Category:Extreme Environments

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.

MARS POLAR ROVER

The Mars 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. The subteam has already built two small prototype lithium polymer battery-powered rovers with custom-designed snow tires and GPS navigational functionality via ArduPilot software. In the next stage of rover prototyping, we aim to incorporate solar panels, a Starlink installation for internet access for live control and video streaming, and a LiDAR module for object avoidance and path planning.

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

MARS EUROPA

MARS MICRO-GRAVITY CRYSTALIZATION

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!