The Importance of Reconnaissance to Prepare for Human Exploration of Mars

Abstract:

This talk will present an update on the challenges we face in our goal to put humans on the surface of Mars, with a specific focus on reconnaissance needs. Proper reconnaissance will allow us to gain valuable, pre-mission information that will be crucial to successfully landing, sustaining, and returning crewed missions to Mars.

One of our top priorities for the new decade include validating the viability of water feedstocks (both hydrated minerals and subsurface ice). Ground truthing and using orbiter data to develop next generation maps of subsurface ice and hydrated minerals is essential to our understanding of the resources that will be available to us. The Subsurface Water-Ice Mapping (SWIM) team has now mapped the northern hemisphere and the southern hemispheres of Mars. Others are improving maps of hydrated mineral deposits across the planet recording both their location and abundance. Global maps for both water feedstocks will be essential to selecting a viable human landing site. This talk will also explore the technologies and missions necessary to validate these findings, such as next generation orbital reconnaissance and improved hi-res imaging coverage (e.g. the planned Mars Ice Mapper mission), as well as accessing the ice with a future special regions drill to understand what is in the ice.

Other key areas of recon include, weather, communications, and civil engineering.

Updating the communications infrastructure at Mars to support increased data rates for science, reconnaissance, and future human missions is a key precursor for the coming decade of exploration.

In exploring each of these topics we will discuss key knowledge gaps and potential next steps to enable human exploration of the red planet.