Category:Extreme Environments: Difference between revisions

The SSI Extreme Environments (formerly known as Mars) team designs and builds projects that operate in some of the most demanding and challenging conditions on Earth. The team designs technologies for environments where conventional approaches fail, like the weightlessness of microgravity, the crushing pressure of the depths of the ocean, and the freezing terrain of Antarctica. We push hardware and ideas to their limits, paving the way for expansion beyond Earth.

The active projects within the Extreme Environments team are the Polar Rover, Europa Benthic Landers, and the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) Payload. The Polar Rover is a semi-autonomous rover designed to transport payloads over unmapped terrain, reducing the need for human presence in extreme polar research environments. The Europa Benthic Landers are low-cost observation platforms that sink to the seafloor to collect data. The Europa team is inspired by the subsurface ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa and are currently testing in the waters off California. The IREC Payload is aboard a rocket developed by the SSI Rockets team and flies to 30,000 feet to study how Sodium Acetate crystallizes in microgravity.

The 2025-2026 Mars co-leads were Colin Crown and Arden Boshler Wiese.

The 2024-2025 Mars co-leads were Jack Liu and Sydney Leigh Bohles.

The 2023-2024 Mars co-leads were Jay Siskind and Will Neal-Boyd.

The 2022-2023 Mars co-leads were Jolene Lee and Jenny Kim.

The 2021-2022 Mars co-leads were Andrew Lesh and Kylie Holland.

The current faculty advisor for the Extreme Environments team is Dr. Michael Lepech.

POLAR ROVER

The Polar subteam is constructing an GPS-based autonomously-navigated rover to replicate driving conditions at the Martian polar ice caps in order to guide future NASA exploration of Mars. The long term goal is to test the rover on an expedition across Antarctica to reach the Earth's South Pole. Specifically, the rover will follow the charted South Pole Overland Traverse from coastal McMurdo Research Station to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

Research missions in harsh environments like the Arctic and Antarctic require continuous logistical support, and pose risks against human involvement. To provide long-term support for such missions, the Polar Rovers Program is developing a series of Semi-autonomous Rovers equipped to transport large payloads through unmapped terrain.

Scope: In its first stage, the Program aims to manufacture solar-powered rovers capable of continuously mobilising 15kg payloads for over 3 months in cold-weather conditions. These rovers will be equipped with local navigation and path planning algorithms, with interfaces for low-level teleoperations and high-level waypoint guidance.

Progress: Our team has built and tested the first prototype teleoperated rover, with a solar panel mounting structure, independently driven wheels, custom tyres made in-house, and power regulation systems. This prototype showed successful structural and snow-driving capabilities at Donner Summit, CA.

Impact: Semi-autonomous rovers simplify logistics for field research, and permit long-term research projects like surface feature mapping and near-ground meteorology!

MARS EUROPA

Benthic landers are observation platforms that sink to the bottom of a body of water prior to resurfacing.  While less flexible than submersibles or ROVs, their simplicity allows for dramatically reduced costs.

Our first prototype has a free-floating H-frame above an anchor line.  The electronics housing includes a video camera, circular LED array, GPS transmitter, and battery.  A magnetic switch allows activation without opening the housing.

The prototype was successfully tested at San Francisco’s Torpedo Wharf using a 2-hour galvanic timed release, which dropped the anchor weight and caused the lander to resurface after filming from the seabed at a depth of 5 meters.  A custom Niskin bottle below the electronics housing collected a water sample.

A second prototype, undergoing testing in Monterey Bay, includes a satellite GPS transmitter (allowing for recovery beyond the horizon), an external pressure sensor, and a sediment scoop.  The frame is self-righting, ensuring the transmitter stays above the waterline after resurfacing.  Replacing our compressible foam floats should enable a descent to 1,000 m and beyond.

MICRO-GRAVITY CRYSTALIZATION

The Microgravity Crystallization Team—in collaboration with Rockets for the 2026 IREC Competition—is sending a payload to 30,000 feet to examine how Sodium Acetate crystalizes under microgravity.

Microgravity provides a unique environment for growing crystals with higher structural quality than those produced on Earth. Under normal gravity, convection and sedimentation can introduce defects and uneven growth. In microgravity, the absence of buoyancy-driven fluid motion creates a diffusion-dominated environment that often produces larger, more uniform crystals. These improvements are important for applications in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and advanced optical materials.

To study these effects, our team developed a rocket payload that measures nucleation density, crystal size, and growth rate of Sodium acetate trihydrate as it crystallizes in freefall from 30,000 feet. High-frame-rate imaging tracks the crystal growth front and allows comparison with identical experiments conducted under 1 g conditions.

MARS BRICKS

The bricks subteam experiments with methods of turning Martian and lunar soil into building materials for habitats and other structures. The team works with biopolymer-bound soil composite (BSC), which is made of soil, protein binder, and water. BSC has similar compressive strength as Portland cement concrete, the world’s most common construction material. While concrete production accounts for about 8% of global CO2 emissions, BSC provides a possible carbon-neutral alternative and is also easy to produce from Martian resources. The team created a payload to autonomously create these Martian bricks in 0g (aboard the ISS), 1g (resting on Earth), and 2g (continuously spinning in a centrifuge). After winning a NASA contract, our payload was sent to the International Space Station to test it's formation in 0g. You can learn more here.

The team's most recent newsletter as of May 31st, 2023, can be found here.

IN SITU RESOURCE UTILIZATION (ISRU)

ISRU is focused on identifying sources of needed elements and materials from one’s immediate surroundings. For example, while the Martian surface is barren and desolate, its carbon dioxide atmosphere provides a source of carbon and oxygen while subsurface water ice provides a source of oxygen and hydrogen. Using electrocatalysis powered by solar panels, these two sources allow for the formation of breathable O2, methane for fueling rocket engines, and carbon monoxide for syngas. Meanwhile, Martian soil can be used as an aggregate base for concrete as well as a source for sulfur and basaltic minerals, whose significance is described below in Mars Bricks.

MARS EXCAVATOR

The SSI Mars team is collaborating with Astrolab, an aerospace company, to participate in NASA's Break the Ice Challenge to develop technologies to extract lunar regolith and water. As it is difficult and expensive to transport construction materials from Earth to the moon, this excavator will dig up regolith on the moon to use as a construction material for the long-term sustainment of human life, following our team's theme of ISRU. The excavator takes up the form factor of a large toothed rotating drum attachment for a lunar rover. In order to test the excavator's effectiveness, we developed a concrete imitation of lunar regolith with similar physical and compressive qualities with help from Stanford's civil engineering faculty.

Join SSI, hop on the slack, and join #mars, #mars-polar-rover, #mars-0g-fab, and #mars-europa.

if you have any questions or just want to chat!