Dust opacity and deposition
Column opacity, deposition rate on optical and radiating surfaces, and the storm-onset statistics that every power budget depends on. The oldest open programme, because the dust has not stopped.
Opened 2011Dr Gideon Sarr
Programmes
14 programmes of record, 8 of them still open
A programme is a multi-year commitment with a charter, a lead, a budget and — since 2004 — a written end condition. It is the unit the Foundation plans in. Grants sit inside programmes; instruments come out of them.
Register
The whole register, in the order it was opened
| Code | Div. | Programme | Opened | Closed | Status | Spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LODESTONE | INS | Lunar-surface instrumentation | 1969 | 1983 | closed | 11 |
| MERIDIAN | COM | Atmospheric circulation modelling | 1988 | 1997 | closed | 12 |
| LATTICE | COM | Memory density and error correction | 1989 | 1997 | closed | 7 |
| PLUMBLINE | SUR | Surface site survey | 2004 | 2021 | closed | 61 |
| WELLHEAD | SUR | Subsurface hydrogen and hydration | 2006 | 2019 | closed | 14 |
| GRAVEL | SUR | Regolith mechanics | 2009 | 2020 | closed | 9 |
| CANOPY | SUR | Dust opacity and deposition | 2011 | — | open | 8 |
| KILN | MAT | In-situ materials and sintering | 2014 | — | open | 22 |
| HEARTHSTONE | LIF | Closed-loop life support | 2015 | — | open | 38 |
| DAYBOOK | ARC | Archive and publication | 2018 | — | open | 4 |
| LONGBOAT | PRO | Crewed transfer vessel | 2022 | — | open | 116 |
| TENDER | PRO | Logistics and launch cadence | 2023 | — | open | 31 |
| JOURNEYMAN | PRO | Autonomous surface labour | 2026 | — | open | 18 |
| SEMAPHORE | COM | Real-time link, Earth to Thessaly Bench | 2026 | — | open | 6 |
| Total programme spend, all eras, including committed LONGBOAT | 333.0 | |||||
LODESTONE, MERIDIAN and LATTICE predate the Foundation and were given programme numbers retrospectively by the archive in 2001. Their sums are restated in credits at constant 2000 value.
Open
Currently funded
CANOPY · SUR
KILN · MAT
In-situ materials and sintering
Sintering regolith simulant into structural slab at power levels a surface plant could actually supply. First 400 × 400 mm slab in 2016 at 1.2 kW; qualification slab for a landing pad in 2024.
Opened 2014Dr Zhao Wenyi
HEARTHSTONE · LIF
Closed-loop life support
Ground-based closed ecology at the Cold Lab. It began by deliberately repeating a 1964 failure in order to calibrate a modern scrubber against it, and has since run 623 days closed with four occupants.
Opened 2015Dr Anselm Vogt
DAYBOOK · ARC
Archive and publication
The Foundation’s own archive, and the machinery that keeps the publication covenant honest: every funded result, every negative result, every retracted result, with a median of forty-one days from acceptance to open publication.
Opened 2018Naomi Vance
LONGBOAT · PRO
Crewed transfer vessel
The vessel. A reactor-electric transfer stage, a truss, tankage, a pressure hull for six and a water shield forward — 68.4 m overall, assembled in orbit from articles built at the Aldern Works. Construction of the first hull was authorised for 2027.
Opened 2022Tiago Mendes-Ruiz
TENDER · PRO
Logistics and launch cadence
The unglamorous half of LONGBOAT: cargo stages, manifests, a launch cadence tied to the transfer windows, and the surface plant that has to be working before anybody is asked to live in it.
Opened 2023Dr Nour Habib
JOURNEYMAN · PRO
Autonomous surface labour
General-purpose walking machines built to the crew standard, to do the work at Thessaly Bench that has to be finished before anybody arrives. Earth and Mars are between three and twenty-two light-minutes apart, so a machine that has to ask permission would wait the better part of an hour for it; JOURNEYMAN units are therefore autonomous in the only sense that matters, which is that nothing on Earth is in the control loop. They are shaped to the human envelope — the same hatches, handholds and tool fittings the crew will use from 2031 — because the alternative is shipping two of everything. Every joint on a JM-1 has to satisfy MF/MAT/1958-A, which is Nadia Farkas’s 1956 note on cold welding, seventy years later and on another planet.
Opened 2026Tiago Mendes-Ruiz
SEMAPHORE · COM
Real-time link, Earth to Thessaly Bench
A programme to remove the light-lag between the two planets, so that a decision at Thessaly Bench can be a decision taken with Earth rather than in spite of it. No mechanism is known that would permit this. Entanglement does not carry information, and the no-communication theorem is a proof rather than an engineering obstacle, which the Foundation states here because it states everything else. SEMAPHORE has funded eleven lines of attack and published eleven null results. Its charter requires it to report annually that it has failed, and it has done so every year. The Foundation is aware of how this reads and intends to keep funding it.
Opened 2026Dr Sofia Errazuriz
Closed
Finished, and closed rather than extended
Six programmes have been closed. Four reached their charter end condition; two were closed on schedule because the decade they were funded for had ended. None was closed for failure, and the Foundation notes that this is a statement about its charters rather than about its luck.
LODESTONE · INS
Lunar-surface instrumentation
Three tranches of instruments carried on lunar surface payloads operated by others: corner-cube ranging arrays, short-period seismometers, and dust adhesion monitors. Named retrospectively in 2001; at the time it was three separate endowments with one condition in common.
1969–1983Dr Teodora Ilic
MERIDIAN · COM
Atmospheric circulation modelling
A general circulation model of the Martian atmosphere, run for nine years on machines that were never quite adequate. Its purpose was narrow: to decide, from the air alone, which places on the surface a vehicle could be put down on.
1988–1997Dr Beatrix Nold
LATTICE · COM
Memory density and error correction
Not a space programme. Memory was the scarce resource in every machine the Foundation needed and the models were losing to single-bit errors at altitude. LATTICE funded the correction scheme and took no royalty on it; the grant instrument did not provide for one.
1989–1997Dr Lev Marchenko
PLUMBLINE · SUR
Surface site survey
Seventeen years of instruments flown on surface vehicles operated by others, with one job: reduce three hundred and twelve candidate sites to a shortlist a crew could be landed on. It finished with three. The Foundation then stopped surveying.
2004–2021Dr Amara Dube
WELLHEAD · SUR
Subsurface hydrogen and hydration
Neutron and passive-gamma instrumentation to find water within the first metre of regolith. Eleven candidate sites were removed from the shortlist by its first return, and the surviving sites gained a reason to be there.
2006–2019Dr Tomas Halvard
GRAVEL · SUR
Regolith mechanics
Bearing strength, trafficability, slope stability and anchor pull-out, measured in simulant and then checked against wheel-track imagery published by the operators of surface vehicles. Unglamorous, and the reason a foundation pad has a thickness.
2009–2020Dr Amara Dube
What an instrument looks like
A 1.9 kg head, built at the Aldern Works and given away
The Foundation’s first grant, in 2000, was a spectrometer bench. The flight head that came out of it was delivered to a payload integrator in 2004, crated, with a calibration certificate and a two-page manual, and returned mineralogy for six years against a design life of two.
The Foundation retains no intellectual property in this design. Three groups it has never funded have built variants of it, which is the intended outcome.
LONGBOAT · TENDER
The next five windows
Cargo precedes crew by two windows. If the 2029 uncrewed transit fails, the 2031 crew does not fly; that is written into the programme rather than left to anybody’s judgement on the day.
2027window 1
TDR-01Power plant, 1.4 MWe · 38.2 t
TDR-02Sinter works and pad plant · 31.7 t
TDR-03Consumables and spares cache · 26.4 t
2029window 2
TDR-04Habitat shell 1 · 44.1 t
TDR-05Habitat shell 2 · 44.1 t
TDR-06Water plant and stores · 29.8 t
LB-1 (U)Vessel, uncrewed shakedown transit
2031window 3
LB-1First crew of six · 258-day transit
TDR-07Habitat shell 3 and crop article · 41.6 t
2033window 4
LB-2Second crew of six · first return crew outbound relief
TDR-08Industrial plant, second phase · 36.9 t
2035window 5
LB-1Crew rotation three · continuous occupation begins
TDR-09Expansion shells 4–5 · 58.2 t
Manifests are published in full before flight. The 2027 manifest excerpt is on the history page →