Yes this has been explored several times. Most thorough report was for HERRO, they did a comparison study which showed that a single mission to Mars orbit could do as much science return as three missions to the surface, of course for far less cost and less risk to the astronauts, and also means it is easy for them to return home at the end of the mission.
Here is a powerpoint presentation from the HERRO team, with details of the comparison.
The Telerobotics Symposium held in 2012 also came to the conclusion that it would be a major missed opportunity to send a human mission to Mars orbit and not use it to explore the surface telerobotically.
The HERRO study is several years out of date now. With the rapid advances in computer technology, games software, telerobotics, remote controlled avatars, virtual reality technology etc I think a new study along the same lines would find even more advantage for the astronauts in orbit.
Video showing what it would be like to be in a spacecraft in the stunning HERRO Molniya orbit (this uses a rather futuristic looking spacecraft as that is all I could manage to put into this orbit in Orbiter, but the orbit is accurate).
Lockheed Martin image of astronauts exploring Deimos,
There is also the possibility of telepresence type exploration of Mars even from Earth if we can only improve communications bandwidth, using methods developed for real time games -where you have the same issue that there are latency issues for the players. The games work by guessing what everyone will do next, and then modelling that in your own copy of the game environment on your computer. Then warping to what the other players and monsters actually did as more information comes in.
In case of remote exploration from Mars you'd need to also indicate areas of uncertainty in the scene. E.g. as you walk around a rock, you'd see the other side interpolated perhaps with a gray area of uncertainty about what is there. And - you'd have a gray area indicating uncertainty about your own position also. So wouldn't be as fast as close up telepresence, but you'd be able to do a whole lot better than we can do now.
Then, you can also proceed as we are doing already, by sending rovers from Earth and making them more and more autonomous able to make decisions for themselves. This way individual missions cost much less. Probably the autonomous rovers won't ever in near future be able to accomplish as much as with the other alternatives. But on the other hand they cost far less so you could send many more rovers to many locations on Mars.
If you have the budget, you can combine them. Send lots of autonomous rovers to Mars, but equip them all with telerobotic capabilities - mainly means having stereo cameras which they would probably have anyway - and equipping them with hands with haptic feedback so that you can feel what you are doing by telepresence. Then also when bandwidth permits control some of them from Earth, in close to real time as with game technology idea.
Then from time to time, when you can afford it, send humans to orbit around Mars, and they can then control any of those many landers and rovers telerobotically. Perhaps the humans go there for just one year every decade or so, but in course of that one year sojourn they can control dozens of rovers on the surface of Mars and get a huge amount done, also of course based on whatever those rovers had discovered already before they got there. And when they are gone, the rovers continue exploring, following up all the new leads and ideas that came out of the human guided close up exploration.
I think that before spending like billions of dollars on exploring Mars with humans we should do proper comparison studies of the various ways of doing it!
For more details see my article on Science20: To Explore Mars With Likes Of Occulus Rift & Virtuix Omni - From Mars Capture Orbit, Phobos Or Deimos
See also
Ten Reasons NOT To Live On Mars - Great Place To Explore
"Ten Reasons Not To Live On Mars, Great Place To Explore" - On The Space Show
Here is a powerpoint presentation from the HERRO team, with details of the comparison.
The Telerobotics Symposium held in 2012 also came to the conclusion that it would be a major missed opportunity to send a human mission to Mars orbit and not use it to explore the surface telerobotically.
- Geoffrey Landis and his team's HERRO mission uses a slowly precessing near sun synchronous Molniya orbit. This is a highly elongated orbit, easy to get into as it is similar to a Mars capture orbit. It requires delta V similar to a landing on the Moon, The spacecraft approaches the sunny side of Mars twice in each Martian day so permitting telepresence operation on opposite sides of the planet by the same crew.
See: HERRO mission to mars using telerobotic surface exploration from orbit - Robert Zubrin's Robert Zubrin's Double Athena Flyby - it is a "free return trajectory" like Inspiration Mars. It just needs one boost from Earth and then is on course to return to Earth. This is a longer mission than Inspiration Mars, 700 days instead of 500, and instead of a single fly by has two of them. One deflects the spacecraft into an orbit similar to that of Mars. Another one year (half a Martian year) later deflects it back to Earth. In between it spends many days within light seconds of Mars. This mission can be launched every two years, and has the advantage of a normal re-entry speed on return to Earth without the fast re-entry issues of Inspiration Mars.
- Lockheed Martin's "Red Rocks project" as part of their "Stepping stones to Mars" project - this time the target is Deimos rather than an orbiting station
- Russia suggested a similar mission as an international effort, with US participation for the landers, called the Mars Piloted Orbital Station
- Best solution for planetary protection. It is hard to see how you could send humans to the surface of Mars without a risk of a hard landing which would contaminate a random area of Mars with all the hundreds of trillions of microbes in tens of thousands of species that accompany humans. If you introduce Earth life to Mars there is a major risk that you will detect life on Mars only to find that you brought it there yourself.
- Costs far less for more science return
- Far safer for the crew. The landing on Mars is the most risky landing almost anywhere in the inner solar system, because the atmosphere is too thin for a parachute landing - and yet - there is just enough atmosphere so that once you start the landing sequence you are committed, unlike e.g. the Moon where right up to the touch down itself, the crew could blast off into space again. You can't do that on Mars because to go up into space again you need enough fuel to overcome the resistance of the atmosphere.
- Exploring is also far safer. Crew at all times remain in shirt sleeves environment in the orbiting spacecraft. All they can endanger is the "avatar" rover they control on the surface. And that, if damaged, can be repaired potentially. While if e.g. you damage your air supply to a spacesuit you die. The rover can spend days, weeks, even months just at one spot on Mars using only electricity from sunlight while a human explorer has to return to base for provisions, oxygen etc. It doesn't have to put on a spacesuit every day, which takes up an hour or two of every day.
- Crew can explore several parts of Mars simultaneously, and skip instantly from one experiment to another - leave one rover doing routine analysis while they drive another, or direct sampling for another - so the crew do all the interesting stuff and the rovers do all the dull stuff by themselves.
- Mars from orbit looks quite Earth like, an interesting planet and the elongated HERRO Molniya orbit is especially stunning with close flybys of the spectacular landscape and the polar caps every twelve hours, with the landscape skimming past below your spaceship followed by a long fly out so far that Mars becomes quite small. Every day you have that experience, twice, and each time coming in over a slightly different part of Mars. On the surface you'd be stuck in a single spot from then on and probably not see that much, and in the dust storms, nothing at all.
- When you drive the rovers on the surface with telepresence and haptic feedback, and virtual reality gogles to see the Mars landscape in 3D - you'd experience the surface vividly, far more so than if you were really there. Our eyes are not adapted to the Mars light and everything would seem dim and reddish brown, with colours hard to discern and a dull butterscotch sky. Exploring via avatars we can colour adjust automatically to resemble Earth lighting conditions, indeed with a blue sky if you like.
- Whatever you see and feel is already digital streaming, so can easily be recorded and streamed back to Earth and so we can experience it here, just as you did. And examine the images to see if we spot anything you missed. And if anything goes wrong on the surface, again, you have everything recorded and streamed, so we can figure out what happened, no possibility of an unknown accident where someone falls and dies and nobody is sure why it happened.
The HERRO study is several years out of date now. With the rapid advances in computer technology, games software, telerobotics, remote controlled avatars, virtual reality technology etc I think a new study along the same lines would find even more advantage for the astronauts in orbit.
Video showing what it would be like to be in a spacecraft in the stunning HERRO Molniya orbit (this uses a rather futuristic looking spacecraft as that is all I could manage to put into this orbit in Orbiter, but the orbit is accurate).
Lockheed Martin image of astronauts exploring Deimos,
There is also the possibility of telepresence type exploration of Mars even from Earth if we can only improve communications bandwidth, using methods developed for real time games -where you have the same issue that there are latency issues for the players. The games work by guessing what everyone will do next, and then modelling that in your own copy of the game environment on your computer. Then warping to what the other players and monsters actually did as more information comes in.
In case of remote exploration from Mars you'd need to also indicate areas of uncertainty in the scene. E.g. as you walk around a rock, you'd see the other side interpolated perhaps with a gray area of uncertainty about what is there. And - you'd have a gray area indicating uncertainty about your own position also. So wouldn't be as fast as close up telepresence, but you'd be able to do a whole lot better than we can do now.
Then, you can also proceed as we are doing already, by sending rovers from Earth and making them more and more autonomous able to make decisions for themselves. This way individual missions cost much less. Probably the autonomous rovers won't ever in near future be able to accomplish as much as with the other alternatives. But on the other hand they cost far less so you could send many more rovers to many locations on Mars.
If you have the budget, you can combine them. Send lots of autonomous rovers to Mars, but equip them all with telerobotic capabilities - mainly means having stereo cameras which they would probably have anyway - and equipping them with hands with haptic feedback so that you can feel what you are doing by telepresence. Then also when bandwidth permits control some of them from Earth, in close to real time as with game technology idea.
Then from time to time, when you can afford it, send humans to orbit around Mars, and they can then control any of those many landers and rovers telerobotically. Perhaps the humans go there for just one year every decade or so, but in course of that one year sojourn they can control dozens of rovers on the surface of Mars and get a huge amount done, also of course based on whatever those rovers had discovered already before they got there. And when they are gone, the rovers continue exploring, following up all the new leads and ideas that came out of the human guided close up exploration.
I think that before spending like billions of dollars on exploring Mars with humans we should do proper comparison studies of the various ways of doing it!
For more details see my article on Science20: To Explore Mars With Likes Of Occulus Rift & Virtuix Omni - From Mars Capture Orbit, Phobos Or Deimos
See also
Ten Reasons NOT To Live On Mars - Great Place To Explore
"Ten Reasons Not To Live On Mars, Great Place To Explore" - On The Space Show
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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