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In a piece on Spectrum, NASA detailed their plans to mine dust on heavenly bodies in our solar system, and turn it into rocket fuel. That already sounds difficult, but according to NASA "Swamp Works" team leader Kurt W. Leucht, mining on Mars is even harder than you'd think. For example, it takes about 225 pounds of rocket fuel to send 1 pound of cargo to the surface of mars. Not only does that make packing fuel for a return trip impractical, but it severely limits the hardware you can send in the first place. The simple act of digging is also much more difficult in low gravity environments, as miners don't have much weight to "push" shovels into the surface with. The team already prototyped a mining drone called "RASSOR" that uses spinning buckets to scrape up materiel, and even detailed a whole accompanying system to unload the rock, refine the material into rocket fuel, and deliver it to a tank with another drone. NASA still has some big problems to tackle, and says that future systems will be tested on the moon before heading to Mars.
The idea for this Mars rocket-fuel factory is that it will all be packed up into a neat little box, shipped to Mars, and deployed and started up on the Martian surface long before human explorers arrive. Human missions to Mars will depend on this factory to autonomously produce and store fuel for their return trip even before those astronauts launch from Earth. There are also teams at NASA figuring out how to grow all sorts of different stuff during transit and on Mars. Including potatoes. So what needs to happen between now and then? Well, quite a lot. NASA has years of experience with standalone landers and independent rovers operating on the surface of Mars. And our most recent rovers-Curiosity, which landed in 2012, and the Mars 2020 rover, to launch in 2020-do have a certain amount of autonomy built in. But the complexity of this Mars rocket-fuel factory, and the long runtime and level of autonomy that will be required of such a system, will take things to a whole new level.
The idea for this Mars rocket-fuel factory is that it will all be packed up into a neat little box, shipped to Mars, and deployed and started up on the Martian surface long before human explorers arrive. Human missions to Mars will depend on this factory to autonomously produce and store fuel for their return trip even before those astronauts launch from Earth. There are also teams at NASA figuring out how to grow all sorts of different stuff during transit and on Mars. Including potatoes. So what needs to happen between now and then? Well, quite a lot. NASA has years of experience with standalone landers and independent rovers operating on the surface of Mars. And our most recent rovers-Curiosity, which landed in 2012, and the Mars 2020 rover, to launch in 2020-do have a certain amount of autonomy built in. But the complexity of this Mars rocket-fuel factory, and the long runtime and level of autonomy that will be required of such a system, will take things to a whole new level.