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Mars Rodwell Experiment Final ReportDeveloped by Army engineer Raul Rodriguez at Camp Century in Greenland during the early 1960s, a Rodriguez Well uses heat exchangers and a submersible pump to create a cavity deep under a glacier’s surface and cycle the heated water up an ice shaft, siphoning a portion of the flow for consumption before sending the rest back down to the well. To evaluate the performance of a Rodriguez Well as one of multiple approaches for extracting water from massive ice deposits on Mars, a series of tests were performed at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Energy Systems Test Area (ESTA) Facility under Martian equivalent environmental factors such as atmospheric and water surface pressure and density. These values were then used to create an energy balance model for a Martian Rodriguez Well, replacing the terrestrial environmental factors with the found Martian equivalents in a computer model published by the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL). This report documents the test results and the subsequent findings from running the modified code.
Document ID
20205011353
Acquisition Source
Johnson Space Center
Document Type
Technical Publication (TP)
Authors
Stephen J Hoffman
(The Aerospace Corporation El Segundo, California, United States)
James H Lever
(Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory Hanover, New Hampshire, United States)
Alida D Andrews
(The Aerospace Corporation El Segundo, California, United States)
Kevin D Watts
(Johnson Space Center Houston, Texas, United States)
Date Acquired
December 9, 2020
Publication Date
October 1, 2020
Subject Category
Lunar And Planetary Science And Exploration
Fluid Mechanics And Thermodynamics
Funding Number(s)
WBS: 460421.04.99
WBS: 452582.81.72
CONTRACT_GRANT: 80GSFC19D0011
CONTRACT_GRANT: NNJ13HA01C
CONTRACT_GRANT: NNJ18ZA01I
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.
Technical Review
Single Expert
Keywords
Mars
Rodriguez Well
Rodwell
Human exploration
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