Selecting Technologies for Mars Missions

What are the optimal combinations of Mars exploration missions that can be developed within certain technology R&D budgets?

Mars program goals include discovering whether life ever arose there, determining the planet's climate history and the evolution of its surface and interior, and preparing for human missions. We began our study by developing concepts for missions to accomplish these goals during the timeframe of 2009-2020. They are summarized in the table below.

Next, we developed quantitative capability requirements to enable the potential missions, and identified the technology development efforts required to enable those capabilities, taking note of their funding levels, probabilities of success, and the alternate technologies available for use if the new technology cannot be successfully developed.

We picked three levels of technology investment for a 12-year period: $25 million per year, $50 million per year, and $75 million per year, and used an optimization program to determine which sets of technology would yield the best science return at each funding level. The results appear in Table 2.

The table presents two alternate choices at the $50 million per year level. For that budget, one can either develop three missions (Mars Smart Lander, Mars Sample Return, and Scout Mission) expected to result in the maximum amount of science, or a greater number of missions that would provide more diverse technology development but have less potential for science return.

Note that for this study, budgets were not permitted to exceed the budget cap in any given year, even if the cumulative budget over the course of 12 years would have been maintained. Also, only the costs of developing technology were considered, not the costs of the missions. In a subsequent study, still being completed, the expenditure schedule is more flexible and mission costs are included.