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THE TEMPERATURE ranges from a balmy 80 to an icy -200 degrees Fahrenheit. The atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and too thin to breathe. So thin, in fact, that it barely slows down the barrages of micro-meteorites. There’s no ozone layer to block the sun’s intense ultraviolet radiation. And, where there aren’t sheer cliffs, deep chasms or bomb-like craters, the landscape is littered with rocks and boulders.
Exploring Mars presents a monumental challenge for humanity. But for the students in “Aerospace Engineering 599,” exploring Mars was a far more pressing problem. Three graduate-level credits were riding on it.
For their midterm project, each student in instructor Madhu Thangavelu’s “Space Exploration/Architecture Concepts Synthesis Studio” had presented an idea for some phase of exploration. For the final, the class forged a single coherent vision of a Mars mission.
Both times, the students had to present their plans before a distinguished panel of aerospace experts – including the entire Caltech Mars mission design team, Mars scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and senior USC engineering faculty. In May, Thangavelu accompanied six students to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they laid out their vision before the space agency’s Mars mission planners.
“NASA was impressed with the boldness of our mission,” says Thangavelu, an adjunct professor in the USC School of Engineering who is himself a 1985 graduate of the USC School of Architecture.
THE PLAN READS like something out of Robert Heinlein’s fantasies: a 950-day mission, including the half-year rocket trip each way. Six astronauts scouring the Red Planet’s surface for 600 days. A nifty habitat with an inflatable membrane interior covered by an adobe exterior of heat- and cold-insulating Martian dirt bricks (great protection from radiation, dust storms and micrometeorite showers). A three-man, live-in rover that can tow trailers loaded with equipment and supplies for several-month jaunts. A smaller emergency rover for use in rescues.
And there’s more: a partially transparent life-science module, where crewmembers can experiment with growing plants in natural and artificial light, in both Martian and Earth soils, and at different temperatures and atmospheric pressures. Facilities to recycle carbon dioxide, oxygen, water and biomass. Plus a three-year supply of food, water and air.
Come down to Earth!
“All of this,” Thangavelu insists, “is existing technology or technology that we will have in place by 2012 or 2015. And I think we could put all of it up in orbit with about a dozen space shuttle loads.”
THE INDIAN-BORN aerospace consultant’s philosophy is simple: “If you can dream it, you can build it. But you surely can’t build it without the dream.”
Thangavelu sees tremendous untapped potential in his Mars seminar students, who tend to be a balanced mix of aerospace industry professionals and full-time architecture and engineering graduate students. Blending the structured, scientific, meticulous thinking of young engineers with the contemplative, synthetic mind-set of young architects fosters great creativity, he says. If the students’ soaring concepts prove flawed, that’s no different from what goes on everyday at NASA and corporate aerospace companies.
“Most ideas are inadequate during the initial iterations. But a good idea opens up new channels, and keeps getting better. This is how resilient, strong-boned ideas are born in the real world,” says Thangavelu, who has taught the interdisciplinary class at USC four times since 1994.
FOR HIS MIDTERM project, aerospace engineering student Mike Myers proposed an airborne solution to getting around the inhospitable Martian terrain: a blimp. Propelled by two small fans, Myers’ 20-meter-long dirigible could carry a 28-pound payload (sufficient to haul light instruments). Architecture student Manasi Khopkar wowed classmates and colleagues with her stylish renderings of a six-wheeled, pressurized, battery-powered Mars rover with swivel captain’s chairs.
Madhu Gupta, another architecture student, knocked a few socks off with her plans for a Mars habitat. Picture a 3,000-square-foot lightweight dome, covered with pressurized plastic membranes, including a mesh layer to stop micro-meteorites. A single habitat, constructed from materials weighing 70 pounds, would house a six-person crew for 28 to 80 days in (judging by Gupta’s impressive drawings) Martha Stewart Living comfort.
Aerospace engineering student Aaron Kiely, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and has applied to NASA’s astronaut candidate program, came closest to hitting the perfect creative groove with his midterm project: a workspace-laboratory with an outer shell of hollow plastic bricks. Made from stackable, identical halves, the bricks are easily snapped together and filled with Martian dirt.
THE FINAL JOINT class project incorporated many other ideas, including communications satellites, a drilling array to search for water and a Mars-based nuclear power plant. Ironically, this last idea was without doubt the seminar’s most controversial one. Reactor, fuel and a second complete backup unit would all need to be launched from Earth, posing some risk of a terrestrial nuclear accident. But, Thangavelu insists, “nuclear-powered rockets were tested and proved feasible long ago. We’ve been sending nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines around the world for decades.”
Whether or not Mars exploration is fueled by fission, Thangavelu believes his students’ ideas will pave the way.
“We will go back to the moon, send expeditions to Mars, and someday go to all the other wonderful places in our solar system and beyond,” he says. “And it will be people like these students who will plan it. I believe that some of these dreams will eventually come true.”
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