Mission Concept for a Nuclear Reactor‐Powered Mars Cryobot Lander

Recently, a team from JPL and the DOE carried out a study to investigate the utility of a 3 kWe surface fission power system for Mars landed missions. In the course of the study it became clear that the application of such a power system was enabling to a wide variety of potential missions. Of these, two concepts were developed, one for a stationary lander and one for a reactor‐powered rover. This paper discusses the design of the lander mission, which was developed around the concept of landing a cryobot on the Mars north polar ice cap. The cryobot is designed to bore through the entire 2–3 km thickness of the ice cap, providing a picture of the Martian climate spanning more than a million years of Martian history. The high sustained power available from the reactor system proves to be an ideal match for this mission design, enabling a level of science return unavailable from any alternative power sources. The lander design is based on a minimum extrapolation of technology, drawing heavily on the existin...