You have been hired to plan a mission to Mars. Your employer knows very little a

Question

You have been hired to plan a mission to Mars. Your employer knows very little about space travel; he simply wants to be the first individual to send a mission to Mars. He has vast but not unlimited resources. Your first step is to educate him about the realities of space flight and the pros and cons of various options.

A. Give at least one advantage for each option. For example, answer both “what is an advantage of one-way over round trip travel?” and “ What is an advantage of round-trip over one way?” Try to be as specific as you can.

(a) One way vs. round trip

(b) Manned vs. unmanned

(c) Hohmann vs. fast transfer

(d) Landing vs. orbiting

B. Your employer says “If you were to send a mission to Mars, what kind would it be? Describe it for me.”

C. After listening to your presentation, your employer says “What I really want to do is to land a spacecraft on Mars and dig down into the surface to find water. Can you tell me how to do this with minimal cost? Also, once I have the water, how might I use that to benefit future Mars missions?” What is your response?

Explanation / Answer

A. a) One way vs Round trip

one advantage of one way trip over round trip is cost benifit. Due to less distance to be travelled, less fuel is required, and moreover, due to not carrying that additional fuel, even lesser fule to carry the mass of this fuel is required. this reduces the size of spacecraft a lot and saVes a lot of fuel too.

one advantage of round trip over one way is that any material samples can be brought back to earth for very detailed analysis which cant be performed on mars. Also, manned mission are also possible with round trips

b) Manned vs unmanned missions

one advantage of manned mission is that onboard equipment control is easy, and experiments including effect of a journey to mass and coming back, life in low gravity etc can be performed

one advantage of unmanned mission over manned mission is that no life support systems are required on board that leaves a lot of volume for more scientific equipment, and reduces mass of the space shuttle and saves money as well

c) Hohmann vs fast transfer

one advantage of hohman transfer over any transfer is its fuel efficiency. It includes firing of thrusters along the tangent to the current trajectory to get into another one, and the firing is always done at apogee at perigee. It is the most fuel efficient and hence economic transfer

one advantage of fast transfewr over hohmann transfer is saving time. Hohmann transfer comnsumes a lot more time whereas fast transfers take very less time

d) Landing vs orbitting

one advantage of landing over orbitting is that landing helps to collect physical samples and then directly examine them

one advantage on orbitting is that it does not require on board equipment for direct measurement, and hence indirect measurements are performed which saves money ( lesser equipment) and fuel ( no fuewl required for landing)

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