A Resilient and Scalable Architecture for In-Situ Propellant Production on Mars Using Large Trucks. ⚡️
NASA RASC-AL 2022 Competition 1st Place Overall & Best in Theme; presented at ASCEND 2022
Our architecture concept for RASC-AL 2022—“Bipropellant All-in-one In-situ Resource Utilization Truck and Mobile Autonomous Reactor Generating Electricity” (BART & MARGE)—describes a system where pairs of BART and MARGE travel around Mars in tandem; BART handles all aspects of production, storage, and distribution of propellant, while MARGE provides power for the operation.
Links 🔗
・Publication: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2022-4315
・NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/langley/nasa-selects-university-teams-to-tackle-moon-mars-exploration-challenges/
・MIT News: https://news.mit.edu/2022/design-mars-propellant-production-trucks-wins-nasa-competition-0711
Overview 🔍
BART & MARGE is a fully integrated, fully mobile architecture with no fixed centralized infrastructure to reliably produce large quantities of Methalox bipropellant by 2037 from thick ice sheets at the mid-northern latitudes of Mars. In a team of 8 MIT students, we designed this architecture for the 2022 RASC-AL design competition. It was required to produce 50 t/yr of propellant on Mars using water from subsurface ice reserves, to operate for at least five years without human maintenance, and to be landed through one or more landings of 45t and 300 m^3 each.
The desired system-level attributes were high reliability and operational flexibility. Based on per-ton proxy risk metrics such as cumulative travel distance, material transfer connections/disconnections, and boreholes drilled, distributed architectures of fixed infrastructure served by resource acquisition rovers were ruled out, and the design space for a fully integrated, fully mobile approach was explored:
1. BART is an end-to-end “ice to propellant” system and includes a RedWater drill, scroll compressors, water electrolysis and Sabatier reaction chambers, cryocoolers, heat exchangers, fuel cells, and 25t storage tanks.
2. It is powered by MARGE, our mobile power truck design based on NASA’s upcoming 40 kWe fission surface power reactor.
The proposed campaign includes a precursor ice scouting and de-risking mission, and a main mission with 4 tandems of BART & MARGE. Each BART has a nominal production capacity of 35 t/yr, making the campaign double-fault tolerant. Other risk-reduction features include material flow connections tested and sealed on Earth, ready to produce on Mars with just a power cable connection, and a technology demo of BART & MARGE during the precursor mission. The integrated approach enables synergies such as reusing waste heat to save energy, fully utilizing available energy sources, and gives rise to new capabilities such as delivering propellant to any Mars ascent vehicle location while also enabling simple scaling of production in the future. The campaign can be executed with three flights of 45t each.
Our BART & MARGE is innovative, resilient, feasible, and scalable and can supply Methalox on Mars at a 15-year average cost of $1.2m per ton — an architecture to consider for NASA's current Moon to Mars plan.
Overview Video 🎥
Personal Responsibilities 🎤
As one of the 3 members of the architecture team, I designed and chose:
・BART’s drilling system
・The batteries
・Launch timeframes
・Cable (connecting BART & MARGE) length and distance
・Radiation shielding against the Martian environment and our Kilopower reactor
・Filmed and edited our competition video
Takeaways
At first, we were determined to develop a stationary ISRU system standard in the industry. We started our project with this assumption, and I started considering the stationary ISRU layout. However, several months in, we realized that we were almost replicating ISRU designs already in the industry; instead, we wanted to revolutionize the ISRU approach using this competition as our chance. So through many discussions, we re-challenged our original assumptions and took a risk by committing to an out-of-the-box approach that was fully-mobile and fully-integrated.
This experience definitely taught me that taking a leap of faith can be good sometimes — something I had often avoided. Rethinking and reproaching something you've already decided is difficult, but I realized it's important and necessary to creating great designs. I also learned a lot about mission design in the space industry; being able to interact with leaders in this field through the conference has sparked an interest in me to pursue this field in the future!
