trip to planet mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover has embarked on an ambitious road trip on Mars

A road trip has begun on Mars.

NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been roaming the red planet since 2021, has embarked on a long trek to the top of the crater in which it landed, the space agency said Tuesday .

It marks a new chapter of the rover’s mission: It’s expected to spend the next few months making a steep ascent up to the western rim of Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide basin north of the Martian equator that scientists think was once home to a river delta.

The trip comes after 3½ years of exploration on the floor of Jezero Crater, where Perseverance found evidence of ancient flash floods and collected several rock samples that NASA intends to bring back to Earth on a future mission.

“Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles,” Art Thompson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement this month. “As we start the Crater Rim Campaign, our rover is in excellent condition, and the team is raring to see what’s on the roof of this place.”

Perseverance is likely to encounter some of the steepest and most challenging terrain it has experienced so far, according to NASA. The journey involves an elevation gain of around 1,000 feet and will most likely wrap up at the end of the year.

Throughout its travels, Perseverance will study Mars’ terrain, comparing rocks on the crater rim with those on its floor and in previously explored areas. The comparisons should give scientists a richer understanding of Mars’ landscape and its geological history.

Once the rover reaches the top, it is expected to focus on two regions: a spot nicknamed “Pico Turquino” and another dubbed “Witch Hazel Hill.”

Photos snapped from orbit suggest that Pico Turquino has some ancient fractures that may be remnants of hydrothermal systems from Mars’ distant past, according to NASA. Scientists are eager to investigate the possibility that heated water circulated beneath the Martian surface long ago; if that was the case, it could indicate that conditions were once ripe for microbial life to exist on the planet.

At Witch Hazel Hill, NASA scientists plan for Perseverance to investigate layers of bedrock that are likely to contain clues about the planet’s climate over billions of years.

Eleni Ravanis, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and one of the science leads of the Crater Rim Campaign, said the findings will help researchers understand more about Mars’ geological evolution.

“This is because we expect to investigate rocks from the most ancient crust of Mars,” Ravanis said in a statement . “These rocks formed from a wealth of different processes, and some represent potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been examined up close before.”

Perseverance launched on July 30, 2020, and landed on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. The mission is the first step in what is known as the Mars Sample Return campaign, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency. The plan calls for subsequent missions to send another spacecraft to Mars to collect the samples Perseverance has gathered and bring them back to Earth.

Denise Chow is a science and space reporter for NBC News.

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Mars in a Minute: How Do You Get to Mars?

What does it take to get a spacecraft to Mars? This video covers a few key things to remember when planning a trip to the Red Planet.

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Mars in a Minute: Is Mars Really Red?

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• Page Last Updated: Sep 3, 2024
• Responsible NASA Official: Rebecca Sirmons

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited entirely by robots.

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Despite being inhospitable to humans, robotic explorers – like NASA's Perseverance rover – are serving as pathfinders to eventually get humans to the surface of the Red Planet.

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Mars is one of the most explored bodies in our solar system, and it's the only planet where we've sent rovers to explore the alien landscape. NASA missions have found lots of evidence that Mars was much wetter and warmer, with a thicker atmosphere, billions of years ago.

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Beyond the Moon

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Like the Moon, Mars is a rich destination for scientific discovery and a driver of technologies that will enable humans to travel and explore far from Earth.

Mars remains our horizon goal for human exploration because it is one of the only other places we know in the solar system where life may have existed. What we learn about the Red Planet will tell us more about our Earth’s past and future, and may help answer whether life exists beyond our home planet.

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Why we explore Mars—and what decades of missions have revealed

In the 1960s, humans set out to discover what the red planet has to teach us. Now, NASA is hoping to land the first humans on Mars by the 2030s.

Mars has captivated humans since we first set eyes on it as a star-like object in the night sky. Early on, its reddish hue set the planet apart from its shimmering siblings, each compelling in its own way, but none other tracing a ruddy arc through Earth’s heavens. Then, in the late 1800s, telescopes first revealed a surface full of intriguing features—patterns and landforms that scientists at first wrongly ascribed to a bustling Martian civilization. Now, we know there are no artificial constructions on Mars. But we’ve also learned that, until 3.5 billion years ago, the dry, toxic planet we see today might have once been as habitable as Earth.

Since the 1960s, humans have set out to discover what Mars can teach us about how planets grow and evolve, and whether it has ever hosted alien life. So far, only uncrewed spacecraft have made the trip to the red planet, but that could soon change. NASA is hoping to land the first humans on Mars by the 2030s—and several new missions are launching before then to push exploration forward. Here’s a look at why these journeys are so important—and what humans have learned about Mars through decades of exploration.

Why explore Mars

Over the last century, everything we’ve learned about Mars suggests that the planet was once quite capable of hosting ecosystems—and that it might still be an incubator for microbial life today.

Mars is the fourth rock from the sun, just after Earth. It is just a smidge more than half of Earth’s size , with gravity only 38 percent that of Earth’s. It takes longer than Earth to complete a full orbit around the sun—but it rotates around its axis at roughly the same speed. That’s why one year on Mars lasts for 687 Earth days , while a day on Mars is just 40 minutes longer than on Earth.

Despite its smaller size, the planet’s land area is also roughly equivalent to the surface area of Earth’s continents —meaning that, at least in theory, Mars has the same amount of habitable real estate. Unfortunately, the planet is now wrapped in a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and cannot support earthly life-forms. Methane gas also periodically appears in the atmosphere of this desiccated world, and the soil contains compounds that would be toxic to life as we know it. Although water does exist on Mars, it’s locked into the planet’s icy polar caps and buried, perhaps in abundance, beneath the Martian surface .

Today, when scientists scrutinize the Martian surface, they see features that are unquestionably the work of ancient, flowing liquids : branching streams, river valleys, basins, and deltas. Those observations suggest that the planet may have once had a vast ocean covering its northern hemisphere. Elsewhere, rainstorms soaked the landscape, lakes pooled, and rivers gushed, carving troughs into the terrain. It was also likely wrapped in a thick atmosphere capable of maintaining liquid water at Martian temperatures and pressures.

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Somewhere during Martian evolution, the planet went through a dramatic transformation, and a world that was once rather Earthlike became the dusty, dry husk we see today. The question now is, what happened? Where did those liquids go, and what happened to the Martian atmosphere ?

Exploring Mars helps scientists learn about momentous shifts in climate that can fundamentally alter planets. It also lets us look for biosignatures, signs that might reveal whether life was abundant in the planet’s past—and if it still exists on Mars today. And, the more we learn about Mars, the better equipped we’ll be to try to make a living there, someday in the future.

Past missions, major discoveries

Since the 1960s, humans have sent dozens of spacecraft to study Mars . Early missions were flybys, with spacecraft furiously snapping photos as they zoomed past. Later, probes pulled into orbit around Mars; more recently, landers and rovers have touched down on the surface.

But sending a spacecraft to Mars is hard , and landing on the planet is even harder. The thin Martian atmosphere makes descent tricky, and more than 60 percent of landing attempts have failed. So far, four space agencies—NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)—have put spacecraft in Martian orbit. With eight successful landings, the United States is the only country that has operated a craft on the planet’s surface. The United Arab Emirates and China might join that club if their recently launched Hope and Tianwen-1 missions reach the red planet safely in February 2021.

Early highlights of Mars missions include NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft , which swung by Mars in July 1965 and captured the first close-up images of this foreign world. In 1971, the Soviet space program sent the first spacecraft into Martian orbit. Called Mars 3 , it returned roughly eight months of observations about the planet's topography, atmosphere, weather, and geology. The mission also sent a lander to the surface, but it returned data for only about 20 seconds before going quiet.

Over the subsequent decades, orbiters returned far more detailed data on the planet's atmosphere and surface, and finally dispelled the notion, widely held by scientists since the late 1800s, that Martian canals were built by an alien civilization. They also revealed some truly dramatic features: the small world boasts the largest volcanoes in the solar system, and one of the largest canyons yet discovered—a chasm as long as the continental United States. Dust storms regularly sweep over its plains, and winds whip up localized dust devils.

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In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 became the first spacecraft to successfully operate on the planet’s surface, returning photos until 1982. They also conducted biological experiments on Martian soil that were designed to uncover signs of life in space—but their results were inconclusive , and scientists still disagree over how to interpret the data.

NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission , launched in 1996, put the first free-moving rover—called Sojourner—on the planet. Its successors include the rovers Spirit and Opportunity , which explored the planet for far longer than expected and returned more than 100,000 images before dust storms obliterated their solar panels in the 2010s.

Now, two NASA spacecraft are active on the Martian surface: InSight is probing the planet’s interior and it has already revealed that “ marsquakes” routinely rattle its surface . The Curiosity rover , launched in 2012, is also still wheeling around in Gale Crater, taking otherworldly selfies, and studying the rocks and sediments deposited in the crater’s ancient lakebed.

Several spacecraft are transmitting data from orbit: NASA’s MAVEN orbiter , Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter , and Mars Odyssey ; ESA’s Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter ; and India’s Mars Orbiter Mission .

Together, these missions have shown scientists that Mars is an active planet that is rich in the ingredients needed for life as we know it—water, organic carbon , and an energy source. Now, the question is: Did life ever evolve on Mars , and is it still around?

Future of Mars exploration

Once every 26 months , Earth and Mars are aligned in a way that minimizes travel times and expense , enabling spacecraft to make the interplanetary journey in roughly half a year. Earth’s space agencies tend to launch probes during these conjunctions, the most recent of which happens in the summer of 2020. Three countries are sending spacecraft to Mars during this window: The United Arab Emirates, which launched its Hope spacecraft on July 20 and will orbit Mars to study its atmosphere and weather patterns; China, which launched its Tianwen-1 on July 23 , and the United States, currently targeting July 30 for the launch of its Perseverance rover .

Perseverance is a large, six-wheeled rover equipped with a suite of sophisticated instruments. Its target is Jezero Crater, site of an ancient river delta , and a likely location for ancient life-forms to have thrived. Once on the surface, Perseverance will study Martian climate and weather, test technologies that could help humans survive on Mars, and collect samples from dozens of rocks that will eventually be brought to Earth. Among its goals is helping to determine whether Mars was—or is—inhabited, making it a true life-finding Mars mission.

All of the robotic activity is, of course, laying the groundwork for sending humans to the next world over. NASA is targeting the 2030s as a reasonable timeframe for setting the first boots on Mars, and is developing a space capsule, Orion , that will be able to ferry humans to the moon and beyond.

Private spaceflight companies such as SpaceX are also getting into the Mars game. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said that humanity must become “ a multiplanetary species ” if we are to survive, and he is working on a plan that could see a million people living on Mars before the end of this century.

Soon, in one way or another, humanity may finally know whether our neighboring planet ever hosted life—and whether there’s a future for our species on another world.

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Mars in a Minute: How Do You Get to Mars?

Video Transcript

How do you get to Mars?

If you want to send a spacecraft all the way to Mars, first you'll need a fast rocket to escape the pull of Earth's gravity. The heavier your spacecraft, the more powerful your rocket needs to be to lift off.

Next, make sure you launch at the right time. Mars and Earth orbit the sun at different speeds and distances. Sometimes they're really far apart, and other times they come closer together. About every two years, the two planets are in perfect positions to get to Mars with the least amount of rocket fuel. That's important. The total trip is 300 million miles.

Finally, make sure your aim is right. You can't shoot for where Mars is at launch time. You have to aim for where it will be when you get there. It's a lot like how a quarterback passes a football.

Also, you may need a few thrusts to correct your direction along the way so you don't miss Mars.

If all goes well, you'll get to the Red Planet in about seven or eight months.

Then, if you actually want to land on Mars, well that's a whole other challenge.

8 Cool Destinations That Future Mars Tourists Could Explore

Touring mars.

Mars is a planet of vast contrasts — huge volcanoes, deep canyons, and craters that may or may not host running water. It will be an amazing location for future tourists to explore, once we put the first Red Planet colonies into motion. The landing sites for these future missions will likely need to be flat plains for safety and practical reasons, but perhaps they could land within a few days' drive of some more interesting geology. Here are some locations that future Martians could visit.

Olympus Mons

Olympus Mons is the most extreme volcano in the solar system. Located in the Tharsis volcanic region, it's about the same size as the state of Arizona, according to NASA . Its height of 16 miles (25 kilometers) makes it nearly three times the height of Earth's Mount Everest, which is about 5.5 miles (8.9 km) high. Olympus Mons is a gigantic shield volcano , which was formed after lava slowly crawled down its slopes. This means that the mountain is probably easy for future explorers to climb, as its average slope is only 5 percent. At its summit is a spectacular depression some 53 miles (85 km) wide, formed by magma chambers that lost lava (likely during an eruption) and collapsed.

Tharsis volcanoes

While you're climbing around Olympus Mons, it's worth sticking around to look at some of the other volcanoes in the Tharsis region. Tharsis hosts 12 gigantic volcanoes in a zone roughly 2500 miles (4000 km) wide, according to NASA . Like Olympus Mons, these volcanoes tend to be much larger than those on Earth, presumably because Mars has a weaker gravitational pull that allows the volcanoes to grow taller. These volcanoes may have erupted for as long as two billion years , or half of the history of Mars. The picture here shows the eastern Tharsis region, as imaged by Viking 1 in 1980. At left, from top to bottom, you can see three shield volcanoes that are roughly 16 miles (25 km) high: Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons. At upper right is another shield volcano called Tharsis Tholus.

Valles Marineris

Mars not only hosts the largest volcano of the solar system, but also the largest canyon. Valles Marineris is roughly 1850 miles (3000 km) long, according to NASA . That's about four times longer than the Grand Canyon, which has a length of about 500 miles (800 km). Researchers aren't sure how Valles Marineris came to be, but there are several theories about its formation. Many scientists suggest that when the Tharsis region was formed, it contributed to the growth of Valles Marineris. Lava moving through the volcanic region pushed the crust upward, which broke the crust into fractures in other regions. Over time, these fractures grew into Valles Marineris.

The North and South Poles

Mars has two icy regions at its poles, with slightly different compositions; the north pole (pictured) was studied up close by the Phoenix lander in 2008, while our south pole observations come from orbiters. During the winter, according to NASA , temperatures near both the north and south poles are so frigid that carbon dioxide condenses out of the atmosphere into ice, on the surface. The process reverses in the summer, when the carbon dioxide sublimates back into the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide completely disappears in the northern hemisphere, leaving behind a water ice cap. But some of the carbon dioxide ice remains in the southern atmosphere. All of this ice movement has vast effects on the Martian climate , producing winds and other effects.

Gale Crater and Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons)

Made famous by the landing of the Curiosity rover in 2012, Gale Crater is host to extensive evidence of past water. Curiosity stumbled upon a streambed within weeks of landing, and found more extensive evidence of water throughout its journey along the crater floor. Curiosity is now summiting a nearby volcano called Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons) and looking at the geological features in each of its strata. One of Curiosity's more exciting finds was discovering complex organic molecules in the region, on multiple occasions. Results from 2018 announced these organics were discovered inside of 3.5-billion-year-old rocks . Simultaneous to the organics results, researchers announced the rover also found methane concentrations in the atmosphere change over the seasons. Methane is an element that can be produced by microbes, as well as geological phenomena, so it's unclear if that's a sign of life.

Medusae Fossae

Medusae Fossae is one of the weirdest locations on Mars, with some people even speculating that it holds evidence of some sort of a UFO crash . The more likely explanation is it is a huge volcanic deposit, some one-fifth of the size of the United States. Over time, winds sculpted the rocks into some beautiful formations.But researchers will need more study to learn how these volcanoes formed Medusae Fossae. A 2018 study suggested that the formation may have formed from immensely huge volcanic eruptions taking place hundreds of times over 500 million years. These eruptions would have warmed the Red Planet's climate as greenhouse gases from the volcanoes drifted into the atmosphere.

Recurring Slope Lineae in Hale Crater

Mars is host to strange features called recurring slope lineae, which tend to form on the sides of steep craters during warm weather. It's hard to figure out what these RSL are, though. Pictures shown here from Hale Crater (as well as other locations) show spots where spectroscopy picked up signs of hydration. In 2015, NASA initially announced that the hydrated salts must be signs of running water on the surface, but later research said the RSL could be formed from atmospheric water or dry flows of sand .In reality, we may have to get up close to these RSL to see what their true nature is. But there's a difficulty — if the RSL indeed host alien microbes, we wouldn't want to get too close in case of contamination. While NASA figures out how to investigate under its planetary protection protocols , future human explorers may have to admire these mysterious features from afar, using binoculars.

'Ghost Dunes' in Noctis Labyrinthus and Hellas basin

Mars is a planet mostly shaped by wind these days, since the water evaporated as its atmosphere thinned. But we can see extensive evidence of past water, such as regions of "ghost dunes" found in Noctis Labyrinthus and Hellas basin. Researchers say these regions used to hold dunes that were tens of meters tall. Later, the dunes were flooded by lava or water, which preserved their bases while the tops eroded away. Old dunes such as these show how winds used to flow on ancient Mars, which in turn gives climatologists some hints as to the ancient environment of the Red Planet. In an even more exciting twist, there could be microbes hiding in the sheltered areas of these dunes, safe from the radiation and wind that would otherwise sweep them away.

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Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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What Would a Trip to Mars Look Like For a Tourist?

A trip to mars wouldn't exactly be a relaxing vacation. learn what it would be like to stay or live on mars..

By NASA’s current estimates, it would take around seven to eight months to get from Earth to Mars, and that’s on a good day when its orbit comes closest to Earth. And once you get there, it’s not exactly an Eden away from home. Rather, it’s an arid Martian desert with temperatures reaching  -81 degrees Fahrenheit  regularly.

It’s not habitable without spacesuits and a completely enclosed environment because Mars’ air is about  95 percent  carbon dioxide. There’s also no liquid water found on its surface.

But that hasn’t stopped humans from wanting to visit the planet. So what would this outer-planet tourism really entail?

Valentina Sumini , a space architect at MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, says that there are major challenges right now that would largely preclude tourists from visiting Mars, mostly because of the radiation.

According to  NASA , “Our planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere protect us from harsh cosmic radiation, but without that, you are more exposed,” which can damage the human body and cause all sorts of degenerative diseases. We’d have to find a fix for this before making the voyage. 

What Is Mars Like?

Still, nonetheless, it’s fun to plan. “You’d have to imagine an entirely new type of exploration," says Sumini. In the same way as a trip to Antarctica, a trip to Mars wouldn’t just be about luxury; it would be about having astronauts lead learning experiences around science.

Most of your time as a tourist on Mars would be spent inside, in what Sumini calls “a mix of augmented and virtual reality.” You’d also have to stay in shape and train, working out to fend off the effects of reduced gravity on Mars and microgravity in the voyage getting to the planet.

According to  NASA , without gravity, your bones lose minerals, dropping about 1 percent of bone density per month. And you’d have to stay at least two years to get back to Mars’ shortest orbit from Earth. 

Read More: The First 'Space Hotel' Plans to Open in 2027

Can Plants Grow on Mars?

It would be difficult to grow plants in Mars’ soil because it’s made of regolith, a reddish space dust that contains poisonous compounds of chlorine in molecules called perchlorates.

Researchers have tried growing plants that mimic conditions on Mars using a soil that’s akin and found in a product called  Mars Regolith Simulant . Additionally, you’d have to grow plants that could tolerate shade because, on Mars, you’d get about  60 percent of the light  that you would on Earth.

That’s why, says Sumini, food production would revolve around an indoor hydroponic greenhouse. The greenhouse would also serve as a means for tourists to reconnect to the nature they would be missing back home.

“You’d take a stroll in the greenhouse not just for food production but also for relaxation,” says Sumini. The water coming down from the ceiling would not just feed the plants; it would also recreate the feeling of rain in a world where water could only exist indoors.

Read More: How Scientists Create Oxygen for Astronauts on Prolonged Space Missions

Can We Live on Mars?

All of the elements that we take for granted on Earth would not exist on Mars, and therefore, says Sumini, we would have to imagine what it would feel like to be isolated in such an extreme environment. Including finding a way to reconnect with those you’ve left behind on Earth.

Being a tourist on Mars involves finding ways to deal with all of the elements that make it physically inhospitable. But humans are emotional beings, and survival would be about way more than just staying alive. Sumini contends that our most pressing objective might be finding a way to thrive psychologically on the Red Planet.

Read More: Life on Mars May Have Evolved Like a Nice Risotto – Not Too Moist and Not Too Dry

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Want to travel to Mars? Here’s how long the trip could take.

By Eva Botkin-Kowacki

Posted on Feb 21, 2023 6:00 AM EST

6 minute read

Despite what Star Trek’s warp-speed journeys would have us believe, interplanetary travel is quite the hike. Take getting to Mars. Probes sent to the Red Planet by NASA and other space agencies spend about seven months in space before they arrive at their destination. A trip for humans would probably be longer—likely on the timescale of a few years. 

There are a lot of things that a human crew needs to survive that robots don’t, such as food, water, oxygen, and enough supplies for a return—the weight of which can slow down a spacecraft. With current technology, NASA calculations estimate a crewed mission to Mars and back, plus time on the surface , could take somewhere between two and three years. “Three years we know for sure is feasible,” says Michelle Rucker, who leads NASA’s Mars Architecture Team in the agency’s ​​ Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate .

But NASA aims to shorten that timeline, in part because it would make a Mars mission safer for humans—we still don’t know how well the human body can withstand the environment of space for an extended period. (The record for most consecutive days in space is 437.) The agency is investing in projects to develop new propulsion technologies that might enable more expeditious space travel. 

A crooked path to Mars

In a science-fictional world, a spacecraft would blast off Earth and head directly to Mars. That trajectory would certainly make for a speedier trip. But real space travel is a lot more complicated than going from point A to point B.

“If you had all the thrust you want, you could ignore the fact that there happens to be gravity in our universe and just plow all the way through the solar system,” says Mason Peck , a professor of astronautics at Cornell University who served as NASA’s chief technologist from 2011 to 2013. “But that’s not a scenario that’s possible right now.”

Such a direct trajectory has several challenges. As a spacecraft lifts off Earth, it needs to escape the planet’s gravitational pull, which requires quite a bit of thrust. Then, in space, the force of gravity from Earth, Mars, and the sun pulls the spacecraft in different directions. When it is far enough away, it will settle into orbit around the sun. Bucking that gravity requires fuel-intensive maneuvers.

[Related: Signs of past chemical reactions detected on Mars ]

The second challenge is that the planets do not stay in a fixed place. They orbit the sun, each at its own rate: Mars will not be at the same distance from Earth when the spacecraft launches as the Red Planet will be, say, seven months later. 

As such, the most fuel-efficient route to Mars follows an elliptical orbit around the sun, Peck says. Just one-way, that route covers hundreds of millions of miles and takes over half a year, at best. 

But designing a crewed mission to the Red Planet isn’t just about figuring out how fast a spacecraft can get there and back. It’s about “balance,” says Patrick Chai, in-space propulsion lead for NASA’s Mars Architecture Team . “There are a whole bunch of decisions we have to make in terms of how we optimize for certain things. Where do we trade performance for time?” Chai says. “If you just look at one single metric, you can end up making decisions that are really great for that particular metric, but can be problematic in other areas.”

One major trade-off for speed has to do with how much stuff is on board. With current technology, every maneuver to shorten the trip to Mars requires more fuel. 

If you drive a car, you know that in order to accelerate the vehicle, you step on the gas. The same is true in a spacecraft, except that braking and turning also use fuel. To slow down, for instance, a spacecraft fires its thrusters in the opposite direction to its forward motion.

But there are no gas stations in space. More fuel means more mass on board. And more mass requires more fuel to propel that extra mass through the air… and so on. Trimming a round-trip mission down to two years is when this trade-off starts to become exponentially less efficient, Rucker says. At least, that’s with current technology.

New tech to speed up the trip

NASA would like to be able to significantly reduce that timeline. In 2018, the space agency requested proposals for technological systems that could enable small, uncrewed missions to fly from Earth to Mars in 45 days or less . 

At the time, the proposals didn’t gain much traction. But the challenge inspired engineers to design innovative propulsion systems that don’t yet exist. And now, NASA has begun to fund the development of leading contenders. In particular, the space agency has its eye on nuclear propulsion.

Spacecraft currently rely largely on chemical propulsion. “You basically take an oxidizer and a fuel, combine them, and they combust, and that generates heat. You accelerate that heated product through a nozzle to generate thrust,” explains NASA’s Chai. 

Engineers have known for decades that a nuclear-based system could generate more thrust using a significantly smaller amount of fuel than a chemical rocket. They just haven’t built one yet—though that might be about to change.

One of NASA’s nuclear investment projects aims to integrate a nuclear thermal engine into an experimental spacecraft. The Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations , or DRACO, program, is a collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and aims to demonstrate the resulting technology as soon as 2027 .

[Related: Microbes could help us make rocket fuel on Mars ]

The speediest trip to Mars might come from another project, however. This concept, the brainchild of researchers at the University of Florida and supported by a NASA grant, seeks to achieve what Chai calls the “holy grail” of nuclear propulsion: a combination system that pairs nuclear thermal propulsion with an electric kind. 

“We did some preliminary analysis, and it seems like we can get pretty close to [45 days],” says the leader of that project, Ryan Gosse, a professor of practice in the University of Florida’s in-house applied research program, Florida Applied Research in Engineering (FLARE). One caveat: That timeline is for a light payload and no humans on board. However, if the project is successful, the technology could potentially be scaled up in the future to support a crewed mission.

There are two types of nuclear propulsion, and both have their merits. Nuclear thermal propulsion, which uses heat, can generate a lot of thrust quickly from a small amount of fuel. Nuclear electric propulsion, which uses charged particles, is even more fuel-efficient but generates thrust much more slowly.

“While you’re in deep space, the electric propulsion is really great because you have all the time in the world to thrust. The efficiency, the miles per gallon, is far, far superior than the high-thrust,” Chai says. “But when you’re around planets, you want that oomph to get you out of the gravity well.”

The challenge, however, is that both technologies currently require different types of nuclear reactors, says Gosse. And that means two separate systems, which reduces the efficiency of having a nuclear propulsion system. So Gosse and his team are working to develop technology that can use the one system to generate both types of propulsion.

NASA’s Mars architecture team is also working with a bimodal concept that uses a chemical propulsion system to maneuver around planets and solar-powered electric propulsion to do the thrusting in deep space.

“What we are developing is different tools for the toolbox,” says NASA’s Rucker. “One tool isn’t going to be enough to do all of the exploration that we want to do. So we’re working on all of these.”

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The Mars Journey Timeline

Many of us are fascinated with the idea of traveling to other worlds, especially Mars. The truth is that the solar system is constructed to give us only Mars as a suitable planet. Let’s explore how long it would take to journey to Mars and other fun space travel facts.

Traveling to Mars

Exploring is in our nature. Even in early childhood, we all had the itch to discover. We explored the attic, and if we found some big old heavy chest up there, we couldn’t wait to see what was inside. As teenagers, we rode our bikes ever farther. After college, many of us went overseas. 

When it comes to off-Earth travel, we are limited. Mercury and Venus are too hot, way too hot. From Jupiter on outward, no planet has a surface, at least not a solid surface. Nowhere to land. Your rocket would just keep descending into thicker and thicker layers of gases and then gooey liquids. That leaves Mars alone. Mars is on average 142 million miles away from Earth according to NASA .

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Its temperatures are not too crazy. The surface of Mars can even reach 40°F at times. Probes show a sandy, rocky terrain that resembles the deserts of the southwestern US . Though half our own planet’s diameter, it’s got the same land area as our world since it has no oceans. And our landers, starting with the twin Vikings in 1976, revealed no poisonous gases or flimsy surfaces incapable of supporting a landing spacecraft. Of course, we’ll go! Beyond the romance are practical reasons. What if we badly mess up our own world? Shouldn’t we have a backup? There’s even some water ice buried in deep-shadowed Martian crevices. We already have the technology to turn that into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel. It’s starting to sound like Shangri-La or at least summer camp.

How Would We Get to Mars?

Unmanned Martian probes are now almost routine. But the great number of mission failures show it’s not exactly easy. You can’t just aim a rocket at it; that wouldn’t work because Mars, orbiting at 15 miles a second, wouldn’t be in that spot when we arrived. Instead, you use something called a Hohman Transfer Orbit. It gets you there using minimum fuel and granting you maximum payload.

Have you not heard of the Hohmann Transfer Orbit ? It’s a simple concept. Johannes Kepler told us in the 17th century that every planet moves in a path that’s not a circle but an ellipse. Orbital ellipses make each planet regularly arrive at the perihelion or near the point to the Sun, which Earth annually reaches in the first week of January. 

Then, on the opposite side of its oval-shaped orbit, planets reach a far point, which we hit every July 4, give or take a day. So when we send any rocket to Mars, we actually blast it more or less forward a bit in Earth’s orbit but at a higher speed, which sends the rocket into a new orbit around the Sun. The spacecraft’s orbit is an ellipse of the right shape and size so that it reaches its far point from the Sun at the Martian orbit’s distance. 

If both Earth and Mars magically disappeared, the rocket, using no additional fuel, would continue in this orbit forever, coming back to Earth’s distance from the Sun at its perihelion point, whipping around, and then heading outward again to reach its aphelion position at the Martian orbit distance.

How Long Does It Take to Get to Mars?

The tricky part of knowing how long it will take to travel is calculating exactly when to launch. That’s because when your spacecraft reaches Martian orbit, you want Mars to be arriving at that exact spot at the same time. 

Then, the Red Planet’s gravity can help you slow down, capture your craft, and, with a few engine burns, let you enter its thin atmosphere for a nice, soft parachute landing. 

This Hohmann transfer orbit requires 259 days to reach Mars from Earth (or around 8 ½ months). You can choose to burn more fuel or carry a lighter payload and get there a bit faster, but figure at least half a year at best.

We could have done this already if we only needed a one-way trip without returning home. Say you get some volunteers, maybe people with serious credit card debt. Depressive types who think Earth is overrated and are willing to stake out a permanent new home. The Alaska mentality. So you’d send an advance rocket stocked with food, medical supplies, a bunch of MP3 files and movies, and a disassembled, modular-type shelter so that all such stuff is awaiting the incoming visitors. Now you send your colonists. There, done.

Of course, if the astronauts do want to come home, that changes things eventually. Now, you need to start with a rocket having enough fuel and air for the almost 1 ½-year roundtrip. This is big and expensive, and we’re not quite there yet. 

Unfortunately, rescue or return missions to Mars can only happen when the planets align, which occurs every 26 months. At an absolute minimum, that’s more than two years between visits.

But there are other considerations, too.

What Other Factors Affect a Journey to Mars?

The biggest issue is that too many people over-romanticize the Mars thing. Maybe the Red Planet brochure needs to offer a more realistic picture.

• First, Mars has no air. Or at least nothing breathable. Its atmosphere is so thin that the surface pressure is less than what we have atop Mt. Everest.  See more facts about Earth’s neighbor, planet Mars .
• And even that super-skimpy vapor is almost pure carbon dioxide. No oxygen . This means you can’t just stroll around outside your spacecraft or sealed modular home. You’re permanently stuck in a spacesuit on the Martian surface. Wouldn’t that grow old pretty quickly?
• And you’d encounter no living creatures or plant life. And no water, Earth’s most magical compound . You’d never feel a breeze on your skin or hear birdsong or rustling leaves. This brings up an entire psychological issue: Does some basic part of us need earthly sensory experiences? Perhaps it even goes more deeply. Meaning, are we, in some sense, pieces of planet Earth itself? 

Are we children of our world, creatures of Earth with millions of years of genetic programming connected with all things earthlike? Bacteria come and go in our systems, and insects land on our skin. Is there some ultradeep connection without which we simply couldn’t live?

We look at zoo animals confined to a small, synthetic zone built to somewhat resemble their home region. What do they do? They pace restlessly, relentlessly. One senses that they feel some deep alienation, of being apart from their home. So, how would humans fare when they no longer receive the slightest aroma of anything? There are no mutating clouds overhead, no contact with strangers, and no life of any kind.

• Speaking of which, what if they send along the wrong companion for you? You’d be trapped with however many crew members are on the ship. What if you’ve come to hate any of them? Or, less dramatically, simply find a few of them annoying. Well, now you’re stuck with an irksome character day after day—for over two years before you can return. 

Added to that alienation thing and the total absence of earthly sensory experiences, might crew members get seriously nutty? Maybe even psychotic? 

Let’s not “go there.” Let’s keep it optimistic. Even so, we’ve already seen that you’re on a planet isolated from everything familiar, with day-to-day life a struggle. 

• You’ve got to find and melt ice to make water and create oxygen; you couldn’t possibly bring enough on board. 
• You’ve got to endure nonstop elevated radiation, which isn’t good for you. See more ways living on Mars would affect the human body .
• If you suddenly need extensive dental work or suffer appendicitis, there are no hospital facilities, and even if there were, they probably wouldn’t accept your plan.

Remember that woman researcher in the Antarctic a few years ago? A doctor herself, she recognized that the growing lump in her breast was probably cancer. But there are no facilities at the South Pole that could have helped her. Ultimately, our government flew in a risky rescue plane to land in the pitch-black conditions of the Antarctic winter. But if it was Mars? The nearest help would be a 17-month round-trip evacuation.

Another issue is the public reaction back home. Amid the current optimistic, Alaska-bound excitement of colonizing another planet, what would happen when actual struggles became widely recognized? Or, God forbid, one of the crew members, whom the world would have long gotten to know on a televised and Web first-name basis, the way everyone was familiar with Neil and Buzz on the Moon, what if they died? A stroke or appendicitis or something treatable had they been on Earth? Wouldn’t that instantly cool the popular ardor of wanting to try living off-planet?

Or consider: Many cite Mars as attractive because Earth’s population, now at around 8 billion, is making us increasingly crowded. Earth’s urban population surpassed its rural numbers in 2007. It again resurrected the Alaska mentality, the attraction for an uncrowded life. Yet there are many terrestrial places where no one wants to live even though they’d have it all to themselves. Why are virtually no habitations in the Sahara or Atacama? Or villages built on lofty mountain plateaus in the Himalayas? Sure, life would be tough in such spots, but at least you could breathe the air. 

Mars is incomparably more dangerous as a place to attempt simple survival. Such super-taxing everyday life is more than merely a totally synthetic environment surrounded by computers, LED s, and the constant humming of air purifiers. 

What Would the Mars Journey Cost?

High technology also means astronomical costs. Round-trip transportation alone would amount to at least $25 million per colonist. 

When the world fully learns that such expense doesn’t necessarily buy anybody a good time, wouldn’t the queue of “I want to go next!” volunteers visibly shrink? This writer isn’t suggesting that this scenario is inevitable or even likely; it’s merely a possible side of the Mars-Colony dream that has perhaps received inadequate consideration.

It’s not hard to imagine a point when some psychologists publish papers suggesting that perhaps the Mars-colonization vogue isn’t borne of an innate human desire to explore. Rather, they may reason that its etiology could arise from a different human characteristic: restlessness. Or the compulsive need to always experience the “next new thing.” Ecologists would get their own turn chiming in, which is sometimes expressed even today: We’re fooling ourselves if we imagine that obtaining a “spare” planet if we totally mess up Earth might constitute a workable solution or bring human salvation.

Because—Earth is inside us. Our planet is unique and precious beyond words. There simply can be no true “spare.” Instead, a different focus is demanded. That we finally learn to be gentle and sensible with our home world. Because, in fact, there really is no other.

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Nasa’s journey to mars.

NASA is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s – goals outlined in the bipartisan NASA Authorization Act of 2010 and in the U.S. National Space Policy, also issued in 2010.

Mars is a rich destination for scientific discovery and robotic and human exploration as we expand our presence into the solar system. Its formation and evolution are comparable to Earth, helping us learn more about our own planet’s history and future. Mars had conditions suitable for life in its past. Future exploration could uncover evidence of life, answering one of the fundamental mysteries of the cosmos: Does life exist beyond Earth?

While robotic explorers have studied Mars for more than 40 years, NASA’s path for the human exploration of Mars begins in low-Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station. Astronauts on the orbiting laboratory are helping us prove many of the technologies and communications systems needed for human missions to deep space, including Mars. The space station also advances our understanding of how the body changes in space and how to protect astronaut health.

Our next step is deep space, where NASA will send a robotic mission to capture and redirect an asteroid to orbit the moon. Astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft will explore the asteroid in the 2020s, returning to Earth with samples. This experience in human spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit will help NASA test new systems and capabilities, such as Solar Electric Propulsion, which we’ll need to send cargo as part of human missions to Mars. Beginning in FY 2018, NASA’s powerful Space Launch System rocket will enable these “proving ground” missions to test new capabilities. Human missions to Mars will rely on Orion and an evolved version of SLS that will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever flown.

A fleet of robotic spacecraft and rovers already are on and around Mars, dramatically increasing our knowledge about the Red Planet and paving the way for future human explorers. The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover measured radiation on the way to Mars and is sending back radiation data from the surface. This data will help us plan how to protect the astronauts who will explore Mars. Future missions like the Mars 2020 rover, seeking signs of past life, also will demonstrate new technologies that could help astronauts survive on Mars.

Engineers and scientists around the country are working hard to develop the technologies astronauts will use to one day live and work on Mars, and safely return home from the next giant leap for humanity. NASA also is a leader in a Global Exploration Roadmap, working with international partners and the U.S. commercial space industry on a coordinated expansion of human presence into the solar system, with human missions to the surface of Mars as the driving goal. Follow our progress at www.nasa.gov/exploration and www.nasa.gov/mars .

> NASA’s Orion Flight Test and the Journey to Mars

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