Mars Exploration News  
MARSDAILY
MIT design for Mars propellant production trucks wins NASA competition
by Sara Cody | MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Boston MA (SPX) Jul 12, 2022

An MIT team's winning design for NASA's annual Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts - Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) features the Bipropellant All-in-one In-situ Resource Utilization Truck (BART, left) and Mobile Autonomous Reactor Generating Electricity (MARGE, right). BART and MARGE are intended to travel around Mars in tandem; BART handles all aspects of production, storage, and distribution of fuel produced while MARGE provides power for the operation.

Using the latest technologies currently available, it takes over 25,000 tons of rocket hardware and propellant to land 50 tons of anything on the planet Mars. So, for NASA's first crewed mission to Mars, it will be critical to learn how to harvest the red planet's local resources in order to "live off the land" sustainably.

On June 24, NASA announced that an MIT team received first place in the annual Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts - Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition for their in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) design that produces propellant on Mars from local resources instead of bringing it from Earth.

Their project "Bipropellant All-in-one In-situ Resource Utilization Truck and Mobile Autonomous Reactor Generating Electricity" (BART and 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. After presenting their concept to a panel of NASA experts and aerospace industry leaders at the RASC-AL Forum in June, the team took first place overall at the competition and was also recognized as "Best in Theme."

"Previous ISRU concepts utilized several different small rovers and a fixed central plant, but MIT's BART and MARGE concept is composed of essentially just two types of fully mobile, integrated large trucks with no central plant," says Chloe Gentgen, PhD candidate in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) who served as team lead for the project. "The absence of a central plant enables easy scalability of the architecture, and being fully mobile and integrated, our system has the flexibility to produce propellant wherever the best ice reserves can be found and then deliver it wherever it is needed."

Gentgen led an interdisciplinary group of undergraduate and graduate students from MIT, including Guillem Casadesus Vila, a visiting undergraduate student in AeroAstro from the Centre de Formacio Interdisciplinaria Superior at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya; Madelyn Hoying, a PhD candidate in the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics program within the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology; AeroAstro alum Jayaprakash Kambhampaty '22, rising MIT senior Mindy Long of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); rising sophomore Laasya Nagareddy of the Department of Mathematics; rising junior John Posada of AeroAstro; and rising sophomore Marina Ten Have of EECS.

The team was formed last September when interested students joined the project. AeroAstro PhD candidate George Lordos, who founded the MIT Space Resources Workshop and who has led or advised all MIT NASA competition teams since 2017, was a mentor for the project team. Jeffrey Hoffman, professor of the practice in AeroAstro; and Olivier de Weck, Apollo Program Professor and professor of astronautics and engineering systems in AeroAstro, served as faculty advisors.

"One year ago, the MOXIE experiment led by Dr. Michael Hecht and our team's advisor, Professor Jeffrey Hoffman, produced the first oxygen on Mars. Today, we are on the cusp of orbital test flights that will bring us closer to the first human mission to Mars," says Lordos.

"As humans venture to other worlds, finding and utilizing local water and carbon resources will be indispensable for sustainable exploration of the solar system, so the objective of our MIT team's concept is an exciting and topical technology."

The MIT team addressed the RASC-AL theme "Mars Water-based ISRU Architecture," which required delivering the target 50 tons of propellant at the end of each year and the ability to operate for at least five years without human maintenance. A few other constraints were placed, chief among them that teams could rely on one or more landings of 45 tons of mass and 300 cubic meters of volume on Mars, leaving it to university teams to propose an architecture, budget, and a flight schedule to support their mission.

They developed a comprehensive Mars mission architecture and defined a comprehensive concept of operations, from a precursor ice scouting and technology demonstration mission in 2031 to the main propellant production, storage, and delivery mission in 2036. BART is an end-to-end "ice-to-propellant" system that gathers water from Martian subsurface ice and extracts carbon dioxide from the red planet's atmosphere to synthesize liquid methane and liquid oxygen bipropellant. These are then stored onboard at cryogenic temperatures until delivery directly into a rocket's propellant tanks.

BART is accompanied by MARGE, a 40 kilowatt electric mobile nuclear reactor based on NASA's Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology project (KRUSTY, which also inspired the MIT team's name) that generates power from nuclear fission to support long-duration operations on distant planets.

For the team's proposed mission, four tandems of BART and MARGEs will roam the region known as Arcadia Planitia at the mid-northern latitudes of Mars following a prospecting rover named LISA (Locating Ice Scouting Assistant) in search of accessible ice to use for propellant production. The entire system has 100 tons of storage capacity and can produce 156 tons per year, against a demand of 50 tons per year, and requires only three landings.

"When designing our concept, we focused on reliability and operational flexibility as our system-level design principles, to guarantee that the architecture could provide the propellant needed for a Mars ascent vehicle to be refilled before the first humans arrive on Mars, and that even after multiple years of robotic-only operations. Ultimately, our design achieved double-fault tolerance," explains Casadesus Vila, who served as architecture lead on the project.

"Next, we plan to present the BART and MARGE concept at an aerospace conference to get feedback from the ISRU community, and we will then describe the analysis work we have done in more detail for publication in a peer-reviewed journal," adds Gentgen.

More than 50 teams responded to the initial call for RASC-AL entries, where participants submitted a proposal and a two-minute video. While this year marks the first time an MIT team took the top spot overall, MIT is no stranger to the RASC-AL competition. Previously, MIT placed first in the graduate division in 2017 and 2010 and second overall in 2016.

In addition, MIT teams supported by Space Resources Workshop have won awards at other NASA competitions, including First Place Overall and Most Water Collected at the 2021 RASC-AL Special Edition for the HYDRATION III Mars Ice drilling system, and the Path to Flight and Industry Collaboration Awards for the MELLTT lunar tower system at the 2020 BIG Idea Challenge.

Both Gentgen and Lordos spearheaded a sustained effort to increase MIT student participation in NASA-sponsored projects and competitions. This year, they were recognized for their leadership with the Apollo Program Prize given by MIT AeroAstro during their annual recognition ceremony in the spring.

"George Lordos and Chloe Gentgen brought together MIT students from all academic levels and four different departments. They mentored and led them throughout the past year and demonstrated how MIT AeroAstro is a great program providing system integration," says de Weck. "The team framed their search for a superior ISRU architecture by stating that the question wasn't how to produce propellant on Mars, but rather how to do so reliably and in a scalable way. Their application of state-of-the-art systems engineering yielded this award-winning, novel, and robust Mars propellant production architecture. We hope to see MIT's BART and MARGE at Arcadia Planitia on Mars in the not-too-distant future."

Research Report:"BART and MARGE: Bipropellant All-in-one In-situ Resource Utilization Truck and Mobile Autonomous Reactor Generating Electricity"


Related Links
BART and MARGE project page
Mars News and Information at MarsDaily.com
Lunar Dreams and more


Thanks for being here;
We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain.

With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords.

Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year.

If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Contributor
$5 Billed Once


credit card or paypal
SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter
$5 Billed Monthly


paypal only


MARSDAILY
NASA's Perseverance Scouts Mars Sample Return Campaign Landing Sites
Pasadena CA (JPL) Jul 12, 2022
The six-wheeled explorer has inspected a stretch of the Red Planet to see if it is flat enough for NASA's next Mars lander. NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is conducting its science campaign, taking samples at Jezero Crater's ancient river delta, but it's also been busy scouting. The rover is looking for locations where the planned Mars Sample Return (MSR) Campaign can land spacecraft and collect sample tubes Perseverance has filled with rock and sediment. The sites being scouted are under consider ... read more

Comment using your Disqus, Facebook, Google or Twitter login.



Share this article via these popular social media networks
del.icio.usdel.icio.us DiggDigg RedditReddit GoogleGoogle

MARSDAILY
Chinese scientists help solve riddle of Moon's largest crater

Advanced Navigation sets sight to be the first Australian company to reach the Moon

Can China claim ownership rights on the Moon

Porosity of the moon's crust reveals bombardment history

MARSDAILY
Third Tianlian II-series satellite launched

Shenzhou-14 Taikonauts conduct in-orbit science experiments, prepare for space walks

Wheels on China's Zhurong rover keep stable with novel material

Construction of China's first commercial spacecraft launch site starts in Hainan

MARSDAILY
Hopping space dust may influence the way asteroids look and move

Asteroid Bennu Reveals its Surface is Like a Plastic Ball Pit

Surface of asteroid Bennu soft like plastic ball pit, OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finds

SwRI-led study provides new insights about surface, structure of asteroid Bennu

MARSDAILY
You can help scientists study the atmosphere on Jupiter

SwRI scientists identify a possible source for Charon's red cap

NASA's Europa Clipper Mission Completes Main Body of the Spacecraft

Gemini North Telescope Helps Explain Why Uranus and Neptune Are Different Colors

MARSDAILY
SwRI researcher shows how elliptical craters could shed light on age of Saturn's moons

Scientists model landscape formation on Titan, revealing an Earth-like alien world

MARSDAILY
Planet signs contract to provide German Federal Agencies with daily satellite imagery

NASA's New Mineral Dust Detector Readies for Launch

BlackSky Wins $4.4 Million IARPA Contract to Provide Advanced Artificial Intelligence for Space-Based Dynamic Monitoring

Great Air Quality for the Great Lakes Region

MARSDAILY
Short space trips for paying passengers on the way

NASA Highlights Climate Research on Cargo Launch, Sets Coverage

Terran Orbital completes CAPSTONE's First TCM Burn

Jacobs Awarded $3.9B Engineering and Science Contract at NASA

MARSDAILY
The life puzzle: the location of land on a planet can affect its habitability

To search for alien life, astronomers will look for clues in the atmospheres of distant planets

Undead planets: the unusual conditions of the first exoplanet detection

NASA's Webb reveals steamy atmosphere of distant planet in detail









The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2024 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. All articles labeled "by Staff Writers" include reports supplied to Space Media Network by industry news wires, PR agencies, corporate press officers and the like. Such articles are individually curated and edited by Space Media Network staff on the basis of the report's information value to our industry and professional readership. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Statement Our advertisers use various cookies and the like to deliver the best ad banner available at one time. All network advertising suppliers have GDPR policies (Legitimate Interest) that conform with EU regulations for data collection. By using our websites you consent to cookie based advertising. If you do not agree with this then you must stop using the websites from May 25, 2018. Privacy Statement. Additional information can be found here at About Us.