Mars: Humanity’s next Apollo
Why all roads lead to the Red Planet, the challenges of going to Mars and surviving there, and what we hope to discover.
BASECAMP
Over the past few weeks we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first of six Moon landings bringing humans to the lunar surface. This week in the Space to Exploreseries we’re looking forward and turning our attention to the next fifty years and humanity’s next big exploration goal: stepping foot on Mars.
Why Mars?
Recently it’s become almost universally agreed that returning to the Moon and using it as a platform for sending humans to Mars is the way forward for Human Space Exploration. The goal is to enable sustainable human missions to Mars, first to orbit the planet and then to the Martian surface.
A mission to Mars would captivate people all over the world and could represent the next big goal for humanity to work toward. A human Mars mission would mark a new era in the history of our species.
Mars is the most accessible planet in the solar system. It has the greatest similarity to Earth in past and current planetary processes, and may have the best record of when life started in our Solar System. Exploration of Mars will result in answers to profound scientific and philosophical questions such as: How did life start in our Solar System? Did life exist on Mars and does it exist today? What can we learn about Earth’s past and future by studying Mars?
A mission to Mars would captivate people all over the world and could represent the next big goal for humanity to work toward. A human Mars mission would mark a new era in the history of our species. Like the Apollo Moon landings of the past 50 years, it would demonstrate the remarkable heights we can achieve when we devote huge amounts of energy and resources toward a truly ambitious goal. It would give us firsthand knowledge of the planet most like Earth and open up the possibility that humans might someday be able to live there. This endeavour also serves to inspire the next generation of explorers and dramatically expand human knowledge, creating what some have referred to as the Mars Generation.
Science at Mars
The fourth planet from the Sun, Mars is a dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere. The story of Mars began about 4.5 billion years ago when gas and dust swirled together to form the fourth planet from the Sun. Mars is the second smallest planet in the solar system with a diameter just shy of the width of Africa. In fact its entire surface area is similar to that of all of Earth’s continents combined, given that 71% of Earth’s surface is covered by water.
Much like the Earth, Mars is dense and has a rocky composition at the centre of the planet. Enveloping the core is a rocky mantle made of silicate minerals and a crust rich in iron. These iron minerals react with the trace amounts of oxygen in Mars’s atmosphere and rusts giving the planet its signature reddish hue.
Mars’ entire surface area is similar to that of all of Earth’s continents combined, given that 71% of Earth’s surface is covered by water.
We know that Mars has an atmosphere and climate, its geology is known to be very diverse and complex (like Earth), and it appears that the climate of Mars has changed over its history (like Earth). Many of the key questions in Solar System science can be addressed effectively by exploring Mars.
Today Mars is dry, desolate and cold with temperatures dropping as low as minus -153 degrees Celsius. However, billions of years ago the planet was much warmer and more geologically active. Volcanoes such as Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system at three times the height of Mount Everest, once erupted lava but by about fifty million years ago soon after Earth’s dinosaurs died out, Mars’s volcanoes also went extinct.
Imagery from Mars reveal what appear to be water-shaped surface lake beds and river valleys that snake along the face of Mars, indicating that liquid water was perhaps for a time present. A large canyon system called Valles Marineris resides on Mars and is long enough to stretch from California to New York — more than 4,800 kilometres. This Martian canyon is 320 kilometres at its widest and 7 kilometres at its deepest. That’s about 10 times the size of Earth’s Grand Canyon.
Water on the red planet is believed to still exist today, mostly in the form of polar ice caps. Because of factors such as the presence of water some scientists believe life may have existed on the Red Planet and may exist again.
Scientists are looking for signs of life that existed long ago, when Mars was warmer and covered with water.
Scientists don’t expect to find living things currently thriving on Mars. Instead, they’re looking for signs of life that existed long ago when Mars was warmer and covered with water. We know that Mars had an ocean that covered two-thirds of the northern hemisphere. We know that it had a strong magnetosphere and it had a thick atmosphere. In other words Mars at one time in history was habitable. That’s not to say it was inhabited. We know that all of that changed at one point in the past. What caused it to change? Did the core cool? NASA’s Insight rover is currently analysing Mars to try and help answer some of these questions.
Recently, complex organic compounds have been discovered on the surface of Mars. These compounds are the building blocks for life to exist. We know Mars was at one time habitable. We now know that there are complex organic compounds that don’t exist on the Moon. And we’re only just starting to uncover the mysteries of The Red Planet.
Recently, complex organic compounds have been discovered on the surface of Mars.
In addition to the probability of discovering life increasing, we now know that underneath the surface of Mars is a lake of liquid water believed to be 20 kilometres in diameter. Robotic missions have shown that Mars has significant amounts of buried water which is promising for the possible existence of life (past and/or present) and the support of future human explorers. The Martian atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to exist for long on the surface. Today, water on Mars is found in the form of water-ice just under the surface in the polar regions. What do we know about liquid water on Earth? Anywhere it exists there’s life!
We now know that underneath the surface of Mars is a lake of liquid water believed to be 20 kilometres in diameter.
What’s most exciting is that all of these discoveries: the complex organic compounds, methane cycles, and the liquid water, were made in the last year. That shows how much we’re learning and resembles just the tip of the iceberg of scientific discovery of Mars. Of course the key questions is what else do we not know? So one of the greatest reasons we need to go to the Mars is for the science.
Is there life on Mars? (NASA)
It’s pretty unlikely, for a few different reasons. One is that Mars is very cold. Because it’s about 50 million miles farther from the sun than we are, its average temperature is around minus 27°C. This is too cold for water to exist as a liquid (except in tiny quantities), which is necessary for all the life we’ve found so far on Earth. Mars also has a very thin atmosphere and weak magnetic field, so its surface is constantly bombarded with harmful radiation from the sun and outer space that would wipe out living organisms.
Mars is 1,000 times drier than even the driest parts of Earth, such as Chile’s Atacama Desert. This makes it less likely that microbial life as we know it exists on the planet’s surface, even with some access to water. However, even in the driest areas of Chile’s desert, remnants of past microbial life from wetter times in the Atacama’s history were clearly present and well preserved over thousands of years. This means that because scientists know that Mars was a wetter, more vibrant planet in its past, traces of that ancient life might still be intact.
Some scientists have speculated that microbial life could evolve and survive beneath Mars’s surface.
Some scientists have speculated, though, that microbial life could evolve and survive beneath Mars’s surface. The planet has geologic activity that could generate enough heat underground to melt ice into water. Additionally, there’s evidence that at the surface, high levels of salt act as an antifreeze, keeping water liquid at frigid temperatures.
Other ingredients necessary for life as we know it, such as elements like carbon and nitrogen, are also likely to exist in cracks deep under the planet’s surface. On Earth, scientists have found microbes living miles underground, powered by chemicals naturally released by rocks, and it’s possible (though still unproven) that the same scenario could unfold on Mars.
There also may be some indirect evidence for it. Curiosity has detected plumes of methane gas coming from the planet’s surface. On Earth, methane is generally produced by living microorganisms, including those that live underground. Methane can also be produced by geologic processes that have nothing to do with life, so this isn’t proof of underground microbes — but it’s probably the most promising finding we’ve made thus far.
Has life existed previously on Mars?
One of the more practical questions to ask is has life existed previously on Mars? This is the question that scientists are asking and one that the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars 2020 is seeking to answer (see section in the summit on upcoming missions to Mars). Data collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover indicate that 3 or 4 billion years ago, Mars may have had a thicker atmosphere, along with a robust magnetic field like Earth’s.
Together, these could have solved both of the main problems that would plague any life on Mars today. A thicker, carbon dioxide–filled atmosphere could have warmed Mars by trapping warmth emitted by volcanic activity, as well as from the sun. Both the atmosphere and the magnetic field would have also acted as protective shields, limiting the amount of harmful radiation from the sun and outer space that would reach Mars’s surface.
Pieces of evidence for this scenario are the rock and soil formations indicating that things like flowing water and lakes were once plentiful on Mars. And chemical analysis of the water vapour currently in Mars’s atmosphere also suggests the planet once had much more water, which presumably evaporated out to space since.
If we find life on a world that’s not our own it’s going to be transformative!
THE SUMMIT
Welcome to the journey to THE SUMMIT. This week is quite the climb, but I assure you it’ll be worth it! Along the way we’ll examine the upcoming missions to Mars, analyse why getting to the surface of the Red Planet is so difficult, and explore what we’ll need to live and survive there.
The atmosphere on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, with no breathable oxygen. There’s no water on the surface to drink, either. The landscape is freezing, with no protection from the Sun’s radiation or from passing dust storms. The surface of the planet is too cold to sustain human life, and the planet’s gravity is a mere 38% of Earth’s. Plus, the atmosphere on Mars is equivalent to about 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere at sea level which as we heard makes getting to the surface tricky. So, ready to sign up?
Upcoming missions to Mars
Since the 1960s, space agencies from around the world have launched missions to Mars in attempt to understand the planets past present and potential for sustaining life. Mars is one of the most explored bodies in our solar system, and it’s the only planet where we’ve sent rovers to roam the landscape. NASA currently has three spacecraft in orbit, one rover and one lander on the surface. India (ISRO) and ESA also have spacecraft in orbit above Mars.
Here at ESA, our goals for Mars exploration have evolved into a longer-term robotic programme: ExoMars. This programme focuses on investigations to: search for signs of past or present life, understand the Martian environment, and demonstrate new technologies.
ESA will launch the ExoMars 2020 rover mission in cooperation with Russia to explore below the surface of Mars in search of clues about whether life ever could or ever did exist on the Red Planet.
ESA will launch the ExoMars 2020 rover mission in cooperation with Russia to explore below the surface of Mars in search of clues about whether life ever could or ever did exist on the Red Planet. The rover will carry a drill to access samples from the martian sub-surface down to two metres, and a suite of scientific instruments to analyse the mineralogy and chemistry of the retrieved samples and the local environment. (Read more here).
To put this into context, this is 40 times deeper than anything else planned (NASA’s Curiosity rover drills up to five centimetres). This will allow ESA to gather data from below where ultraviolet light and other radiation from our sun and galaxy, which is harmful to life, can reach. It is the most likely of any planned mission to finally answer the question of whether there was, or even is, life on Mars.
NASA are also preparing to send a rover to Mars next year. The Mars 2020 rover contains a suite of experiments centred on human living and survival on the planet. Future Mars exploration is expected to benefit from studies undertaken with both Mars and lunar exploration in mind, e.g., deep drilling technologies and in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU). An interesting technology expected to be on-board NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment (MOXIE). The technology demonstration is an oxygen generator designed to convert carbon dioxide, which constitutes about 96% of the Martian atmosphere, into breathable oxygen.
“When we send humans to Mars, we will want them to return safely, and to do that they need a rocket to lift off the planet. Liquid oxygen propellant is something we could make there and not have to bring with us. One idea would be to bring an empty oxygen tank and fill it up on Mars.” — Michael Hecht, Principal Investigator NASA.
ESA is in the early initial stages of a collaboration with NASA and other space agencies on the development of a Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. The main purpose of this mission would be to look for evidence of life on Mars by characterising the climate of Mars and its geology, but also to prepare for future human exploration. MSR will be split into two phases: an extraction phase followed by a sample collection phase a few years later. (Read more here).
The following table provides an overview of upcoming missions to Mars and the main objectives of those missions, per the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG).
How difficult is getting to Mars?
Really, really hard! The farthest place we’ve ever sent astronauts, the Moon, is about 384,400 kilometres away. Earth is about 56 million kilometres from Mars at its very closest point. Comparing Mars to the International Space Station where humans currently reside in space is the difference between walking across your living room and walking halfway around the world.
Comparing Mars to the International Space Station where humans currently reside in space is the difference between walking across your living room and walking halfway around the world.
Getting to Mars is tricky even for a robot, and landing on the surface is even more challenging. Of the 56 Mars missions so far, only 26 have been successful — a testament to the difficulty in reaching the planet. Upcoming missions to land rovers like Mars 2020 and ExoMars 2020 provides more experience of putting a heavy spacecraft on the surface of Mars.
The reason it is so hard to land on Mars is that the atmospheric pressure is low, less than 1% of Earth’s surface pressure. This means that any probe will descend very rapidly to the surface, and must be slowed. What’s more, the landing has to be done autonomously as the light travel time from Earth is three to 22 minutes. This delay transmission means we can’t steer the rapid process from Earth.
Of the 56 Mars missions so far only 26 have been successful.
One of the main issues with landing humans on Mars is figuring out how to slow down so the vehicle landing doesn’t smash into the ground. This issue doesn’t affect the Mars rovers’ landings because those machines are lightweight. The first crewed spacecraft will be titanic by comparison. If humans land on Mars, they’ll need to bring quite a bit of luggage including life support systems, supplies, shielding, and without a dense atmosphere to provide friction, it’ll be very difficult to sufficiently slow this heavier payload.
We can’t just travel to Mars when we want!
It takes between seven to nine months to get to Mars. It is possible to get to Mars in less time, but this would require a longer burn of rocket engines, using more fuel in the process. With current rocket technology this isn’t really feasible.
When we’re on rockets, we are restricted to very precise trajectories. Mission planners have to wait until the best “window of opportunity” when the planets are in the correct orbital alignment. It takes the Earth one year to orbit the Sun and it takes Mars about 1.9 years to orbit the Sun. The elliptical orbit which carries you from Earth to Mars is longer than Earth’s orbit, but shorter than Mars’ orbit.
In the nine months it takes to get to Mars, Mars moves a considerable distance around in its orbit, about 3/8 of the way around the Sun. You have to plan ahead to make sure that by the time you reach the distance of Mar’s orbit, that Mars is where you need it to be! Practically, this means that you can only begin your trip when Earth and Mars are properly lined up. This only happens every 26 months. Therefore only one launch window exists every 26 months. It’s not feasible to send stuff to Mars at any other time.
After spending up to nine months on the way to Mars, you will probably want to spend some time there. In fact, you must spend time at Mars! If you were to continue on your orbit around the Sun, then when you got back to where you started, Earth would no longer be where you left it (due to the aforementioned differences in planetary orbits)!
In order to get out of your elliptical orbit around the Sun, and into Mars orbit, you will again need to burn some fuel. For human missions to explore the surface of Mars you also need fuel to get a lander off the surface. On the first trip to Mars, it is necessary to bring all of this fuel with you (though this might not necessitate a human mission). Perhaps someday we will be able to manufacture rocket fuel on Mars. A future article will explore the possibility of refuelling in space. It is only possible to land a small part of the ship on Mars, because landing everything on the surface and lifting it off again would require enormous amounts of fuel. Therefore future human Mars mission architectures will propose leaving part of the ship, including all the supplies for the trip home, orbiting Mars.
What about returning home?
Just like you have to wait for Earth and Mars to be in the proper position before you head to Mars, you also have to make sure that they are in the proper position before you head home. That means you will have to spend approximately half a Mars year (one Earth year) before you can begin your return trip. All in all, your trip to Mars would take about 30 months: nine months to get there, a year at the surface, and nine months to get back.
To survive on Mars, what factors need to be considered?
The atmosphere on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, with no breathable oxygen. There’s no water on the surface to drink, either. The landscape is freezing, with no protection from the Sun’s radiation or from passing dust storms. The surface of the planet is too cold to sustain human life, and the planet’s gravity is a mere 38% of Earth’s. Plus, the atmosphere on Mars is equivalent to about 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere at sea level which as we heard makes getting to the surface tricky. So, ready to sign up?
To sum up how difficult the mission is, here’s a passage from NASA’s Dr. Stan Love, a NASA astronaut, who flew to the International Space Station in 2008 on the space shuttle mission that delivered and installed ESA’s Columbus Laboratory Module:
“You land on Mars, now I got to wait for my launch window to come back from Earth, and that happens a year after I land, one Earth year, half a Mars’ year. So, you’re going to go halfway around the Sun on the planet Mars, and then your launch window opens so you can come back to Earth. So, once you have left Earth (and no spacecraft that we can possibly design has enough propellant on board to come back), done the burn, and headed off to Mars, you can’t abort and say, no, I don’t like this, I’m coming home. You’re committed. You’re committed to nine months out, you’re committed to a year on the surface, and you’re committed to nine months back.
Now we can mess with things and say, well, what if we do a special different trajectory and we’re going to come back and go closer to the Sun than the Earth and do a swing by the planet Venus and get a little boost from Venus’ current gravity and then we’ll come back to Earth a little earlier. That adds complexity to your mission: now I’ve got to have a bunch of heat shielding because I’m getting close to the Sun.
Once you have left Earth and headed off to Mars, you can’t abort and say, no, I don’t like this, I’m coming home. You’re committed. You’re committed to nine months out, you’re committed to a year on the surface, and you’re committed to nine months back.
And as with certain other philosophical conflicts in spaceflight, there has been a great deal of discussion and no winner on whether it’s better to just suck it up and do the long haul or try to be fancy and do this faster thing. The pros and cons on both sides have not shown a clear victor on that one. So, basically, when you are committing to Mars, you’re committing to two and a half to three years away from the Earth and nothing important can break, nothing important can run out. All those engine burns have to work right and you have to launch yourself off a planet without help.
Nobody wants to emigrate to Mars to live in a room the size of a bathroom until they die of cancer three years later, that’s just not fun.
And they’re [the future astronauts] fussy about being alive when they get there, and some of them are even fussy about coming home. If you don’t need to come home, it gets easier. The radiation environment on Mars is not super healthy for you, you need to get 30 feet or so dirt over your head to block the cosmic rays. The Earth has a nice magnetic field, a nice thick atmosphere that protects us from that stuff. Mars doesn’t have that. So, nobody wants to emigrate to Mars to live in a room the size of a bathroom until they die of cancer three years later, that’s just not fun.”
So yeah, Mars is tough!
You might wonder: how can we hope to survive against such odds? Alas, thankfully there are some very intelligent people working hard to find solutions to these challenges and more. Let’s take a look in greater detail at some of these challenges and proposed solutions.
Gravity
All planets and large moons have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere. On Mars you weigh 0.38 your weight on Earth, and we’re not entirely sure what this would do to human health. Normally, your body’s muscles and bones have to work to stand up against the force of Earth’s gravity. Due to Mars’s reduced gravity, astronauts’ muscles would quickly atrophy. In experiments, rats flown in space lost a third of the muscle bulk in their legs within a few days.
On Mars you weigh 0.38 your weight on Earth, and we’re not entirely sure what this would do to human health.
For some muscles, this could be minimised by exercise on stationary bikes or treadmills, as is daily routine for the astronauts on the International Space Station. But the reduced gravity would still be a problem for the skeletal system (which would lose calcium, becoming more brittle) and for the mechanisms inside the inner ear that normally allow you to balance (potentially leading to vertigo and disorientation). There’s also some evidence that an extended period of time in reduced gravity can be harmful to astronauts’ eyesight, perhaps because it causes the fluid pooled near the optic nerve to expand, changing the shape of the eyeball.
To keep Mars residents’ bones from demineralising, for instance, they might need to exercise inside large centrifuges every single day. For long-term effects, which in weightlessness involve not only bone demineralisation, but also muscle atrophy, immune system effects, and other complications throughout the body, there is no way to replicate partial gravity on Earth. We can simulate it with various contraptions that have allowed researchers to study things like walking on Mars.
We can put people in bed for long periods with the beds angled so as to simulate the shifting of fluids on Mars or other worlds. But until we actually send animals to those environments, we can’t really be sure what will happen to various systems, including reproduction. And while Martian gravity is low in terms of human physiology and movement (you could jump really high on Mars and that would be fun), it’s high enough that spacecraft would consume a significant amount of energy in taking off from the planet or landing on it. Similarly, while the atmosphere is way too thin to support human life (until we terraform it — make it more Earth like), it’s still thick enough to cause dust storms that can ruin machinery.
Oxygen
Living on Mars will require a steady supply of oxygen, which would be costly to transport from Earth in the necessary volumes. A cube-shaped device called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment (MOXIE) is exploring a space-saving alternative that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen. Although MOXIE is a small-scale demonstration, the hope is that its technology could evolve into bigger and more efficient oxygen generators in the future. Those would allow astronauts to create their own breathable air and would provide oxygen to burn rocket fuel needed to return humans to the Earth.
Food
With a thin atmosphere and reduced sunlight, it will be difficult to get anything to grow on Mars. Astronauts could take food, water, and oxygen along, but enough supplies for the entire trip will add weight and size to the spacecraft. One possible solution might be to send materials to be used on Mars ahead, on an uncrewed rocket to land on Mars and be waiting when the humans get there.
Although we could send an advance spacecraft stocked with some food, water, and oxygen ahead of the astronauts, they’d still need to provide these supplies for themselves after a short period of time. They might establish a base near the planet’s water ice caps, melting the ice to provide water and converting some of it into oxygen through chemical reactions. NASA has identified a few hardy, dense crops that might be worth growing on Mars, including: lettuce, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, green onions, radishes, bell peppers, strawberries, fresh herbs, and cabbages.
Shelter
NASA is already considering what kind of habitation we’ll need to survive on the surface of Mars. Six companies began designing possible habitat prototypes in 2016. All these habitats will likely have a few things in common — they have to be self-sustaining, sealed against the thin atmosphere, and capable of supporting life for extended periods without support from Earth. Shielding from dust and radiation are a key part of every design. Dust blows everywhere, sticking to spacecraft and covering solar panels. And because the planet doesn’t have a magnetic field, as Earth does, the Sun’s radiation bathes the Martian surface.
The Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere naturally protect us from most of the harmful radiation that emanates through space. Without this protection, any astronauts living on Mars would be exposed to dangerous levels of it, increasing their long-term risk of cancer and potentially eroding their decision-making skills.
NASA has calculated that a round-trip voyage to Mars, combined with a six-month stay there, would increase an astronaut’s lifetime risk of developing fatal cancer by about 5 percent. The longer someone stayed there, the higher this number would climb. This radiation would also increase a person’s chance of having a child with a harmful genetic mutation — a big problem for any plans to establish a self-sustaining colony there.
There have been various mechanisms suggested to shield astronauts from some of this radiation, like Martian soil piled up against their living quarters, and a special heavily lined protection room they could retreat to in case of a solar flare.
“The International Space Station has really taught us a tremendous amount of what is needed in a deep space habitat. We’ll need things like environmental control and life support systems (ECLSS), power systems, docking ports, and air locks so that crew can perform space walks to repair things that break or to add new capabilities.” — Richard McGuire Davis, Jr., Assistant Director for Science and Exploration and co-leader of the Mars Human Landing Sites Study at NASA
One technology that offers much potential to establish a settlement on Mars is 3D manufacturing (printing). Rockets that can carry large payloads to deep space with ready made habitation elements on-board are not readily available and transporting the infrastructure to Mars is an expensive venture.
One thing that is rapidly improving is robotics and 3D manufacturing technologies / techniques. A 3D printer that can make habitats from Lunar regolith will be tested on the Moon in the coming decade. A similar printer using Martian dirt, blending the grains together at a high temperature like glass beads, could present a cheap model for basic habitat construction. You can check out the winners from the NASA funded 3D printing habitat competition here.
In theory, a robotic autonomous 3D manufacturing facility could make a basic habitat capable of withstanding the the majority of radiation before the first humans to Mars have arrived. Of course humans would have to make considerable enhancements to make the habitat airtight and pressurised, but this approach, whilst beyond our current technical capability, offers a potentially credible solution to habitat construction on Mars.
Boredom
Some experts think that psychological tensions of spending years cooped up with a couple of crewmates and few distractions would be the most difficult part of a Mars journey. In Mars mission simulation experiments (analogue studies), for instance, researchers have noticed that participants often experience something called “third-quarter syndrome.” They do all right for the first half of a nine-month mission, but as it wears on, they have a noticeable dip in morale, with the lowest moments coming before the fourth quarter, when they’re close to the finish. For a 30-month round-trip mission to Mars (or a permanent colony there), you’d have to imagine this problem would be a lot more severe.
Could we terraform Mars?
Terraforming has a connotation of humans making another planetary body, like Mars, Earth-like. But really, it’s about humans changing their environment to make it more supportive of our need. Scientists have proposed terraforming to enable the long-term colonisation of Mars. A solution common to both groups is to release carbon dioxide gas trapped in the Martian surface to thicken the atmosphere and act as a blanket to warm the planet.
However, Mars does not retain enough carbon dioxide that could practically be put back into the atmosphere to warm itself, according to a new NASA-sponsored study. Transforming the inhospitable Martian environment into a place astronauts could explore without life support is not possible without technology well beyond today’s capabilities. Read more about the study results here.
Mars does not retain enough carbon dioxide that could practically be put back into the atmosphere to warm itself.
While plants will need a higher pressure to grow, they don’t have to be at an Earth-like pressure. In fact, we can pressurise the greenhouse with carbon dioxide, which is the main component of the Martian atmosphere. Instead of the astronauts having to wear cumbersome space suits, they could just wear lightweight oxygen masks in the greenhouses. The key takeaway is that the planet doesn’t have to transform into Earth 2.0. Maybe one day it will, but for the time being, it just has to function for people to live and work.
That hasn’t stopped long-term terraforming solutions such as nuking the planet into habitability to create a magnetic shield around the planet to encourage it to ‘grow’ its own atmosphere from being hypothesised.
What steps must be taken to land the first human on Mars?
The International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) agreed upon six capabilities that are necessary to create the mission architecture to send humans to the surface and back, taking into consideration the increasing duration, complexity and distance of missions from Earth.
Acknowledging SpaceX’s Mars Transportation Architecture
As an advocate of private industry led space missions, I must make reference to the Mars transportation architecture that has been proposed by SpaceX. I won’t go into the details here, but if you’re interested in how SpaceX plan to get humans to the Martian surface then take a look at the following video and guide.
To conclude
Well that concludes our tour of Mars. We’ve reached THE SUMMIT of this long article. I hope it served as a useful guide to why Mars is so important but challenging, and how we’re a long way away from reaching our mission of landing humans on the Red Planet.
Last week we celebrated 50 years since the Apollo 11 Moon landing. An incredible feat of will, technology, engineering, and teamwork. Now we must look forward to the next 50 years with Mars firmly in our sights.
This endeavour also serves to inspire the next generation of explorers and dramatically expand human knowledge, creating what some have referred to as the Mars Generation.
Mars may or may not be a place where a consistent and large population of humans live any time soon, but visiting the planet and observing how life works there could greatly impact life on Earth. It seems extremely unlikely Mars would ever be more habitable than Earth, but it’s possible the planets could one day be more similar than different. Mars could soon show us what just barely surviving is really like. Visiting a desert always makes you appreciate an ice-cold glass of water.
Mars is hopefully just our first step into the universe. Once we’ve dipped our toes out into the Solar System, it will be easier to expand out into the asteroid belt and beyond. With capabilities to travel to Mars, it will be possible to visit some asteroids in their native orbits. These remnants of early Solar System formation have scientific interest and may hold resources which will be useful in the future. Mars’s low gravity provides the perfect platform for constructing and launching other deep space vehicles. After we’ve got that foothold, the only thing holding us back is our technology and will.
I leave you this week with a quote from Dr. Firouz Naderi, manager of the Mars Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: “We are in a tough business. It is like climbing Mt. Everest. No matter how good you are, you are going to lose your grip sometimes and fall back. Then you have a choice, either retreat to the relative comfort and safety of the base camp, or get up, dust yourself off, get a firmer grip and a surer toehold and head back up for the summit. The space business is not about base camps. It is about summits. And, the exhilaration of discoveries you make once you get there. That is what drives you on.”
Amen!
