Project: How Advanced Life Support Systems can Include Extraterrestrial Resources

An important factor which needs to be considered for future manned mission to the Moon and Mars in the design of future life support systems is the potential availability of in-situ resources. Manned space activities generally represent multi-billion dollar undertakings. The transport and storage of crucial life support systems and re-sources can be identified as one major cost driver, especially for the far destinations Moon and Mars. However, Mars and Moon offer a wide variety of natural resources, which could be implemented in the design of an ad-vanced life support system in order to reduce significantly the costly re-supply requirement from Earth.

Mars, for example, provides a thin CO2 atmosphere as well as water deposits assumed in the polar regions and in the upper layers of the Martian soil (permafrost), which could be taken for an oxygen and water production plant. The Moon's regolith, for example, consists of up to 50% of chemically bounded oxygen, which could be used for the establishment of a lunar oxygen production plant, as proposed by DLR and NASA. On a lunar south pole mission, for example, the potential availability of water could reduce the open loop mass requirements. Depending on the quality of the water, it may or may not then be a viable option to use this water for propulsion and life support. So for a permanent lunar base established to mine water and/or oxygen, the reduction in re-quired stored supplies might eliminate the need for processing hardware. The Moon's and Mars's soil could also be used as shielding material for manned habitats or as topsoil for bioregenerative life support systems (e.g. sowing of plants).

In this project, the potential of in-situ resource utilization should be critically analyzed. This includes an assess-ment of potentially available resources, in particular on the Moon and Mars, and their possible use in an advanced life support system scenario.

This is the description as given me by Dr. Michael Reichert who will be my advisor at the DLR.

DLR is the German Aerospace Center and stands for "Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt."

And I wish I knew how to make the umlauts (sp?) on top of the "o" on Koln and the "u" in fur.