In-Situ Propellant Production on Mars: The First Flight Demonstration

Introduction: Strategic planning for human missions of exploration to Mars has conclusively identified insitu propellant production (ISPP) as an enabling technology [1]. A team of scientists and engineers from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Lewis Research Center is preparing the MARS ISPP PRECURSOR (MIP) Flight Demonstration. The objectives of MIP are to characterize the performance of processes and hardware which are important to ISPP concepts and to demonstrate how these processes and hardware interact with the Mars environment. Operating this hardware in the actual Mars environment is extremely important due to both uncertainties in our knowledge of the Mars environment as well as because of conditions that cannot be adequately simulated on Earth.