinct facilities (listed above) with an eye towards recycling, sustainability and self-reliance in the face of a 7-day long Martian dust-storm.
Q. What was your role in the mission?
My role was chief of the launch centre - an area within the habitat that ships would arrive and depart from. If this makes you think of airports on Earth, you’re on the right track! For this mission, I chose to focus on the following areas:
- Construction and maintenance of landing pad facilities
- Mining in-situ resources for oxygen, water and fuel generation
- Robotic swarm technology to enable these functions with implied redundancy
- Solid, liquid and hybrid fuel systems
Each centre chief presents their research on their chosen facility. This gives everyone in the mission an opportunity to learn about techniques, protocols and technologies in adjacent realms.
Q. That looks intense - what’s the biggest highlight?
My biggest take away was how cool mining for in-situ resources could be - specifically, water, oxygen and fuel. Martian regolith can be used as a source of oxygen, hydrogen and water. On Earth, the high mass of mining equipment allows the excavator’s blade to penetrate the ground due to reaction force2,3. On Mars - we have two problems - a) Mars has about 38% of Earth’s gravity and b) We measure the cost of lifting things to Mars in kilograms because it’s extremely expensive. The RASSOR excavator3 is intelligently designed to skirt around these limitations. It does not rely on sheer weight to dig into regolith. It consists of toothed drums on the periphery for digging and hollow drums for storage in the middle. As the toothed drums rotate, the dug up regolith gets loaded into the storage drums. The concept does not currently handle large chunks of ice that are likely to be encountered in regolith.
I explored the benefit that a swarm of RASSORs would bring to large scale production. Water and oxygen production facilities will be critical to a habitat - the decentralized control offered by a swarm would protect against mission failure through redundancy. It would be interesting to explore what the trade-off between size reduction of the individual RASSOR and quantity of excavated material looks like, if we wanted to think about a truly scaleable swarm.
The next part of the system would heat the excavated regolith to a high temperature to extract H2O. This H2O would then be electrolyzed into H2 and O2 using the Sabatier reaction. H2 should be stored cryogenically as CH4 for stability by combining it with CO2, which the Martian atmosphere is abundant in. O2 would also be stored cryogenically for use within the habitat. MOXIE4, an experiment onboard the ongoing Perseverance mission5, will test out solid state electrolysis of CO2 to produce O2.
Q. This sounds cool! Is there proof?
I’m all about documenting things - Here are some links to the material that I presented at my first mission:
It’s rough, and it improves for my next mission which you can read about here.
Q. What are some other things that you learnt about?
To give you a taste for the range of topics covered:
- Dr. Susan Ip-Jewell6, MD, DCEG is the CEO/Co-founder, MMAARS, Inc (Mars-Moon Astronautics Academy & Research Science), briefed us on the advances in A/R and mixed reality for telemedicine. We covered 3D printing of spare parts powered by solar energy as well as the limitations of medicine in space - surgery is currently not feasible because anesthesiology in microgravity environments is an unsolved problem. 5G will be critical to the new world of telemedicine.
- Davi Souza7, a student of Electrical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, covered the challenges and advances in aquaponic greenhouses (that’s hydroponics + fish). Apart from having a separate greenhouse within the habitat, miniature versions embedded into the design of every facility was noted as an important feature, given the limited real estate in space habitats. Sensor based control of LED lighting for plant growth, monitoring crops for pests and health checks, enabled through automation to reduce the room for human error, are the real game changers to this critical component of the habitat.
Q. Where can I find out more?
This article only touches the tip of the iceberg. All our sessions were recorded and are available on Youtube. I’m always happy to chat about my experience - feel free to reach out to me via the usual channels.
References
- Prof. Julio Rezende’s Linkedin
- Singh, S. (1995, May). Learning to predict resistive forces during robotic excavation. In Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Vol. 2, pp. 2102-2107). IEEE.
- RASSOR Excavator
- MOXIE
- Perseverance mission
- Dr Susan Ip-Jewell is pioneering the first Martian-Lunar Analog Astronautics Settlement and creating an analog training community for over 100 analog astronauts living and working in an austere Isolated and Confined Environment (ICE). MMAARS is located in the Mojave Desert, California near Mojave Spaceport and NASA’s Neil Armstrong Research Center. The Settlement will include a Space Clinic for testing and developing AvatarMEDIC, a humanoid telerobotic surgeon integrating spatial computing, AI, and multi-haptic sensors.
- Davi Souza’s Linkedin