This semester, the studio had the privilege of working with Dr. Mike Gernhardt and his colleagues from NASA to develop concepts for human exploration of Phobos, one of Mars’ moons.
The video and pesentation provided below delivers a detailed proposal & user test of our group's concept design for future human exploration on Phobos
Full-scale model of a Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (mmsev)
Simulating microgravity
On Earth, we experience a gravitational acceleration of 9.8 m/s2, but Phobos (the moon of Mars) is so small the gravity field is only .0057 m/s2. This drastically affects how astronauts might explore the surface of this planetary body.
The design our team chose to further explore and develop was greatly inspired by the grid systems used in archeological sites. We believe that the gridded structure would serve not only serve as a structural frame for astronauts to traverse the moon, but also serve as a way to document and collect samples from the surface.
