Developing thermal testing methods for a locomotion system of a Phobos rover

In 2024, a rover will leave Earth on a daring mission to explore Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars. Phobos has a severe thermal environment, with surface temperatures ranging from -153 °C to +57 °C and an 8-hour diurnal cycle. This work focuses on validating the performance of the locomotion system of the Mars Moon eXploration (MMX) rover....

ESS: A Settlement Site Selection Tool for a Human Mars Base

In recent years, private entities have joined the race to send humans to the Red Planet. While Mars is well defined as the next frontier for human space flight, little work has been done towards identifying possible settlement sites on its surface. The current site proposals use a bottom-up approach, that is focusing on one settlement site and...

Optimising Landing-site Selection for ExoMars

Only 6 out of 16 missions to the surface of Mars have been successful, all have been NASA missions. The landing sites of all the successful missions have been carefully selected in a process where: 1) scientists propose candidate landing sites, 2) engineers check whether these sites allow for a safe landing, and 3) over a few iterations, the...