This interdisciplinary course, open to all Innsbruck University bachelor students, provides a broad overview of the scientific and technical foundations of future Mars missions.

Topics include the formation of terrestrial planets, the geology of Mars, resource utilization and construction methods on Mars, biological and biotechnological aspects of transplanetary habitats, fundamental principles of spaceflight, and Mars rover instrumentation. The course also offers insights into crewed space missions and current analog research missions. A highlight will be excursions to the ISS Control Center (including the Columbus Module) near Munich and the SuitLab of the Austrian Space Forum in Innsbruck.

The course showed how crewed missions to Mars could look like by explaining the geology and resources of the planet as well as constraints of a mission to the Red Planet. The Integrative Design team explained the challenges and opportunities to designing habitats using in-situ resources and biotechnologies. At the end, we challenged the (non-architectural) students to building models of Martian Habitats using various techniques.

At the end, we got to see it from up close with a visit to the Human Spaceflight Design department at TUM (incl. testing out the Soyuz simulator) and a visit to DLR to see the Colombus Control Room, learning how an astronaut’s day is planned and seeing some beautiful live pictures of Earth.

The course is given by Prof. Dr. Bastian Joachim-Mrosko, Dr. Gernot Grömer, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Konzett, Ass. Prof. Dr. Clifford Patten, Univ. Prof. Dr. Barbara Imhof, & Dr. Layla van Ellen