Habitability Considerations for a Notional Five-Day Small Pressurized Rover Excursion
Within the Artemis program, the Pressurized Rover (PR) is intended to support two-person mobile habitation up to roughly thirty days in duration. Lunar surface use of the PR, however, assumes a crew swap approximately halfway through a 33-day surface mission. Within that shorter duration, a rover crew may perform one or more excursions to remote sites in support of specific mission science or operational objectives. An important consideration in rover design is ensuring that the habitation accommodations in the vehicle support these types of missions. No pressurized rovers have ever been used in human spaceflight, but several have been proposed. The current NASA pressurized rover reference configuration is based on the third generation of the prototype small pressurized rover initially developed under Constellation. Using the NASA reference configuration, habitability considerations are discussed in the context of a notional five-day science excursion. The primary focus will be on the time the crew spends in the cabin, as opposed to time spent outside the vehicle on science-based EVAs. On each day of the excursion, the specific crew activities will be detailed. Crew activities that will be assessed include post sleep, EVA preparation, daily planning conference, private medical conference, traverse driving, EVA cabin egress, EVA cabin ingress, post-EVA activity, crew meals, pre-egress site observation and analysis, crew exercise, pre-sleep, and sleep. Considerations for crew fatigue will be discussed, including lessons learned from field testing. Finally, the assessment will identify hypotheses to assess in future analog missions and suitable test campaigns to evaluate them.