Mars Space Station Could Pave Way for 1st Footsteps on Red Planet — **Artist's illustration of the "Mars Base Camp" space station proposed by aerospace company Lockheed Martin.**
**Credit: Lockheed Martin**

Humanity may camp out for a year or so in Mars orbit to get ready for its epic first trek to the Red Planet's surface.

The aerospace company Lockheed Martin recently proposed that NASA work with its international partners and private industry to set up a space station in Mars orbit by 2028. The astronauts working and living aboard this "Mars Base Camp" could help collect information that any future Red Planet explorer would need to know, the project's developers say.

"Before we send people to the surface of Mars, we owe it to that crew, to ourselves, to understand if there's life on the planet and if there's anything that's toxic to humans," said Steve Bailey, the president and chief engineer of the Colorado-based company Deep Space Systems Inc. "This mission will do those two very fundamental things." [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]

**Conditions make living on Mars extremely challenging. See how living on the Red Planet would be hard in this Space.com infographic.**
**Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist**

Bailey and Steve Jolly, chief engineer for civil space at Lockheed Martin, discussed the Mars Base Camp idea July 27 during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations (FISO) working group.

The Mars Base Camp plan

NASA is currently developing a capsule called Orion and the huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to get astronauts to Mars and other distant destinations.

Orion has flown once, on an uncrewed test flight in December 2014. The maiden flight of SLS is currently scheduled for late 2018, when the rocket will blast Orion on an unmanned, weeklong trip around the moon known as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1).

"SLS is about to become operational; Orion is about to become operational," Bailey said. "What do we do with these vehicles? How do we best utilize those to get the highest bang for the buck for Mars science?"

The answer, according to the Lockheed plan, is to build a 132-ton (120 metric tons) Red Planet space station, the core of which would be composed of two Orions and two habitat modules/science laboratories. (For comparison, the International Space Station weighs about 440 tons, or 400 metric tons.)

Mars Base Camp could support up to six astronauts, who would stay aboard for about a year. These crewmembers would ideally be career scientists who received astronaut training, rather than test pilots taught to do a little geology work, Jolly said.

"This is more like Jack Schmitt on Apollo 17 heading to Mars," Jolly said, referring to the geologist on NASA's last crewed moon mission in 1972. [Lunar Legacy: 45 Apollo Moon Mission Photos]

Lockheed Martin unveils concept designs for Mars Base Camp

https://youtu.be/-_IRbH-d79U

Mars Base Camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsOvixkzZ_E

A year at Mars

Mars Base Camp crewmembers would be pretty busy. For example, Jolly said, they would likely analyze samples of Red Planet dirt and rock, poring over them for signs of past or present life.

Such material would presumably be collected by NASA's Mars 2020 roverand/or the European/Russian ExoMars rover, both of which are scheduled to launch in 2020. (There is currently no firm plan in place to get such samples off Mars and into orbit, however.)

From their lofty perch, the astronauts would also operate a dozen or so robotic "surface assets" — wheeled rovers, and perhaps also winged vehicles that would ply the Red Planet's sky. (This gear would be ready and waiting for the astronauts to arrive, having been sent to Mars via SLS in 2026.)

Such near-real-time robot control is not possible today, given the immense distance between Earth and Mars, and it could allow big discoveries to be made, Jolly said.

For instance, the robots could be sent to investigate transient phenomena on Mars, such as plumes of methane (a gas that may be a sign of life) or recurring slope lineae (RSL), intriguing dark streaks that occur seasonally and appear to be caused by liquid water.

"That's really something we're throwing out to the scientists — to imagine that you have this ability," Jolly said.

The Base Camp crew would also get to do some exploring of their own. The Lockheed plan envisions astronauts making two- to three-week sorties toPhobos and Deimos, the two tiny moons of Mars, to collect samples and perform other science work.

Such exploration would likely be accomplished with the aid of long-legged "spider walkers," which would provide stability in the microgravity environment, Bailey said. (Astronauts on Phobos and Deimos would feel just 0.04 percent the gravitational pull experienced here on Earth.)

**Graphic showing the proposed steps leading to the launch of Lockheed Martin's envisioned "Mars Base Camp" space station.**
**Credit: Lockheed Martin**

Achievable and affordable?

Making Mars Base Camp happen doesn't require any big technological leaps, Jolly said. The plan should be affordable as well, he added, given the amount of money NASA will spend in the near future in an attempt to get astronauts to Mars — the chief long-term goal of the agency's human-spaceflight program.

"Between the $4 [billion] to $9 billion a year that NASA will spend on exploration missions — and that includes both EM stuff and, obviously, [the International] Space Station — then, over a 10- or 15- or 20-year period, they will have spent $50 to $80 billion in total expenditures," Jolly said. ("EM stuff" refers to EM-1 and a series of other test flights involving Orion and SLS.)

Mars Base Camp would also stretch those dollars via reuse, Jolly said.

"We envision a series of missions using the same architecture, and the next one, or the one right after that, goes to the [Martian] surface," he said. "We're not ready to talk about that today, but we wanted to make sure that the community listening realizes this wasn't a one-off concept."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us@Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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IN BRIEF

A meteorite, which landed in Canada back in 2000, is now being said to be from the Kuiper Belt. NASA's New Horizons mission may be able to collect samples from the outer solar system to compare.

It’s taken us 16 years, but we might finally know the origin of one of the strangest meteorites to ever collide with Earth’s surface.

Astronomers have found evidence that the Tagish Lake meteorite, which crash-landed in Canada back in 2000, came from the Kuiper Belt – all the way in the outskirts of the Solar System, past Neptune.

In January 2000, a fiery meteorite plummeted into the frozen Tagish Lake of northwestern British Columbia, the fireball vaporising much of the car-sized space rock, but leaving enough debris on the icy surface for scientists to collect.

“These primitive meteorites are very fragile, more like clods of dirt than hard rocks, and often burn up and shatter,” Clark Chapman from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told New Scientist at the time of the discovery.

“Even in this case, only a few kilograms have been recovered from an object that was 5 metres across when it hit Earth’s atmosphere.”

At the time, Chapman and his team suspected that the Tagish Lake meteorite – which looks nothing like any other meteorite found on Earth – might be the most ancient chunk of the Solar System we have.

“Its composition is very much like the Sun itself (minus the gaseous compounds) and it shows even less alteration of its minerals than is typical for these kinds of meteorites,” Chapman explained.

As part of a huge, bustling Universe, it’d make sense that Earth is coming into contact with space rocks from all corners of the galaxy, but in reality, things from outside our immediate neighbourhood don’t visit us all that much.

In fact, of the millions of meteors and meteorites that have made it here, each has been traced to the asteroid belt – which sits just between Mars and Jupiter – except one, the Tagish Lake meteorite.

Photo: Karen Bean, ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Southwest Research Institute has just come up with a new hypothesis about the origins of this strange meteorite, and say it could have gotten mixed up in a planet fight some 4 billion years ago.

Based on several simulations of the early Solar System, when the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were all jostling each other for position, they suggest that their gravitational pulls might have tossed rocks inward, from the Kuiper Belt into the much closer asteroid belt.

A separate study that’s found evidence that a fifth gas giant might have existed in the early Solar System – before Jupiter kicked it out – could make this even more likely.

Did our long-lost fifth gas giant seed the asteroid belt with objects from the distant Kuiper Belt?

“For a short time in the Solar System’s history, you have giant planets encountering one another while surrounded by this big sea of comets,” one of the team, Bill Bottke, told Nola Taylor Redd from New Scientist. “Things were very dramatic for a short time.”

Their hypothesis is backed up by previous research that has suggested that the Tagish Lake meteorite is a piece of D-type asteroid – a class of asteroid with compositions unlike most others found in the asteroid belt, but similar to objects found in the vicinity of gas giants.

“Only a handful of the unusual class of rock lurks in the asteroid belt, though the dark samples are abundant around gas giants,” says Taylor Redd.

The good news is we might not be speculating for much longer – NASA recently approved a New Horizons mission to visit the Kuiper-belt object, 2014 MU69, so we could soon have some Kuiper Belt material from the source to compare.

The study has been published in The Astronomical Journal.