JuanCastillo29/space-mission-intelligence-data huggingface dataset:
Producing 1 N of thrust using megawatts of power and a space-rated synchrotron is not a compelling reason to build this engine – however the concept can theoretically produce thrust even though the engine is inside an enclosed volume.  There are many paths to make the engine more efficient and powerful.
Key benefits: the engine can operate indefinitely without significant refueling; be energy efficient (provided the decelerator energy is harvested); be reliable as ions are the only moving part; and have an extremely high speed.  The engine could be powered by solar energy for satellite station keeping or a nuclear reactor for interstellar travel [6].  It may be the only practical long duration interstellar engine based on existing technology.  The Helical Engine is possible because of recent innovations: an engine architecture that conserves propellant and offers an opportunity to recover energy used to accelerate ions; lightweight, efficient, space-rated, neutrally-charged particle beam components developed by National Laboratories; space-qualified nuclear reactor technology developed by NASA; and lightweight magnets and high efficiency undulators developed for producing synchrotron radiation in particle accelerators.
Challenges include significant engineering design hurdles and trades.  Particle accelerators can produce intense xrays and are traditionally designed for nuclear chemistry, with magnets, shielding, and detectors often weighing hundreds of tons.  There are numerous technical challenges to be addressed before a practical engine can be realized:
a) Efficient power collection and transfer from the decelerator to the accelerator is key to the feasibility of this class of propulsion.  This technology is mature for producing low current spectrally pure energy from electrons, but it has not been developed for continually producing high current from heavier ions.  The proposed engine architecture requires high current and high efficiency. b) The design is not proven or optimized, and the author’s system level models need to be examined by the particle accelerator technical community.  The point design described in Table 2 can be improved, with tradeoffs between applied magnetic field, ion density, power, cycle time, and thrust.  Many design parameters are dependent on power, ion chemistry, curvature, and minimum ion velocity. c) High temperature materials and components, including high efficiency electromagnets.  Revolutionary material advances, including superconducting magnets designed and manufactured for the Large Hadron Collider [5], may enable the proposed engine.  New particle accelerator designs can be optimized for high current and low mass – suitable for space propulsion but not traditional nuclear chemistry applications.  A space-based neutrally charged particle beam missile interceptor was designed and flight-tested by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1989 but was not fielded due to a shift in national strategy [7].

The Helical Engine could be an interesting testbed for exploring the relationship of Conservation of Momentum to mass, force, and energy.
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Available in electric form at http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS
This preliminary report provides lists of tasks that were developed during a three-year study conducted under Cooperative Agreement NNX15AW34G/NNX16AQ86G for the Human Factors and Behavioral Performance Element, Human Performance Program, located at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Johnson Space Center. The tasks were identified during interviews and archival research as likely to be performed during the first few human expeditions to Mars. The tasks are consistent with Design Reference Architecture-5, NASA’s most-recent published plan for the human exploration of Mars.
The 1,125 tasks listed in this document are organized by 12 mission phases and represent preliminary estimates of what tasks are likely required from launch to landing 30 months later. Also included in the lists are tasks for which crew members must be prepared, but would only be performed in emergencies. By focusing on an expedition to Mars, we have considered the extremes of what is possible for human space exploration during the first half of the 21st Century and accommodated the human requirements for missions to asteroids and a return to the Moon.
The study under which the task lists were developed addresses the Risk of Inadequate Mission, Process, and Task Design and the Risk of Performance Errors Due to Training Deficiencies during exploration-class space missions by identifying and analyzing the tasks that will be conducted by human crew during an expedition to Mars and the abilities, skills, and knowledge that will be required of crew members.
The current research is ongoing and will conclude with a final report that documents all research activities and presents the results of task and ability analyses and the implications of study results to crew size and composition, personnel selection and training, and design of equipment and procedures. This interim report has been prepared to facilitate dissemination of the task lists to others whose research might benefit from detailed information about the work and other activities that are likely to be performed during initial human expeditions to Mars.
Page

INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1

DEVELOPING THE TASK LISTS .............................................................................................. 1

THE 12 PHASES OF A HUMAN EXPEDITION TO MARS ........................................................... 2

COMPOSING TASK STATEMENTS .......................................................................................... 4 ASSUMPTIONS CONCERNING MARS EXPEDITION TASKS ............................................................ 7

ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE MISSION PROFILE ...................................................................... 7

ADDITIONAL ASSUMPTIONS ................................................................................................. 7

NOTE ABOUT THE TASK LISTS ............................................................................................. 8 MARS EXPEDITION TASKS BY MISSION PHASE .......................................................................... 9

PHASE 1: LAUNCH TO LOW-EARTH ORBIT OR CIS-LUNAR ORBIT ........................................ 9

PHASE 2: TRANS-MARS INJECTION ...................................................................................... 11

PHASE 3: CRUISE TO MARS .................................................................................................. 11

PHASE 4: MARS ORBIT INJECTION ....................................................................................... 18

PHASE 5: MARS ORBIT ......................................................................................................... 18

PHASE 6: MARS SURFACE DESCENT .................................................................................... 19

PHASE 7: MARS SURFACE OPERATIONS ............................................................................... 20

PHASE 8: MARS SURFACE ASCENT ...................................................................................... 34

PHASE 9: TRANS-EARTH INJECTION ..................................................................................... 35

PHASE 10: CRUISE TO EARTH ............................................................................................... 35

PHASE 11: EARTH APPROACH .............................................................................................. 42

PHASE 12: EARTH SURFACE DESCENT ................................................................................. 43 APPENDIX - LIST OF SOURCES USED TO DERIVE THE TASK LIST ................................................ 45
Title
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First Photo Taken on Mars, Viking 1, 20 July 1976 ................................................................. ii Number of Tasks by Mission Phase.......................................................................................... 5 Example of a Summary Task Statement and Constituent Tasks from the Master List ............ 6 Photo of Mark Watney Shoveling Regolith to Free His Rover in The Martian ....................... 6 First Light by Pat Rawlings, 1988 ............................................................................................ 8 Fram Crater on Mars ................................................................................................................ 46
This is a preliminary report of ongoing research that has identified 1,125 tasks that are likely to be performed during initial human expeditions to Mars. The purpose of the report is to facilitate immediate access to the task inventory by researchers whose efforts might benefit from concrete examples of the work that will likely be performed by the first human explorers of Mars and the tasks for which crew members must be prepared to perform in response to emergencies. The research that led to the task lists is being conducted under Cooperative Agreement NNX15AW34G / NNX16AQ86G for the Human Factors and Behavioral Performance Element, Human Performance Program, NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The study is ongoing and will conclude with a final report that documents all research activities and presents the results of task and ability analyses and the implications of study results to crew size and composition, personnel selection and training, and design of equipment and procedures. The research addresses the Risk of Inadequate Mission, Process, and Task Design and the Risk of Performance Errors Due to Training Deficiencies by identifying the work that will be performed during an expedition to Mars and the abilities, skills, and knowledge that will be required of crew members. The study began by developing the comprehensive inventory of 1,125 tasks that are likely to be performed during the 12 phases of initial human expeditions to Mars, from launch to landing 30 months later. This full-mission task inventory was generated by a comprehensive review of documentation and concepts of operations with the understanding that plans and tasks might change in response to continuing technological development. Note: This interim report includes no discussion of analyses and has been prepared solely to facilitate dissemination of the task lists to others whose research might benefit from detailed information about the work and other activities that are likely to be performed during the human exploration of Mars.
Human factors specialists usually rely on job descriptions, training documents, written procedures, decision aids, and interviews with job incumbents for information that can be used to develop task statements for analysis. These sources are essential when developing task lists for existing equipment, systems, or processes. Identifying tasks for a new or proposed system requires the analyst to review specification documents, incorporate evidence from simulated operations with mock-ups, and/or perform hands-on operations using prototypes of the system. In contrast to the usual task analysis, rather than focusing on a “system,” the focus of the current research is a 30-month expedition. Also, no actual equipment has been developed and there are few references in published material to the tasks that might be performed during the expedition. These factors required the research team to review a wide range of material concerning the human exploration of Mars and to infer tasks by extrapolating from published and unpublished sources and from analogous jobs and systems. The Appendix presents the published sources used during development of the task lists.
We reviewed a broad range of documents relevant to the human exploration of Mars, beginning with von Braun's Mars Project and the series of Colliers magazine articles that introduced the possibility of Mars exploration to the general public. We then reviewed Mars expedition planning documents, in chronological order of publication, beginning with a study by researchers at the Lewis Research Center that began in 1957, only one month after Sputnik 1 and a full year before the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) laboratory became part of the new organization, NASA.1 Our review progressed through the decades and concluded

1 Lewis was renamed Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in 1999.

with NASA’s most recent plan for the human exploration of Mars, Design Reference Architecture-5, published in 2009.2 Our archival research was supplemented by interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) about likely biological, geological, and maintenance tasks. Internal procedural descriptions of expected medical conditions and teleoperations led to the development of medical and robotic tasks. The research team met weekly via teleconference to identify gaps in the task lists and to perform preliminary analyses.
We divided the mission profile into the 12 phases described by Brian O’Leary to help organize the growing inventory of task statements; slight changes were required to adapt O’Leary’s assumption of an Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) after the Transit to Earth to be consistent with the Direct Descent method specified in DRA-5.3 The DRA-5 plan, which provided the basis for our assumptions, is summarized, below.
The first phase of the mission begins with the crew entering the Earth Ascent Vehicle (EAV) on the launch pad and ends with the EAV docking with the interplanetary space craft in either Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) or at a Lagrange point near the Moon (i.e., Cis-Lunar, or CLO). The phase would be similar to a journey to the International Space Station (ISS) if the destination were in LEO (24 to 48 hours) and longer if the interplanetary space craft were to be waiting in CLO (75 hours). The duration is assumed to be 84 hours (which is slightly longer than the time required for Apollo 11 to reach the Moon) for this mission phase.
The second phase of the mission begins with the Mars crew entering the interplanetary space craft where they will be greeted by a team of astronauts who have prepared the ship for the journey to Mars and who will return to Earth in either the EAV or a similar space vehicle. This phase ends when the engines are shut down after the burn to achieve the correct course for the cruise to Mars. This phase is assumed to last four days, which will include final preparations and culminate with the main engine burn of approximately 60 minutes.
The third phase of the mission is the unpowered cruise to Mars, which will take approximately 180 days (i.e., six months). The crew will be busy during this phase exercising and performing training tasks using configurable simulators; some refresher training will be performed, but most of the training will be new (in response to a strategy to transfer much of the pre-launch training burden to the cruise phase).
2 Bret Drake (Editor). Human Exploration of Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0. NASA/SP–2009–566. Washington, DC: NASA Headquarters (July) 2009. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373665main_NASA-SP-2009-566.pdf Bret Drake (Editor). Human Exploration of Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0 Addendum. NASA/SP–2009– 566-ADD. Washington, DC: NASA Headquarters (July) 2009. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373667main_NASA-SP-2009-566-ADD.pdf 3 Brian O’Leary. Mars 1999: Exclusive Preview of the US-Soviet Manned Mission. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1987.
The fifth phase of the mission begins as the interplanetary ship approaches and then docks with a pre-positioned Mars Descent Vehicle (MDV), which is located in an elliptical orbit with a 1-Sol (one Martian day) period; the orbit places the space craft over the landing site once per Martian day at the same time of day. The rendezvous and docking are assumed to take approximately 48 hours and another 48 hours for the crew to enter the Mars Descent Vehicle (MDV), configure systems, perform final checks, and communicate with Earth in preparation for descent to the surface of Mars.
The sixth phase of the mission begins with the crew securing themselves in the Mars Descent Vehicle (MDV) where they will perform final checks before undocking from the interplanetary space craft and then initiating the deorbit burn at the highest point of the parking orbit (apoapsis). The MDV will descend through half of the parking orbit (about 12 hours) at the end of which is atmospheric entry and the 10 to 20-minute terminal descent burn. Approximately 14 hours are assumed from ingress in Mars orbit to egress of the MDV following landing, shutdown of MDV systems, and initial communications from the planetary surface.
The seventh and longest phase of the mission begins with the crew walking from the Mars Descent Vehicle (MDV) to the pre-positioned Mars Habitat following landing and ends approximately 545 days later when the crew enters the pre-positioned Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) to return to Mars orbit and the interplanetary ship. Crew time on the planetary surface will be spent performing construction and maintenance; housekeeping and planning; geological and biological science in the vicinity of the habitat and during mechanized traverses; and communicating among the members of the crew and with Earth (communications response lags with Earth will be approximately 20 minutes).
The eighth phase of the mission begins when the crew enters the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) to prepare for launching from the surface of Mars to rendezvous with the interplanetary ship in Mars orbit. Approximately 14 hours are assumed from ingress to the MAV and shutdown of MAV systems after docking with the interplanetary ship in Mars orbit. A “missed attempt” for rendezvous would add 24 hours to the duration of this mission phase.
A Conjunction Class (approximately 500-day surface stay) mission profile is assumed with an out-bound Earth Orbit and Mars Orbit Rendezvous (MOR); Earth Orbit Rendezvous in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) or Cis-Lunar Orbit (CLO) are accommodated by this task inventory. A six-month transit, or cruise, to Mars is followed by all crew members descending to the surface of Mars from the (interplanetary) space craft in a Mars Excursion Vehicle (MEV)/Mars Descent Vehicle (MDV); the (interplanetary) space craft remains untended in Mars Orbit. Pre-positioned on the surface are habitats, laboratories, sample storage facilities, and greenhouses (some of which require inflation and siting by the human crew); a nuclear-powered electricity-generating plant; teleoperated robot rovers (TROVs), at least two pressurized surface rovers, excavation and drilling equipment/vehicles; automatically-operating machinery for extracting O2 and fuel from Martian atmosphere and subsurface H2O, and tanks for storing the material produced; also prepositioned is at least one Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) for returning the crew to the space ship orbiting the planet (the task inventory also accommodates returning to the orbiting space ship in the same Mars Excursion Vehicle in which the crew arrived). Most of the pre-positioned equipment will remain in cold storage awaiting the crew. However, the power-generating and extraction plants will be emplaced and activated remotely; the human mission will launch from Earth only after verification that the habitat and other structures are in place and that the propellant and life-support resources needed to survive and return to Earth have been produced. Following a six-month return transit, the crew will transfer from the interplanetary ship to an attached Oriontype craft as they approach Earth, undock, and then descend to Earth directly while the interplanetary ship continues on course unoccupied.