Analytical study of NASA’s Mars mission architecture

Abstract

In these days it seems that, in another context, a new space race has began withthe objective of reaching Mars with humans on board for the first time. Exempli-fied by various agencies and private companies’ efforts, such as NASA orSpaceX,at this same moment their projects are mainly focused on developing the necessarymeans to reach the red planet as soon as possible. For this reason, this study aimsto develop the necessary tools to analyse every phase of an Earth to Mars missionfocusing on NASA’s proposed mission architecture. So, would it be feasible to bringhumans to Mars using the suggested timelines and technologies?To try to answer to this question, this thesis attempts to develop a series of soft-ware gadgets using numerical methods, with the purpose of obtaining a set of dataregarding the existent launch opportunities to travel from Earth to Mars througha specified date range. The study also includes the design of a series of graphicalinterfaces to support the analysis of the manoeuvres to be performed in a missionof this characteristics. Thus, with the initial obtained information and with theassistance of the developed tools, two mission timelines including the analysis ofevery manoeuvre to be performed have been defined and presented in this report;one of them according to NASA’sDesign Reference Architecture, while the otherone suggests an architecture aimed to create a one million population city on Mars’soil.The results obtained indicate that a powerful analysis tool for inspecting the pre-liminary phases of a space mission design has been developed in this thesis, fulfillingthe mandatory requirements and being useful to study any space mission to Marsin the future