ESA Document - Emits - ESA

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1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
HMM
Assessment Study
Report: CDF-20(A)
February 2004
page 19 of 422
In November 2001, the ESA Council at Ministerial level approved the Aurora Programme
dedicated to the human and robotic exploration of the Moon, Mars and asteroids. The ultimate
goal of the Aurora Programme is human exploration of Mars foreseen in 2025-2030 time frame.
A first ESA activity performed with industrial support concerned high level trades and defined
some of the mission boundaries and constraints.
Subsequently, the Aurora Programme asked for further internal activities to refine and detail the
above trades.
The main objective of the study was not to define an ESA “reference human mission to Mars”
but rather to start an iteration cycle which should lead to the definition of the exploration strategy
and the associated missions and the set-up of requirements for further mission design and further
feedback to the exploration plan. The mission shown in the report is a design case, and does not
address prior technology demonstration missions. These are covered separately by the Aurora
Long Term Plan.
Peer reviews of the design case have been performed in ESTEC and reports are available as
separate documents.
1.2 CDF study
Within the time frame September 2003-February 2004, in two phases, for a total of 23 sessions,
the ESTEC Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) performed an assessment study of a Human
Mission to Mars, known as the HMM study.
The results of this study are reported in this document.
1.3 Document structure
This document is structured so that the background to the study is described first, followed by an
executive summary that gives an overview of the mission. This is followed by the chapters
introducing the mission analysis and the mission architecture trade-offs.
The actual subsystem designs that were performed in the study were split into two main separate
vehicles: the Transfer Vehicle (TV) and the Mars Excursion Vehicle (MEV). In turn, these two
vehicles are split into their main subvehicles/components.
The document includes the chapters relevant to some other overall disciplines such as operations,
cost, risk, programmatics and simulation.
Due to the different distribution requirements, only the cost assumptions (excluding figures) are
given in this report. The costing information is published in a separate document.