A New Concept in Planetary Exploration: ISRU With Power Bursts

Details A New Concept in Planetary Exploration: ISRU With Power Bursts A New Concept in Planetary Exploration: ISRU With Power Bursts

Jan 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000srrt.conf...65s&link_type=abstract

Space Resources Roundtable II, p. 65

Biology

Ammonia, Atmospheric Composition, Carbon Dioxide Concentration, Hydrocarbons, Nitrogen, Oxidizers, Space Exploration, Water, Bursts, Ascent, Carbon Monoxide, Crushing, Drilling, Extraction, Harnesses, Low Earth Orbits, Mars (Planet), Muscles, Oxygen, Robots, Rocks

Scientific paper

The concept of generating power bursts upon demand in space exploration is presented. As acknowledged by two NASA Novel Technology Report (NTR) awards, the concept is new and innovative. As a general background, it must be recalled that power has always been a major limiting factor in exploration, especially in the exploration of far off sites like Mars (contrasted with LEO or GEO). Without the high power ability, no amount of energy (that can only be expended at a low rate, i.e., low power) can accomplish such simple operations as: crushing a rock, hopping over an obstacle, drilling deep, and eventually ascent from the planet to an orbiting craft above, or even the return journey to Earth. The concept presented here is an advance over the much studied In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU); we use ISRU for the extraction of the needed fuel and oxidizer from the local resources, store these gases, and expend them rapidly when needed. In the martian scenario, these gases will be carbon monoxide (fuel) and oxygen (oxidizer) extracted from the atmospheric carbon dioxide; subsequently, higher chemistry is possible after the discovery, and utilization of water which enables the production of an entire spectrum of hydrocarbons and carbohydrates. If nitrogen can also be added at a still later date, many more chemicals in the ammonia based family are possible. At SERC (University of Arizona) we have pioneered all of these chemical productions. In another award-winning innovation, an ultra-light weight material, popularly known as muscle wires, is used in a biology-inspired robot called BiRoD. The expenditure of energy in these materials produces power that results in mechanical motion. The short term power generation is thousands of times the average power that was used to harness the local resource in the first place. At the time of this abstract, BiRoD has been designed, assembled, and shown to work in a primitive way, in its component form; new media have carried the high-profile story all over the nation. At the time of the Congress, we expect to no only have many more pieces of quantitative, engineering data from BiRoD but we still also attempt to bring that robot to the session for an actual demonstration.

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