NASA ARTEMIS MARS LANDING PLUME SURFACE INTERACTION

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Background:

When the Artemis Mars Lander lands on the Mars surface, the retro thrusters pick and circulate Mars dust forming a crater. Mars has 1/6th the gravity of Earth, so these particles that are being thrown around during crater formation leave at astronomical speeds making them essentially projectiles that can travel all the way around Mars. Thus, these particles can damage space equipment, people on the Martian surface, and the lander itself. NASA wants to land astronauts as well as multiple landers on the Martian surface. However, due to the dangers of cratering, these landers have to be far away from one another which is a problem for astronauts whose supply is now far away from where they landed.

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Objective:

We are researching crater formation and evolution in order to better understand how craters develop and use this knowledge to, ultimately, decrease the space required between Mars landers and limit the dangerous effects of cratering. 

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Current Status:

After analyzing the current literature on cratering and extracting only the useful information, I organized the experimental setup so that we could see the crater form over time as we increase the pressure in our chamber. While I cannot include some of our current experiment videos because we have not published a paper on our findings yet, shown above is one of our first experiments we analyzed. Currently, I am in the process of creating an equation for pressure at the ground surface due to a jet/retro thruster some distance above the ground surface.

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