Space Exploration Methods

Great Essays
The future of space exploration starts today with the Space Launch System. Soon we will be able to go farther and faster than ever before to explore Mars and everything beyond. There are many difficult choices to be made before this is possible. We must choose a transportation method for the crew to travel these vast distances. SEP-Chem and the Hybrid Method are the two most promising methods. We must also be able to use Mars’s natural resources to our advantage and explore new ways of getting to other planets by using gravity with current propulsion technology. The SEP-Chem and Hybrid Method are similar in their initial stages of deployment. With the timeline to send humans to Mars and its moons in the mid 2030’s regardless of which system …show more content…
For humans to stay healthy it is recommended that, “an adult male needs about 3 liters per day while an adult female needs about 2.2 liters per day” according to the United States Geological survey. Mars missions will require a lot of water for each crew member to stay healthy. We will need to bring all of our water with us or find a way to extract it from the Martian land. In 2015 NASA announced an important discovery about running water on the surface of Mars. Liquid water flows according to NASA, appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times”. Hydrated salts lowered the freezing point of the water essentially creating brine making it possible for water to flow on the surface of Mars. Future Mars missions could greatly benefit from this discovery with a source of water confirmed on Mars, we can collect it for studying and eventually consumption. Once we have examined the Brine and determined it safe for human consumption, we can begin a desalination process to create drinking water. By tapping into this water source we would no longer have to drink so much water for a single mission, which would lower the payload weight at launch ultimately saving money for other …show more content…
One of the most recent examples of this is the New Horizons probe’s journey to Pluto and beyond. The team used the gravity well of the gas giant Jupiter to speed the probe up so it would fly by Pluto in 2015. Another more dramatic example of using the gravity assists maneuver was the Apollo 13 lunar mission. Apollo 13 was badly damaged by an explosion of the oxygen tanks which crippled the craft rendering the command module useless and with it the engines. Apollo 13 used the Moon’s gravity to slingshot themselves around for a return trajectory to Earth with the help of the Lunar Lander’s

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