Mars Research Base

I had recently proposed a Mars Lab Station. It would allow samples gathered all around Mars to be analyzed in orbit. However, transferring the samples from ground to the orbit requires single use expensive rockets. Sending one for every sample would be prohibitively expensive. I would like to propose an alternative based on my previous ideas.

A Mars Lab Base that would be deployed to a central location on Mars can serve as a stationary analysis base. The samples would be collected by the Mars STOL airplane. Once the samples are gathered, the aircraft would return to the base. The samples would then be transferred to the Lab using Mars Service Robot. The service robot would also conduct simple maintenance work for the aircraft. It would patch small holes, clean and oil parts.

The Lab Base, the aircraft and the service robot would utilize Plutonium 238 as the energy source. (explained in previous articles)

This setup requires at least three independent missions to Mars. One carrying the Lab Base, the second carrying the STOL aircraft and the last one carrying the service robot and maintenance materials. In order to cover more areas, these three missions would be repeated for each additional region.