Robotic Support Serving On-Site Human Mars Exploration

Chapin, Ned
Information Systems Consultant, InfoSci Inc., Box 7117, Menlo Park CA 94026-7117
mailto:NedChapin@acm.org

Preprint. (2005)

NASA’s Michael Griffin in 2005 set NASA’s priorities for implementing the USA’s “Vision for Space Exploration.” Those priorities shift the focus in NASA to human lunar and later Mars exploration, away from and rather than robotic exploration. Yet as simulations at The Mars Society’s research stations and work at NASA’s Ames and Johnson centers have shown, the human presence on site can be made more productive with the appropriate aid of robotics. Robotics can relieve a person from having to do some or all of a task, thus saving a person time or effort. Robotics can extend or enhance what a person can do, or do something more capably than a person can do, thus enriching potential mission accomplishment. Robotics can empower a person by making it potentially possible to do what otherwise would be too risky or too expensive in time or effort to do. More than fifteen opportunities are sketched as examples of where robotics could improve human on-site Mars or lunar exploration accomplishments.

For such a use of robotics, the robot-project selection criteria point mostly to four main areas of target contribution: life support, habitat integrity, data handling, and mission functions. Secondary selection criteria are more mundane and more unforgiving, and include: cube, weight, power drain and supply, reliability, usability, and maintainability. In the USA, likely sources of concepts for human-supporting robotic projects include The Mars Society, academic institutions, NASA centers, and commercial organizations. Overseas, The Mars Society, research centers, and government agencies are likely sources. In practice, the implementations of concepts into actual working robots will be done or contracted or financed primarily by commercial organizations and academic centers strong in robotics or space exploration, by specialized government agencies such as NASA and ESA, and by space-oriented commercial organizations.

KEYWORDS

robotic technology, nanotechnology, life support, mission objectives, mission accomplishment

Keywords

Robotic Exploration