Human Mars Exploration and Expedition Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews the extensive challenges faced in human Mars exploration, categorizing them from terrestrial to planetary surface issues, and emphasizes their implications for successful crewed missions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive categorization of challenges in human Mars missions, highlighting their impact on mission planning and execution, which is a novel synthesis compared to prior studies.

Findings

Identifies challenges across five categories: terrestrial, Earth-bound, interplanetary, Mars-bound, and planetary surface.

Highlights the importance of addressing these challenges for reliable Mars exploration.

Provides a complete overview of potential issues faced by astronauts and mission planners.

Abstract

Mars is the next frontier for the space explorers to demonstrate the extent of human presence in space beyond low-earth orbit. Both government and private space industries have been fascinated by Mars quest to attempt a crewed expedition to the red planet. The journey to Mars is vastly challenging as it endowed with numerous challenges from the inception of the mission engage to the mission achievement. Therefore, it is substantial to overcome those challenges for a reliable mission. Hence we have studied and emphasized the comprehensive challenges under the categorization of terrestrial, Earth-bound, interplanetary, Mars-bound, and planetary surface challenges. These challenges are suspected to encounter by the astronauts and mission planners throughout the mission timeline. Our research is different from other studies as it reports complete challenges and their implications on the way to human exploration of Mars.