Human Planetary Exploration

Abstract

The human exploration of planetary bodies started with the Apollo missions to the Moon, which provided valuable lessons learned and experience for the future human exploration. Based on that, the design of hardware and operations need to further be developed to also overcome the new challenges, which arise when planning crewed missions to Mars and beyond. This chapter provides an overview about the environment and structure of the Red Planet and discusses the challenges on operations and hardware correlated to it. It further provides insights into the considerations regarding the hardware development which need to be investigated and defined before launching a crewed mission to Mars.