Human Mars Exploration | Emily Judd | ISS Online 2021

thank you for joining us once again i'm really looking forward to this morning's lecture when i was putting together the program a little while ago i was trying to find you know as as we usually do a really good diverse section of researchers and scientists and engineers to talk to us about a whole wide range of stuff and i thought you know what would be really real really good there's been a lot of stuff happening over the the first half of this year around mars like everyone seems to be going to mars at the moment we've got uh nasa's got a got a a new mission which is touchdown has roving around on mars like a little helicopter and everything it's amazing we've got china up on mars now we've got um the the saudi uh saudi space team i've got a got an orbiter around mars at the moment it seems like everyone is going to mars mars is where it's at and so i thought we should have someone to talk about mars let's do that and so i got in contact with a few people that i have contact details for over in america at nasa and they put me in touch with today's speaker who said yeah i'll come and have a talk to you oh okay so it's really nice to meet you emily what what do you do and emily this is emily judge she's an aerospace engineer at nasa langley research center and she's got one of the best job descriptions i've ever come across in my life so imagine this for a second right you you go to a party and someone says what do you do and you say well i'm i'm the deputy team lead for uh langley research center's mars architecture team oh really what's that well i work on the challenges of sending astronauts through deep space to another planet oh cool you're like how good would that be so would you please make very very welcome in the time on a tradition of banging your hands together in whatever space you're in please make very very welcome emily judd aerospace engineer at nasa emily welcome to the to the iss it's really nice to have you here thank you for joining us please do tell us about your work i'd love to hear about it well sure thanks thanks for inviting me i'm really excited to talk with you all about what nasa's been up to for planning out some human mars exploration so as we said i'm going to be talking today to you all about human mars exploration so some of the missions that got mentioned previously were about the robotic missions that have been going to mars and roving around the planet orbiting around the planet but all of those are kind of in prep for you know the ultimate goal of sending humans there so that's what i'm going to be talking about today so before we get into you know some of the technical details um just a little bit about me and how nasa is set up you know i'm here at the nasa langley research center which is one of quite a few different nasa centers spread all across the u.s and within nasa we have what are called different mission directorates or different areas that nasa likes to focus on and so the area that i am working in is called the human exploration and operations mission directorate so that's all of the human exploration with the astronauts going to the international space station looking at returning to the moon with the artemis program all of those types of things so and as part of that i'm on the mars architecture team so looking at specifically how can we go on to mars so how did i end up in engineering so i would say you know my path here has not been kind of the normal path to engineering when i was in high school although i was really good at math and science and i enjoyed those topics a lot i um was much more interested in kind of the you know humanities uh being involved in band and choir i you know was also an athlete played on the volleyball team so when i was signing up to go to college i applied as a music major and so when i got to school i was at the university of central florida which is very close to another nasa center the kennedy space center and that's where nasa launches most of our big missions so just by being in that location i was exposed to what what nasa does and i thought you know oh rockets this stuff is really cool maybe i should figure out more of what's going on here so um while i was there i kept kept involved with music ended up getting a degree in that but also picked up aerospace engineering so you can see the picture on the left there is me with our school mascot and uh he's holding a rocket from our rocketry club so that's kind of how i got into aerospace uh kind of you know a roundabout way but um had a lot of fun there too so after undergrad i realized i still needed to learn a bit more about what aerospace was really all about and figure out what area i wanted to focus on so i applied to go to graduate school so i could get some more of those specialized skills and so for that part i was at the university of michigan and again did two degrees because i have problems picking what exactly i want to do when i grow up um and so i got a master's in climate and space sciences and engineering focusing on planetary atmospheres particularly looking at the differences between venus earth mars and jupiter and then after that i realized okay maybe the hardcore space science is maybe not the best fit for me and i may like doing more of the engineering side of things a bit better so i stayed around for another year and picked up a second masters in space engineering and that topic area really spoke to me and was a really great fit for my my skills and my interests and that's how i ended up here at nasa langley in our space mission analysis branch where we do all sorts of um space yeah space analysis space engineering so it fits exactly with what that program was teaching me so since i know you all are from australia and might not know where all these places are here's a little map to help you orient yourself so down here at the bottom is the the gulf of mexico and then we have the atlantic ocean off to the right here so iowa is kind of smack dab in the middle of the u.s highly agricultural area you know pretty rural area so then i went down to florida for undergrad popped back up north for grad school and now i'm out here right right on the east coast now at the nasa langley research center mars is a is approximately one-third the size of the earth so your gravitational force on the surface is uh much less so you know walking will feel a lot different for the astronauts just general operations on the surface will feel a lot different um you you know as an astronaut yourself you will weigh a lot less on mars um and kind of the the rough approximation is it's about one third the difference from here on earth um volume wise i it's about takes up about six of mars to make one earth um mars has two moons uh phobos and deimos both very very small moons um and there actually have been some interesting mission concepts proposed of what would happen about sending astronauts to one of the moons here but you can imagine with the moons being so small the gravitational effects would would have a much much larger impact on those surface missions so a few other differences you can see here between the planets the atmospheric composition is a lot different whereas earth is primarily nitrogen and oxygen which is what allows us to breathe mars is primarily carbon dioxide with a little bit of some other stuff mixed in so you know astronauts would always have to be in their spacesuits when they're wandering around mars um just you know to help them stay safe be able to breathe so they're not inhaling any of the dust any of that stuff too um you can also see the temperature ranges down here on the bottom and a fun thing that you can see there is some overlap even though mars is so much farther out in the solar system than earth is um at times places on the earth depending on how the weather is uh can actually be colder than places on mars which is a really fun fact when you get that popping up in your weather saying hey you know today in canada it is colder than mars so what is nasa planning for sending astronauts sending humans to mars um the current mission concept is that we're going to send four crew members and that's a mix of male and female astronauts this could uh include some of them staying in orbit around the planet and some going down to the surface or a mix of both uh just depends on how things shake out so how are we going to be accomplishing that so there's going to be you know several pieces that will have to all come together to make this mission work so we'll have the transit portion you know how do we get from earth vicinity to mars so that'll take a big transit vehicle then we'll also have how do we get down to the surface how do we stay safe while we're exploring on the surface and then how do we get back after that you know how do we get back up off the surface and return home safely so the where so this takes place in lots of different areas um that haven't had astronautic exploration before so you know we're going to you know be around earth uh in the earth vicinity we're going out into deep space on our way to mars and then we'll have the exploration around mars in orbit and on the surface this could happen as early as sometime in the 2030s um the current kind of mission plan is that the round trip would take about two years um and this would include 30 souls on the surface of mars and so a soul is a mars day so just there's just terminology there um and one nice thing about mars is that a soul is actually only about 37 minutes longer than an earth day so it's not you know a big change for the astronauts to to get used to um and kind of essentially for mission uh you know timeline planning generally that 37 minutes gets baked in as a as free time for the crew or you know extra time if if stuff uh takes longer than expected now why do we want to go to mars in the first place well i kind of believe that you know one of our uh you know intrinsic characteristics as humans is that we always want to push further we want to keep exploring we want to keep finding out more and more about where where we are in the universe um so you know by developing the technologies that are needed to go to mars you know we're helping improve life here on earth uh we're finding more about what makes the solar system the solar system how it's different than you know other solar systems wandering around um you know just just a lot of really exciting things to look at now how are we going to do this so you know kind of contrasting with the robotic missions like the rovers or the orbiters that are currently at mars you know those those missions they don't have to worry about trying to come back they also don't have to worry about trying to keep these uh pesky humans alive you know humans are very needy you know we have to breathe we have to eat we have to drink you know we have to sleep um you know so many things that we have to include to take care of the humans um so in order to keep the humans alive and happy um we are going to have to send things in advance because to send everything all at once would be this gigantic system that would be really really difficult to build um so there's going to be uh cargo missions that will be sent out ahead of time to make sure that all the food um well maybe not all of the food but uh you know some of the systems that will will be going in advance will be there ready and waiting for when the crew finally gets there and then you know then we'll have all the vehicles and that the crew will use such as you know uh uh pressurized rover where they will spend their time on the surface um their ascent vehicle to return back to mars orbit their different space suits all those types of things so we talked a little bit at the beginning about you know your transit vehicle how are you going to get from earth vicinity to mars so this is our current concept for our big transit vehicle and so you know the it's going since it's so large um we're going to have to use a combination of different types of launch vehicles um so that could be you know commercial launch vehicles um you know what nasa's new rocket that's currently in development the space launch system which is going to be a huge heavy lift rocket in order to uh you know be able to lift these these large payloads up to space um just for a concept of distance the trip the round trip from here to mars um is about 2 000 times farther than a trip to the moon so just for scale just think about how how many kilometers that would be i i think the the number came out to be 1.8 billion kilometers for a round trip to mars so it's a pretty pretty uh hefty hefty trip there um another big challenge is that the landed mass that we have to do the curiosity rover which is very similar to the the newest rover the perseverance rover that um just landed back in february um the mass needed to keep the humans alive and for this exploration plan is over 20 times the mass needed to land one of the big rovers so that whole seven minutes of terror with the communications delay from getting back to mars to the earth you know it's going to be a much bigger deal because if your mars ascent vehicle crashes like you're going to have a very very bad day so um just challenges are getting bigger and bigger um just requiring so much more to take care of the humans i'm guessing this video is not going to work uh just due to the bandwidth issues so we'll see if i can just play a little and then pause it okay so we'll just pause it there so there aren't hopefully audio issues so this is kind of the just to give you a little scale so we you know the solar system here um the the distance from the sun to the earth is what we call one astronautical union unit 1au so about you know 150 million kilometers on average earth's orbit is pretty circular so that's that's a good a good approximation for mars um mars orbit is a little more oval a little more elliptical uh but again on average it's about 1.6 au so you can see just looking at the distances it's a lot farther farther out there okay so about here so you can see that with how orbital mechanics work you can't just fly in a straight line to the planets because as you head out mars is also moving so you kind of have to take this nice path and catch up to mars on your way out there okay so let's see if there we go um so once you get to mars then you can see also you know you're not going to be able to just go straight back to earth when you want to leave because now earth and mars are again moving um so depending on what propulsion system you pick whether that's a you know chemical system whether that's a nuclear system whether it's a combination whether you're using electric propulsion um all of those variables kind of mix to to help you plan out what trajectory what what path options you have to get get back and forth between the planets so options you know include you know well we could have a really long stay at mars you know close to a year at mars an earth year i should say at mars um where you wait until the planets get aligned again to do a short trip home or in this current option what we're doing is having a very short stay at mars about 30 souls on the surface about 50 souls total in orbit and then using that combination of propulsion systems in order to to chase earth on the way back home and so you can see that that means like maybe the overall emission will still be pretty long but it won't be as long as if you waited the whole time for the planets to come back in alignment so you can see for this example um the crew actually go out past mars orbit on the way back in which is kind of a really unique trajectory option that um isn't usually thought of but was was kind of a unique one that came out of this this piece of analysis so you can see here these these have the dates or the i guess the the time durations um so for this specific example um you know this is just one example of a possible mission uh the outbound transit takes about 300 days then you have your stay at mars for about 50 days and then your inbound transit is actually right around 500 days so pretty long trip lots of days in deep space so you can see here on the table again we have that total distance traveled about 1.8 billion kilometers which is just mind-boggling our closest distance to the sun again is right about earth distance and then the furthest distance to the sun is 1.75 astronomical units um so that creates some additional challenges because you know the farther out from the sun you get the colder it's going to get so the more thermal protection you're going to need on your spacecraft okay so i think we should just be able to skip there we go okay so we talked about the the propulsive system um that's needed to get you out there how are that where are the astronauts going to be living during this during these you know 300 days on the way out 500 days on the way back um so the current concept is this mars transit habitat and so one really exciting thing is the the new development of the inflatable technology so you can see this this kind of what looks like quilted material here you know is condensed when it's going up in the rocket so it can be folded down to a smaller size um which actually then when you get out into space and you re-inflate it allows you to have a much larger living space than the equivalent mass for a you know solid uh habitat um so that's making use of new materials development uh you know they have a a test um inflatable module that's up on the international space station um you know so all of those those different things are really exciting um you know things that need to be included in this habitat you know you need to consider what are your medical capabilities um you know generally people like to go to the dentist every once in a while just to make sure their teeth are okay are you going to have a crew member who's trained in dentistry um what happens if someone gets sick can you take care of them can you do surgery in microgravity um you know you want to have good food you know i don't know about you but eating canned food for two years doesn't sound particularly appealing so you know you want to have a good mixture of food that the astronauts will be happy eating for this time and they will also you know it'll be still nutritious um you know things like that they'll need exercise equipment so that um you know as their bodies adapt to microgravity you're not uh causing harm and you know you're still prep preparing the astronauts for when they get to mars and they have to then operate in mars gravity environment and adapt to that relatively quickly um let's see what else do we have on here life support so you know what happens if something breaks like you know your oxygen system or your water system again those pesky humans have to be kept alive somehow so how do you know how much um how many spare systems how many spare parts do you need to take along with you um doing that type of analysis from a risk perspective of you know how much is enough and you know how much is is too much where we're just wasting money we're wasting space we're wasting mass sending all these extra pieces that we're not going to ever use so back to those those human issues um you know there are some pretty big issues with with sending humans to space uh space radiation you know here on the surface of earth we have the nice big thick atmosphere that's helping keep us safe from the radiation coming from both the sun and from you know beyond the sun the galactic cosmic rays things like that that radiation can cause increased cancer risk it can make you very very sick and you don't want your astronauts getting sick during their mission or increasing their risk of getting sick after they complete their mission one thing that you know maybe we are understanding a little bit more after this past year of of lockdowns how does isolation affect how you operate as a human being you know we want to keep the astronauts healthy we want to keep them happy we want to keep them able to work together you know not being able to see the sun or having the sun rise and set to have your normal circadian rhythm um you know are the astronauts going to have experiments to do all those days on their way to and from mars or are they going to get bored you know astronauts are usually very gung-ho people of like let's let's do stuff are you going to be able to have enough stuff for them to do um let's see distance from earth yeah so the farther out you get you know the more you have a communications delay and you're not going to be able to rely on mission control or ground control to answer your every question right away so the astronauts are going to have to be much more self-sufficient able to solve problems on their own now gravity so we already talked about this a little bit you know adapting to both the microgravity environment and then also readjusting to gravity but a different gravity for the surface of mars and then back to microgravity again on your trip back then we also have what's called these hostile closed environments you know you can't just step outside your your habitat whenever you want you know you have to plan with your spacesuit you have to make sure you have everything that you need um so that means you need to keep your your environment working well um a lot of times astronauts will say that the international space station smells a little funky and it's very loud so you know are you going to be able to stand that for two years or is that going to get really really annoying so once we get to mars what what happens with stuff there so things that we need to think about you know mars has dust storms that pop up frequently enough and sometimes those can even grow to be global dust storms and that's what actually took out the opportunity rover is that there was a global dust storm that covered the entire planet and it could not get enough solar power to stay alive um so you know if there's a dust storm when we get to mars how long can you wait before you have to give up and go home or if you're already down on the surface you know how fast can you get back to your ascent vehicle to get back up to orbit and return home you know there's then there's also that just navigating around mars you know with uh the sand different hills things like that um one of the big things for exploration is you know we want to go look at these rocks that you know the rovers have been investigating we want to see if there's the potential for life there or if we can find life there um so we want to do that in a way that protects both the mars environment protects those samples but also protects us the humans and earth from bringing anything back with us too let's see yes we already talked about the round trips so again you're not going to be really be able to just send supplies if you run out of something so you want to make sure that you have everything that you need either sent ahead of time or sent with you and yeah the communications delay can get pretty bad um about 44 minutes round trip sometimes depending on how the planets are aligned you can actually get to the point where there's um where the sun is in between mars and earth so you get those blackout periods where you're just kind of on your own um and yeah so there are some pretty big challenges to work around there but while we're on the surface the plan is that the astronauts will kind of go around in what we call this pressurized rover so there are you know a couple different concepts and the idea is that we would do a test one on the moon as kind of practice and so you can see kind of you know here's one kind of uh that was i think tested out in the the desert in arizona in the southwestern united states um here's a concept that the japanese space agency has proposed and then here's another concept of you know that that same rover-ish design for on mars and so that would be where the astronauts would spend those 30 souls on the surface of mars roving around and exploring so after we're done with all of our exploration we have to get back somehow and this is where it gets a little bit tricky because mars has an atmosphere but it's very very thin compared to the atmosphere on on earth um so it's it's just enough that it makes things tricky um now you know kind of the big the big things to consider um you know over 20 tons of propellant are needed to to get your your ascent vehicle back up to orbit that's just a ton well 20 tons [Music] but um you know so that there's a lot that's needed to to make this this work to get you back up to space so we're actually going to go through a little bit of an example here um since i heard that you guys were maybe a little bit interested in you know what actually do i do all day here at nasa so some of the things that we do are kind of these initial vehicle design sizings and figuring out what are the important factors for these designs so kind of you know looking at this mars ascent vehicle problem this is kind of like what drives the entirety of the rest of the architecture is what do we need to bring back from the surface so that includes your mars samples so what rocks do you need what um are you going to take some mars regolith the the soil samples are you going to try to take any frozen ice cores and then you know how many astronauts are you sending how much how many supplies do they need for that that trip back up to their transit vehicle so then you say okay based on how many samples we want to take and how much space how much packing volume those are going to need how many astronauts we need their supplies and you know the life life support systems then we can kind of build a general size for this ascent vehicle figure out how big it needs to be and then we can take a pic of what engines do we want to use what propellant types do we want to use um how many stages do we want these vehicles to be currently the the general concept for the mars asset vehicle is that it would be two stages to get you back up to orbit um but definitely a really cool area for exploration and so then kind of once we have the general sizing figured out uh then we can um you know take a look at where does this ascent vehicle have to get you to what what orbit is this transit have going to be in um how long is it going to take you from launch to um meeting up with the transit vehicle and from there we can use this this fun equation the rocket equation it just sounds really cool um so let's see here here is your what we call the delta v which is your change in velocity and so you can figure that out based on knowing what orbit you have to get to so that's how you get that variable and then your isp is your specific impulse and that is a characteristic of what engine you choose so based on what engine you choose you then know that variable your g naught is standard gravity so that's earth at sea level so that's your gravity factor there and then you have your natural log of this fraction from your mass initial to your mass final over the time it takes between those two points so you can say okay if i know my change in velocity based on what orbit i need to get to i know my engine so i know my specific impulse earth gravity is constant and i know my um final mass which we're going to say is approximately the mars asset vehicle with the gas tanks empty once we meet up with the transit hab then we can rearrange the equation and find your initial mass to figure out how much propellant you actually need so that that is kind of the the process that we go through for some of these initial vehicle sizing and architecture analysis problems so as i said before we're going to be um practicing for mars at the moon so that includes you know practicing how do we get all these vehicle pieces going together we're going to test out the mars transit hub at the moon um you know we're going to see for the the crew health how the astronauts um adapt to to space for longer duration missions uh you know we're gonna have that pretty much the same design of the rover that they'll be able to use testing out new spacesuits figuring out our planetary protection procedures um yeah so basically the the whole idea is we're doing moon to mars we're going back to the moon in order to prep for mars and so here we can just see some of the comparisons talking about those five hazards of human space flight and how we're going to use the moon to practice so you can tell yeah of course there are some differences at the moon um but still practicing at the moon is going to be a lot closer than practicing anywhere on earth and again this is just another comparison slide of you know kind of the the differences in the architectures and how we're going to be doing those different things so a little bit of the australia connection um you know the australian space agency uh uh is is kind of more of a working to enable the the commercial the industry factors so it's it's different than nasa whereas like nasa is kind of building our own missions and doing things us um the australian space agency is is much more involved in getting private companies to to do space exploration and things like that but nasa is involved with australia as part of the deep space network so the deep space station number 43 in canberra is actually this is a 70 meter diameter parabolic antenna and that's part of three major deep space network locations across the world so that uh you know missions that are really far out you know the mars missions um you know some of the voyager missions going out past the solar system um those can still communicate back with earth and still send their data back to earth so we can figure out what they're doing and with that i think we'll open it up for questions fantastic thank you very much emily i you know if you're asking whether or not there are questions i've just been gathering them as we're going along because the students have been putting them in the chat and we've got dozens and dozens of questions to choose from so first of all thank you so much for the talk um it's absolutely mind-blowing that this is actually something that we're actually planning on doing it's not sort of thinking about maybe one day we could no this is this is plans in motion so could we maybe start there a number of the questions have been around the the notion of like how much lead time do you need to have from maybe we should send people to mars to hey we've just landed people on mars like what's the what's the full time scale of a mission like that from conception to success let's say rather than the alternative yeah so i think a lot of that is figuring out exactly what vehicles we are wanting to use as part of these mission architectures and then kind of backing out the time it's going to take to develop those vehicles and develop the technologies that are needed um so basically you know if we can kind of start with a well let's say we're going to mars and such and such here we're going to need to have the you know landers developed at this time and we're going to need to have the rockets developed at such and such time um so kind of you know i have teammates that are working on both identifying the gaps in current knowledge and the gaps in current technology and then working to figure out a timeline for how quickly do we think that technology can be developed um and you know do we have the funding resources in order to get those developments going on time and things like that so for a mission of this scale you know we're looking at you know especially for some of the the lunar missions that we're hoping to use as as practice you know the plan for the lunar missions is starting in the 2020s so you know we're hoping to have those those uh architecture vehicles um up and running by the end of the decade in order to use as practice and the idea is you know we don't want to build a lunar version test it out um realize like oh that was a horrible design and it didn't work at all or you know just redo things entirely for mars we want to be able to use approximately the same system so that we can take what we learned on the moon and you know use those experiences to make things as similar as possible that implies that you know the astronauts will have less training between you know the differences in the systems it'll hopefully be saving cost by not having to redo developments and hopefully you know be saving time too by not having to redo those developments and redo all the testing um so you know i would say for our current current architecture plans you know we're hoping to have some of these uh these systems up and running um on the moon by the end of the decade so you know if we're hoping to try and get to mars uh some you know as early as the 2030s that's that's pretty ambitious and i mean i like the notion of like from an engineering point of view we're going to go to the moon and we'll we'll use that as a bit of a testing ground but by the same token we don't want to have to do that too many times you know we don't want to get things wrong and have to start again so let's go to the moon and then assume we can actually take stuff to to mars i think it's a it's an interesting point of view the questions literally just come through through which was also on my mind as well how many people would you estimate it takes to get to mars and what i mean by that is like how many people are working on this at the moment what's the size of this project in terms of people yeah so i would say you know currently mars is not an official program at nasa so our mars architecture team is fairly small within the overall you know breadth of human exploration at nasa but if you take into account the whole moon to mars idea um right now with the artemis program ramping up to send astronauts back to the moon you know there are hundreds if not thousands of people working on that so you know the idea would be then you know a lot of those people would then transfer over to mars or you know there would be a blending of the the people and the the knowledge between those two programs so right now our mars architecture team is you know working closely with a lot of the artemis um teams uh to kind of make sure that art what we're planning and actually fits with what they're planning to do on the moon and making sure that they understand hey if we are trying to use the moon as practice for mars you know the systems that they're designing for the moon have to actually work on mars so it's been a lot of collaboration between the different groups and making sure that everyone uh is on the same page so how big are these groups i mean how big is the team that you're you're working with you know when you say it's not a very big team is it like two people is it 200 people how big is the group yeah so our our local mars architecture team here at langley i would say we probably have about 12 people um but i think there's only two of us that are working full-time on the team others are split you know a lot of them are split working on the on the moon stuff too or you know on other science projects other space technology projects um so yeah our team locally is is pretty small i would say across the agency the mars architecture team has uh again probably under a hundred people um at various levels of involvement whereas uh you know some of the artemis teams can have several hundred people working on just one vehicle because you know they're much much closer to actually launching it um someone has their microphone there's some audio coming through so whoever that is if they could turn their microphone off thank you um let's get into a little bit of the nitty gritty because there's a bunch of questions that have come through which are about the technical side of stuff and so you know as as we said in our in our discussion in the lead up to this talk emily there's a bunch of students who are just championing a bit yeah but i want to use that equation i want to do some stuff you put up some trajectories of showing how we get from earth to to mars and one of the questions which came up was why are we chasing mars like you know you sort of go from earth and you you follow it around this and you sort of chase it to catch up wouldn't it be easier to just go the other way and sort of meet it meet it halfway around so what's the problem with that i have a feeling i know but i'm curious to know whether i'm right what's the problem with going the other way yeah so there are a couple issues with trying to go uh backwards around the solar system um but the main one it comes down to is the amount of propellant that's going to be required so when we launch you know as nasa we're launching um east to the over the atlantic ocean and uh in general launches like to go east because you get the added bonus of factoring in the spin from the earth to help give you a little extra boost in your velocity so you know then if you're trying to take off going opposite planetary motion you have to effectively cancel that that velocity out and then also get your velocity to travel across the solar system so you know the propellant needed to uh do that it would just be so much more than um what it would be to to chase mars and in the in the direction of planetary motion right so even though just drawing it on the the simple plan of the solar system it looks like it's a shorter distance or might be an easier trip in some ways you've actually got to cancel out the fact that we're going really fast now um and that actually takes a lot of propellant so am i right in what you're saying that you know if you use the fact that we're already moving that actually makes it easier yeah so if you go back to that rocket equation that's going to say well your delta v your change in velocity is just going to be so large the difference between your mass initial and your mass final that propellant that you're going to need is just going to be too big to be realistic gotcha some of the detailed questions that are coming through about the the equipment that you're taking with you and the the spacecraft that you'll be in for for that period of time um how is it how is it powered like what's the plan for actually keeping the keeping the lights on in this thing for such a long period of time there and back yeah so um solar panels are going to be part of of the um let's see the transit hub will have solar powers um but since the transit hub is going to be uh you know a pretty big vehicle um there will also be uh you know some opportunities to use some alternate uh power sources um and that could be you know pulling from um you know you could use some nuclear that gets a little tricky with you know how do you protect the astronauts from that radiation um when you get down to the surface of mars uh currently we are looking at nuclear powered just because of that issue with the dust storms you don't want to be solely relying on solar power and then have the solar panels get covered with dust and you lose all your power um so you know nuclear is a fairly reliable system that uh you know you won't have to worry about whether or not you can see the sun in order to get that power on the surface right that kind of it leads me to like when you're down on the surface that leads me to another whole series of questions that have come through which is you talked about having to get an enormous amount of stuff to mars uh in order to to just sustain the mission and and have stuff there for people to live in and work with um i'm guessing that it's a little bit further down the track but is there are there considerations about using uh resources that are already at mars in other words getting to mars and going let's dig stuff out of the ground and use that you know is that is that even even a consideration yeah so one of the experiments that is currently on the perseverance rover is called moxie and it's basically a proof of concept to see about you know we said that the atmosphere on mars is primarily carbon dioxide well one of the components for rocket fuel you know in order to have stuff burn you need oxygen so can we split the carbon dioxide and pull the oxygen out in order to use that oxygen as propellant or you know for the astronauts on the surface can we use that for as part of their life support systems so this this moxie experiment was looking at can we pull that oxygen out of the atmosphere and um it has been successful so far at a very very little scale um so you know in order to use that for for the humans you'd need to scale up that that system quite quite a bit um so that is one of the options it's possible in principle yeah yeah yeah so we've got i think we've got time for for maybe a couple more questions so i'm going to throw this one to you now and then we'll see how this one goes and i i hope you don't mind i'm going to ask you it's a i guess a little bit of a cheeky or a tricky question but i'm also guessing that as someone who who works on the project that you work on it's probably not the first time this one's come up so i'm going to give it a go anyway and then you can totally dodge it if you want to or address it face on it's totally up to you but there's a series of questions coming from the students who are looking at this from the point of view of i guess you'd lump it into ethics really saying we have so many things that we need to pay attention to here on this planet how do you justify the amount of effort resources funding to send people to another planet let alone the moon um and so i'm really interested as as someone who like you're obviously pretty early in your in your career and you're working in got to be one of the most exciting places to be an engineer how do you go how do you think about that that issue around the ethics of spending money and time and effort getting to another planet when there's lots of problems here that we can be solving yeah so for one one point is you know oh well if we just had all the people that are working on these types of projects turn around and focus their attention on you know finding a vaccine for covid curing cancer uh you know solving climate change things like that you know oh could we solve all of earth's problems well you know i'm not trained in immunology um you know that's medical stuff is not a big interest of mine um so you know that's kind of one of those areas of sure we could probably figure it out but we would not be the most efficient people to solve some of those problems on the other end you know nasa does a lot of fundamental research for climate science earth science we're using some of the nasa earth observation satellites to actually look down at the earth one of my favorite examples is um you know we're helping farmers figure out when is the best time to plant we're looking at soil conditions how much water is in the soil is there currently a drought going on do we have wildfires popping up and so kind of all of that data can be used to help the farmers grow their crops most efficiently and at the right times to avoid some of those agricultural disasters um we you know are also doing uh you know there is medical research with figuring out stuff with the astronauts how their bodies change in space some of those you know medical advances are coming from that type of research we have a large contingency of flight surgeons aerospace doctors that are that are doing a lot of that research on the human body and um kind of overall in general you know the way i see it is nasa is pushing the boundaries of the technology development for you know the us and the world in general um and a lot of the technology that is developed as part of you know solving these challenging problems for space exploration actually does um filter down into common practice so one of the really cool examples is by trying to reduce mass and make better optics for cameras that technology is actually used in pretty much every cell phone camera now in the world and that was developed for a space mission by one of the engineers at the jet propulsion laboratory in california another example by trying to keep the astronauts safe as part of you know launch and landing conditions when it's really rough on their bodies memory foam that was one of the developments by nasa so you know there's all these these developments that you know we come up with these ideas to solve very specific problems for space exploration that then can be applied to solving real problems here on earth in everyday life so the way i see it is you know by pushing these boundaries of technology development um you know we are influencing the technology and and how people live here on the planet earth um and we're also providing inspiration for people you know there there's more to life than just surviving you know if you're not enjoying life or learning from life um you know that's that's not too great so by providing these these really cool out out of the world um missions we're you know helping provide that that uh curiosity that area for exploration um to inspire people around the world i think that's you've hit on a couple of really nice things there i i like the the notion first of all i mean if you look at things like you know return on investment from from something like the apollo mission where we went to the to the moon the the first time it cost a load of money to do that but the amount that nasa the us the world got back from that from a technology point of view far outweighed the the amount of money that went into it in the first place so there's probably a reason to believe that you'd get the same kind of return on investment here we seem to be strangely wired as a species to need these these big strange exciting exploration goals rather than rather than focusing on on what seems like a a scary dangerous thing like like climate change we need to do both obviously but it's not necessarily a one or the other um is what i'm taking out out of your your answer there listen i think we are going to have to finish that one up there because we've come to the end of our allotted time there are plenty of other questions that i that i could have thrown at you emily and so maybe if you would be prepared for this maybe i could gather those up and send them your way and i'm not expecting necessarily an answer to every single question but would you be prepared to at least get down a few thoughts on some of the some of the questions that stand out to you from the from the ones that have been thrown into the chat with the students today that'd be great okay well then could i get everyone to in the time-honored tradition give a huge round of applause wherever you are to emily judd from nasa for the fabulous talk today and i would like to hand over to one of our fabulous iss scholars i'm going to hand over to ankita from the green group and keita is there ready to go um to give the formal thank you on behalf of us all anki to take it away um hi emilia i'd like to extend a huge thank you on behalf of all of us here at iss we would like to express our gratitude for your time and effort to provide us with an insight into your amazing and truly fascinating work i think i stand with everyone when i say we thoroughly enjoyed this presentation very very much so thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to give us this engaging and thought-provoking lecture about the nasa mars mission once again thank you very very much emily thank you thank you i think we have one more final huge round of applause we can hear it virtually through the airwaves uh for emily judd from nasa thank you so much emily and if you'd like to stick around

Channel: The Professor Harry Messel International Science School

Views: 95

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: sydney, ISS, Harry Messel, International Science School, University of Sydney, science

Id: kWud0xWV5_s

Length: 58min 49sec (3529 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021