how can humans travel to mars

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.

For Hungry Minds

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

All About Mars

Small World

Mars is 53% smaller than Earth.

Fourth Rock

Mars is 1.52 AU from the Sun. Earth = 1.

A Martian day is a little longer than Earth's; a Mars year is almost two Earth years.

Rocky Planet

Mars' surface has been altered by volcanoes, impacts, winds, and crustal movement.

Bring a Spacesuit

Mars' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, argon, and nitrogen.

Phobos and Deimos are small compared to the planet.

Mars has no rings.

Many Missions

The first success was NASA's Mariner 4 flyby in 1965,

The Search for Life

Missions are determining Mars' past and future potential for life.

The Red Planet

Iron minerals in the Martian soil oxidize, or rust, causing the soil and atmosphere to look red.

Mars Overview

Mars is no place for the faint-hearted. It’s dry, rocky, and bitter cold. The fourth planet from the Sun, Mars, is one of Earth's two closest planetary neighbors (Venus is the other). Mars is one of the easiest planets to spot in the night sky – it looks like a bright red point of light.

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.

Why Do We Go?

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.

Mars Relay Network

How we explore.

Mars 2020: Perseverance Rover

The Mars 2020 mission Perseverance rover is the first step of a proposed roundtrip journey to return Mars samples to Earth.

Mars Sample Return

NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are planning ways to bring the first samples of Mars material back to Earth for detailed study. 

Mars Curiosity Rover (Mars Science Laboratory)

Curiosity is investigating Mars to determine whether the Red Planet was ever habitable to microbial life.

Mars Resources

View the one-stop shop for all Mars iconic images, videos, and more!

News & Features

NASA Technology Grants to Advance Moon to Mars Space Exploration

NASA Selects Commercial Service Studies to Enable Mars Robotic Science

NASA Scientists Gear Up for Solar Storms at Mars

Major Martian Milestones

Why is Methane Seeping on Mars? NASA Scientists Have New Ideas

Beyond the Moon

Humans to mars.

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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How NASA is planning to get humans to Mars

The upcoming Artemis II mission is the first step in a long mission

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NASA recently announced the crew of its upcoming Artemis II mission, which will be the first manned trip to the moon since 1972. The launch is being billed as the first step toward getting humans to Mars , but how does NASA plan to do that? Here's everything you need to know:

How will NASA get to Mars?

The journey will start with the Artemis program, which has the goal of establishing the first long-term human outpost on the moon. From there, NASA says , they "will use what we learn on and around the moon to take the next giant leap: sending the first astronauts to Mars."

In 2022, NASA unveiled a rough outline for its first crewed Mars mission, identifying "50 points falling under four overarching categories of exploration, including transportation and habitation; moon and Mars infrastructure; operations; and science." These objectives "will inform our exploration plans at the moon and Mars for the next 20 years," said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy.

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These objectives include , among other things, "[Developing] a transportation system that can deliver large surface elements from Earth to the Martian surface," as well as "[developing] Mars surface power sufficient for the initial human Mars demonstration mission," and building "entry, descent, and landing (EDL) systems capable of delivering crew and large cargo to the Martian surface."

However, there is still a ton of work to be done, as making a human trip to Mars "will be challenging," Space.com writes. The distance itself will play a major factor. Earth and Mars are an average of 140 million miles away from each other, and it would take about 500 days round-trip to get between the two planets, "assuming the funding and technology come into play at the right time," the outlet adds. A lack of gravity would also pose a significant problem, so crews may have to live in a pressurized cabin during the mission to help acclimatize to the change.

If all goes well — and that is a big "if" — Space.com notes that NASA "envisions using a habitat-like spacecraft to ferry crew members to the red planet, using a hybrid rocket stage (powered by both chemical and electrical propulsion)." The initial mission would be made by four people, with two making the journey to the Martian surface. But since you can't live on a desolate planet by yourself, NASA estimates the crew would need at least 25 tons of supplies awaiting them on Mars, which will have been delivered by a prior rover mission.

How will Artemis II help accomplish this goal?

The mission, set to launch toward the end of 2024, will be the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft, the vessel that has been tapped to send humans to Mars. Both the Orion and the Space Launch System (SLS) associated with it "are critical to NASA's exploration plans at the moon and beyond," the agency writes .

The Orion capsule is specifically designed to keep humans alive during months-long missions, and "will be equipped with advanced environmental control and life support systems designed for the demands of a deep space mission," per NASA . The first step in proving that these systems are viable will be a successful Artemis II mission, which CNN reports will go beyond the moon and "potentially further than any human has traveled in history."

The upcoming mission is only a flyby, and while humans will not land on the moon until Artemis III, operating on the lunar surface requires "systems that can reliably operate far from home, support the needs of human life, and still be light enough to launch," NASA writes. As a result, "exploration of the moon and Mars is intertwined," with the moon providing a platform to test "tools, instruments, and equipment that could be used on Mars ."

When does NASA plan to go to Mars?

That could depend on how fast things develop. In 2017, then-President Donald Trump signed an order directing NASA to send humans to Mars by 2033, and former President Barack Obama had set a similar goal of a mission in the 2030s, CNET reports.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pushed that date back slightly, saying the agency's plan "is for humans to walk on Mars by 2040," per CNN . Nelson added that the goal was to apply "what we've learned living and operating on the moon and continue them out into the solar system."

President Biden's budget proposal for the next fiscal year included an allocation of $27 billion to NASA, of which $7.6 billion would be used for deep-space exploration. However, negotiations on a budget deal are ongoing between Congress and the White House, so it remains to be seen how much of these potential NASA funds will actually see the light of day.

Who will go?

That probably won't be decided for years to come. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in 2019 that "we could very well see the first person on Mars be a woman," per Space.com , but no specifics regarding an astronaut class were given. Artemis III is expected to land both the first woman and first person of color on the moon, so it won't come as much of a surprise if a similarly diverse group heads to the red planet. Elon Musk, who has worked alongside NASA via his spaceflight company SpaceX, has said he believes humans will be on Mars by 2029 at the latest, but he hasn't provided any names either.

For now, though, the question of who will be the first person to place their boots on the Martian surface remains a mystery.

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 Justin Klawans has worked as a staff writer at The Week since 2022. He began his career covering local news before joining Newsweek as a breaking news reporter, where he wrote about politics, national and global affairs, business, crime, sports, film, television and other Hollywood news. Justin has also freelanced for outlets including Collider and United Press International.  

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Why we can't send humans to Mars yet, and how we'll fix that

While humans have dreamed about going to Mars practically since it was discovered, an actual mission in the foreseeable future is finally starting to feel like a real possibility.

But how real is it?

Nasa says it's serious about one day doing a manned mission while private companies are jockeying to present ever-more audacious plans to get there . And equally important, public enthusiasm for the Red Planet is riding high after the Curiosity rover's spectacular landing and photo-rich mission.

Earlier this month, scientists, Nasa officials, private space company representatives and other members of the spaceflight community gathered in Washington D.C. for three days to discuss all the challenges at the Humans to Mars (H2M) conference, hosted by the spaceflight advocacy group Explore Mars, which has called for a mission that would send astronauts in the 2030s.

But the Martian dust devil is in the details, and there is still one big problem: We currently lack the technology to get people to Mars and back. An interplanetary mission of that scale would likely be one of the most expensive and difficult engineering challenges of the 21st century. "Mars is pretty far away," Nasa's director of the International Space Station, Sam Scimemi said during the H2M conference. "It's six orders of magnitude further than the space station. We would need to develop new ways to live away from the Earth and that's never been done before. Ever."

There are some pretty serious gaps in our abilities, including the fact that we can't properly store the necessary fuel long enough for a Mars trip, we don't yet have a vehicle capable of landing people on the Martian surface, and we aren't entirely sure what it will take to keep them alive once there. A large part of the H2M summit involved panelists discussing the various obstacles to a manned Mars mission. "I've said repeatedly I'll know when we're serious about sending humans to the Mars surface when they start making significant technology investments in particular areas," engineer Bobby Braun , former Nasa chief technologist, told Wired.com.

The good news is that there's nothing technologically impossible about a manned Mars mission. It's just a matter of deciding it's a priority and putting the time and money into developing the necessary tools. Right now Nasa, other space agencies, and private companies are working to bring Mars in reach.

Here, Wired.com presents the most challenging obstacles we'll have to overcome to get to Mars and how to fix them.

Getting off the Earth

Before you can run you need to walk. And before you can do deep space exploration, you need to get off your own planet.

While we've been sending people and probes into space for more than 50 years, a manned Mars mission would be on a much larger scale than almost anything we've done before. There is no rocket in existence that can take off from the Earth's surface and escape its gravitational pull to reach space carrying the weight of a large spacecraft, astronauts and all the supplies and materials needed to get to Mars. Most likely, rockets would have to make several trips to drop off supplies and pieces for a vehicle into low-Earth orbit.

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There astronauts would slowly build the vehicle over time and then rocket off to the Red Planet.

That still requires some heavy lifting. The largest construct assembled in space, the International Space Station, has a mass of 4,500 tonnes and required 31 spaceship flights to complete.

According to Nasa, a Mars vehicle capable of taking people to the Red Planet and back would be smaller than the space station -- around 1,250 tonnes. But our capabilities are hampered by the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet , which was capable of carrying large masses to Earth orbit with relative ease.

Using existing rockets, aerospace engineer Bret Drake, who leads planning and analysis at Nasa's Exploration Missions and Systems Office, estimated it would take 70 or 80 launches to assemble a Mars mission spacecraft. Considering the ISS took more than a decade to complete, assembling a Mars vehicle would require a very long time.

But in the future, this task should be much easier. Nasa is hoping to have its Space Launch System ready by 2017, which will be the largest rocket ever flown, even bigger than the Saturn V that carried astronauts to the moon. The private spaceflight company SpaceX is also working on its new Falcon Heavy launch vehicle , which would have somewhat less cargo capacity than Nasa's big rocket but still much greater than anything around today. Falcon Heavy's first tests could begin later this year.

Nasa estimates it would need to fire at least seven of its new SLS rockets to deliver to orbit the people, supplies, and ships necessary for a Mars mission. And while SLS could help get to the Red Planet, it should be noted that there are other alternatives we could pursue.

Fuel storage

Humans aren't the only things you want to send on a manned Mars mission.

In order to stay alive in space, people need lots of things: food, oxygen, shelter, and, perhaps most importantly, fuel.

Somewhere around 80 percent of the initial mass launched to space for a human Mars mission is going to be propellant. Trouble is, storing that amount of fuel in space is hard.

Objects in low-Earth orbit (the place you'd park your Mars spaceship while you built it) travel around the world every 90 minutes. During half that time, they experience the intense heat of the sun and then the unheated blackness of space. That difference causes liquid hydrogen and oxygen -- rocket fuel -- to vaporise.

Unless tanks are regularly vented, containers holding these materials are liable to explode.

Hydrogen in particular is susceptible to leaking out of its tanks, resulting in a loss of about 4 percent per month . This means that if a Mars mission required a year to assemble in low-Earth orbit, it would lose more than half of its propellant before even departing to the Red Planet. At a cost of around $10,000 (£6,600) to send a kilogram to space, that would be an expensive waste.

Nasa is actively pursuing new technology that would allow them to store propellant in space for long periods of time. Starting this year, the agency hopes to demonstrate the capability for large, in-space cryogenic loading and transfer. Such technology would be extremely valuable for a manned Mars mission and could one day lead to the equivalent of a Space Age gas depots waiting to top up a rocket's fuel.

Advanced propulsion

While you want to get people to Mars as fast as possible to minimise exposure to the hazards of radiation and weightlessness in space, their supplies can leave Earth earlier and travel at a more leisurely pace.

A relatively low-power engine could push along a large ship carrying astronauts' supplies for their time on Mars. In its interplanetary plans, Nasa would like to send such things on ahead of a crew and have them waiting on the Martian surface when the people arrive.

The agency is currently working on advancing solar electric propulsion, which shoots ionised gas behind a craft to move it forward. Previous missions, such as Nasa's Dawn and the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft, have used this method. A Mars mission would need much larger solar electric thrusters than have been used before. The agency currently has plans for a mission to collect a small asteroid and tug it back to Earth , which could be helpful in moving this technology forward.

Landing on Mars

We currently don't have the capability to land people on Mars, plain and simple. This is a fairly recently recognised problem, having only been understood through calculations made in the early 2000s.

As engineers began to build larger and larger machines to land on the Martian surface, they realised they were reaching a limit . The thin Martian atmosphere can't quickly inflate very large parachutes, such as those that would be needed to slow a spacecraft big enough to carry humans. But the atmosphere is just substantial enough that a lunar-style vehicle using downward-facing rockets couldn't land without creating too much turbulence.

The 0.9 tonne Curiosity rover, which arrived on Mars in 2012, is the largest object our current technology can place on the ground.

Human-scale missions, according to Nasa, will require landing at least 36 tonnes. Even the bare bones one-way manned mission proposed by Mars One would bring around 9 tonnes of material to the surface. "Landing Curiosity was landing a small nuclear car," said engineer Bobby Braun , former Nasa chief technologist and currently a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. For a human-scale mission, "We're talking about landing perhaps a two-story house, and then another two-story house with fuel and supplies right next to it." "That's a fantastic challenge," he added. Though Curiosity's landing was a truly remarkable achievement, it "pales in comparison to what might be required one day to land humans."

Landing things at that scale will require new technologies that have to be invested in, matured, and tested over and over to make sure that they don't kill their crew. "The one thing we do not want landing for humans to be characterised as is ' Seven Minutes of Terror '," said engineer Kendall Brown of Nasa's Marshall Spaceflight Centre.

Curiosity also had a relatively large landing ellipse. That is, researchers could be reasonably sure where the rover would touch down, but only within an ellipse seven by 20 kilometres. Imagine if a human descent vehicle touched down on Mars and then the astronauts' supplies came down 20 km away. It would be quite a schlep just to go pick up your extra oxygen.

The next generation of landers will need accuracy on the order of hundreds of metres and make sure they don't come down on top of some other vital piece of equipment, like a nuclear power plant.

Scientists at Nasa are currently working on hypersonic inflatable systems . These are basically gigantic balloon-like objects that would expand and stiffen to become something like a super-rigid parachute, helping to slow a landing vehicle down. But the key technology to landing people on Mars is something called supersonic retropropulsion.

A spacecraft comes into the Martian atmosphere at a screaming 24,000 kph. Even after slowing down with a parachute or inflatable, it would be traveling well above the speed of sound. Simply sparking a rocket flame would be something like trying to light a candle while someone is blowing on the wick the entire time. And once you had your thruster going, it would be injecting that flame into an extremely dynamic environment, something our technology has never had to handle before.

Nasa has done wind tunnel tests to look at this problem before, once in the 60s and 70s for the Viking landers, and again more recently. The good news is the testing shows that supersonic rockets are theoretically possible. The bad news is that Nasa is not working on this program anymore.

While Nasa may yet pick up testing for this again, a member of the private spaceflight business may be leapfrogging them. SpaceX is working to create reusable rocket tanks that descend from orbit and land back at their launch pad. The company is planning to test supersonic retropropulsion later this year, which could be used both on Earth and in an eventual Mars mission.

Keeping the crew healthy

Space is a dangerous place to send complicated, delicately tuned systems, and "perhaps the most complex system of them all is the human body," said health specialist Saralyn Mark , president of SolaMed Solutions, which consults with Nasa's health and medical office.

Ironically, the thing responsible for powering most life on Earth, the sun, is also the most deadly part of space travel for living organisms.

Once outside the protective magnetic field of our planet, solar radiation would accumulate in an astronaut's body, raising his or her risk of cancer. Recent data from Nasa's Curiosity spacecraft have helped quantify just how risky background radiation levels are. Massive explosions like solar flares or energetic particle events could throw potentially lethal doses of radiation right at a spaceship.

That's why the private manned mission to flyby Mars in 2018, Inspiration Mars , is planned for a time of low activity from the sun, when the chance of a solar outburst is lowest. Though, lowering solar activity increases levels of radiation streaming in from the galaxy, which would also be hazardous.

The trip out to Mars would probably take between seven and nine months, and humans would need to be protected the entire time.

Currently, the most feasible solution is to line a spacecraft with water, which would absorb radiation and provide some amount of shelter during a solar storm. But water is heavy, and any added weight on a mission is an added cost. In the future, the capability to create a mini-magnetic field to protect a crew could be developed, but this is years or possibly decades away.

Aside from radiation, the biggest challenges for a manned Mars trip will be microgravity, which causes a host of odd medical conditions, and isolation, which can bring on a range of psychological issues.

The record for continuous time spent in space is held by a few pioneering Russians, who remained aboard the Mir space station for periods up to a year or longer. "That's pretty much the limit of our understanding," said Richard S. Williams , Nasa's chief health and medical officer. "And when you're talking about going to Mars, that's up to 30 months for a round-trip."

What we do know is that extended stays in zero-g cause bone and calcium degradation, muscle loss, and a recently-identified issue that may stem from swelling of the optic nerve. If left unchecked, astronauts arriving on Mars could be weak, brittle-boned, and possibly blind .

Medical advances and regular exercise seem to help some of the biological problems of space travel. Nasa is currently planning to have its astronauts undergo long stays of up to a year on the International Space Station to better understand these factors.

But the psychological issues that a crew en route to Mars will face are largely unknown. With the ISS, Earth is a relatively short Soyuz ride away, and astronauts can gaze down upon it. But crewmembers on a Martian trip would have no way to abort their mission and would suffer an ever-increasing time delay in communication with home.

There have been other isolated group experiments that offer some insight into how a Mars crew might fare. The Biosphere-2 experiments of the 1990s had seven or eight people stay in a large simulated environment for two years at a time. "All crewmembers in Biosphere-2 agreed that the psychological issues were the biggest issue," said Taber MacCallum, co-founder of Paragon Space Development and a participant in Biosphere-2.

The longest simulation approximating a Mars trip so far has been the Mars 500 mission, which had six men stay for 500 days in a sealed room while researchers monitored the results. The participants in this experiment became lethargic and bored . One of them became depressed. Only two out of the six crewmembers experienced no real problems and only one kept busy and active, with no deterioration of cognitive performance.

A Mars mission would test the limits of isolated human groups.

Crewmembers would probably have to pass through long-term screenings to make sure they are fit both physically and mentally.

Living off the land

With freezing temperatures and an arid environment, Mars may not seem like the best place to set up camp. But there is a wealth of materials on the Red Planet that astronauts could use to their advantage.

Nasa and other space agencies call this in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) and it basically means living off the land. A machine could be sent to Mars ahead of astronauts that might extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide atmosphere. Or elements in the soil could be isolated and then used for building materials or rocket fuel.

As has been recognised in recent decades, Mars has a lot of water locked up in ice. In certain places, there are enough ice crystals in the soil that a robot could simply scoop up a heap. "Prior plans [to go to Mars] said we have to bring all this water," said space physicist Jim Green , Nasa's director of planetary exploration. "Now we say, bring a straw."

Though often discussed, ISRU technologies are something that have never been developed. Nasa would have to demonstrate that living off the extraterrestrial land is feasible.

Human missions to Mars also often call for some sort of crop growing capabilities. At first blush, the idea of farming on Mars seems like a reasonable plan. Your astronauts are going to want fresh vegetables and a farm could lessen the amount of freeze-dried food they might have to take.

[Quote"]We currently don't have the capability to land people on Mars, plain and simple[/pullquote]

But growing crops on another planet is tricky. You wouldn't want your crew to rely on the food they produce, said Taber MacCallum, co-founder of Paragon Space Development, which makes life-support systems for space. Plants are finicky. If the crew makes "one mistake, they all die," he said.

Looking at the amount of food you'd get out of farming for the amount of energy you'd have to put in, and considering all the temperature controls and other systems technology necessary, MacCallum estimates it would take 15 to 20 years of continuous habitation on Mars before it would be worth putting in an agricultural system.

Protecting ourselves and the planet

Earth is the only place we know of with life. But that doesn't mean something else isn't out there.

Because of this possibility, Nasa and other spacefaring nations have agreed to follow strict planetary protection standards . When the Apollo 11 astronauts came back from the moon, Nasa quarantined them for three weeks just to make sure they weren't harboring some terrible space virus that would destroy mankind. The procedure was repeated until Apollo 14, when scientists felt confident that there was no harm.

The moon is sterile. Mars is another case altogether. Evidence suggests that the Red Planet may have once been capable of supporting life . There is a slim but non-zero chance that something is still alive on the planet and could potentially be virulent.

Alongside the possibility of destroying mankind with Mars microbes, we also want to avoid the opposite problem. Humans come with their own smorgasbord of bacteria and fungi (your body has 10 microbial cells to every human cell in it) and right now there's nothing we can do to prevent some human contamination from leaking out onto Mars. Future technologies will have to improve our ability to seal ourselves from the dangers of Mars and Mars from the dangers of us.

To adhere to the strictest planetary protection protocols, perhaps the best course would be to spend a few missions without humans on the surface of Mars. People could park in orbit or set up camp on one of Mars' moons and teleoperate rovers and other robots on the surface in near-real time. They could pick over the surface for evidence of life and perhaps uncover areas that might be safer to land in. Future technologies could also help prevent Earth contaminants from infecting Mars for when we actually land people.

Dealing with dust

"The number one problem on the surface of Mars is going to be dust," said Grant Anderson, chief engineer of Paragon Space Development, which makes life-support systems for space.

The arid Martian environment has created ultra-tiny dust grains flying around the planet for billions of years. These fines are not quite like anything we have on Earth.

The only similar situation we have faced before was the moon dust that the Apollo missions encountered. The ultra-sharp and abrasive moon soil was recognised as something that could clog up machinery and damage basic functions. "We spent $17 million (£11 million) trying to solve dust problems and I don't know of one that worked," said Anderson. "John Young [commander of Apollo 16] was out on the moon brushing thermal panels with a pig-hair brush and it didn't work well."

For a human crew on the surface, living on Mars will be like living in a giant salt flat. The dust will be caustic and the crew's tools will need to be extra-hardy. During Apollo 17, astronaut Harrison Schmitt threw his geologic hammer away because the handle corroded off after just three days.

Keeping the crew as free of dust as possible will be even more important because Martian sand is thought to be toxic. Though little is known at this point, Curiosity and a previous mission, the Mars Phoenix lander, proved that the Martian soil is chock full of chemicals called perchlorates. These substances, which are basically highly chlorinated salts, can cause problems in the human thyroid gland. The issue is not well understood but researchers have labelled perchlorate "an emerging chemical of concern" in Earth water supplies.

The dust on Mars may also contain carcinogenic material and produce allergic reactions or pulmonary problems in humans, similar to the lunar hay fever experienced by Apollo astronauts. Missions will need to know how the Martian dust will interact with the humidity in a human habitat or else it could burn human skin like lye or laundry bleach.

Curiosity is helping scientists understand the extent to which Mars dust poses a hazard to human health. But "precursor missions should have some test of how dust is going to kill you," said Anderson. His company has been developing seals that they think can keep the dust out but they will need extensive experimentation to make sure they work.

Making the plan

In the grand scheme of things, engineering challenges are easy.

It's the social and political aspects of a manned Mars mission that are likely to be toughest.

Currently, many different plans are floating around. Nasa has its Design Reference Architecture (.pdf). SpaceX and Inspiration Mars have their visions. Other space agencies are weighing in with their own ideas. But at some point, one of these will have to be chosen as the plan.

No one knows exactly how much a human mission will cost but it is likely to run to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

Adjusted for inflation, each Apollo landing cost roughly $18 billion (£12 billion), and a Mars mission would be an order of magnitude greater in difficulty. It seems most likely that an undertaking of that scale will be led by an international partnership. That requires everything to be outlined in formal commitments between participating countries. The only similar space mission, building the International Space Station, required about five years for the countries involved to hammer out their deals.

The plan would also have to be flexible. The world is complicated and multi-year missions need to cope with changing political landscapes and economic downturns.

We often have a vision for beautiful machinery in space, says Sam Scimemi, Nasa's director of the ISS: Something like the majestic wheeled space station in Stanley Kubrick's *2001:

A Space Odyssey*. "What we got with the ISS is not as pretty or sexy as a big rotating wheel," Scimemi said. "But this is what the politics, budget, and technical capability all provided for. After all the dreaming, this is what was built."

There are many that wish for a new Space Race to spur on the US to Mars. But the future is not going to be like the past and the very unique set of circumstances leading to the Apollo project are not likely to be repeated.

There are certainly new players that did not exist in the previous Space Age. Private companies have set their sights on the Red Planet, in particular Inspiration Mars and SpaceX, and there are probably many who believe commercial industry should go it alone. "But at current levels of technology, governments are going to play a big role," said space policy expert Scott Pace of the George Washington University. "Human space exploration is driven by visions and hopes, but they must be grounded in facts and analysis. Fantasies don't get you to space."

Pace outlined the best ways to get countries to sign off on an ambitious plan like a manned Mars mission. "Destinations are really just symbols, proxies for skills, inspirations, values," he said. "The US is not going beyond low-Earth orbit without international partners. Apollo isn't going to happen again. I think our partners are willing to go to the moon and Mars with us, but I don't think they're going to go without us."

This story originally appeared on Wired.com . Click through for more images

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

Jonathan O'Callaghan

Matt Reynolds

Emily Mullin

NASA shows off early plans to send astronauts to Mars for 30 days

The agency also wants feedback about its concept.

We have a glimpse now of NASA's latest vision for its first crewed Mars mission.

The agency released its top objectives for a 30-day, two-person Mars surface mission on Tuesday (May 17) and asked the public to provide feedback on how the planning is going. Submissions were initially due on May 31, but that deadline was recently extended to June 3.

NASA aims to launch astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s. Making that vision a reality will be challenging. Assuming the funding and technology come into play at the right time, for example, the round-trip travel time would still be about 500 days given the distance between Earth and Mars.

Related: How living on Mars would challenge colonists (infographic)

Gravity — or the lack thereof — would also be a problem, as current-generation spacecraft look nothing like those seen in movies like "The Martian" (2015). The astronauts will arrive on the Red Planet after months in microgravity and face a significant road to recovery, even to operate in the partial gravity of Mars, which is roughly one-third that of Earth. NASA suggests that one way to address this issue might be having the crews live in a pressurized rover during their mission.

"We want to maximize the science so we allow them to drive around before they become conditioned enough to get in the spacesuits, and walk and maximize that science in 30 days," Kurt Vogel, NASA director of space architectures, said in a 30-minute YouTube video accompanying the data release.

The mission plan is in the early stages and could change considerably. But so far, NASA envisions using for a habitat-like spacecraft to ferry crewmembers to the Red Planet, using a hybrid rocket stage (powered by both chemical and electrical propulsion). Four people would make the long journey, with two alighting on the surface, somewhat similar to the model seen in the Apollo program with three astronauts.

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Roughly 25 tons of supplies and hardware would be ready and waiting for the crew, delivered by a previous robotic mission. These supplies would include a crew ascent vehicle, already fueled and ready to go for the astronauts to make it off Mars and  back into orbit around the planet.

— 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover's 1st year on Mars — NASA's Curiosity rover shares spectacular views of Mars — See a sunrise on Mars in this stunning view from NASA's InSight lander (photo)

NASA is not issuing a standard request for information or formal contract process for this mission concept yet. After all, the agency is focused on getting its uncrewed Artemis 1 mission off the ground to get ready for astronaut missions to the moon in the 2020s. (NASA has said the moon work is essential to getting ready for Mars.)

But more stakeholder input on Mars is forthcoming. The agency pledged to have a workshop in June "with partners from American industry and academia," who are invited individually by NASA. Invited international organizations can also weigh in during a workshop in July.

You can view more details about NASA's objectives (there are 50 in all) before submitting your comments on this website , through June 3.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter  @Spacedotcom  and on  Facebook . 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

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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Sending Humans to Mars: 8 Steps to Red Planet Colonization

After the red dust settles from President Barack Obama's reiteration of his ambitious goal to have humans reach Mars in the next two to three decades, the next question becomes: What will it take to get there?

"We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time," Obama wrote in an op-ed on CNN.com yesterday (Oct. 11).

NASA has laid out detailed plans for the journey to Mars . It's feasible to get there by the 2030s — if that deadline is stretched out to the last year of the decade, said John Logsdon, a professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at the Space Policy Institute at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. [ 5 Mars Myths and Misconceptions ]

Other experts say Obama's stated timeline is not bold enough.

"We are far closer today to sending humans to Mars than we were to sending men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later," said Robert Zubrin, president of nonprofit organization The Mars Society and the author of "The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet," (Free Press, 2011). The next president should announce an ambitious goal to get to Mars by the end of the second term, or by 2024, Zubrin said. Otherwise, the momentum for the mission could be lost, and space exploration could be delayed further, he added. [ SpaceX to Mars: Awe-Inspiring Video Shows Vision for Red Planet Exploration ]

Either way, before astronauts start packing their spacesuits and intergalactic playlists, scientists have to sort out a few problems.

Step 1: Build American technology to get astronauts to space

Currently, the United States relies on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get astronauts to the International Space Station. That is set to change, as private spaceflight companies have taken on the challenge of building a system to launch humans and cargo spaceward: Elon Musk 's SpaceX is working on the Dragon robotic launch vehicles, while Boeing is building its CST-100, Logsdon said. Musk has also said that SpaceX's robotic launch vehicle could head off to Mars as soon as 2018 . (A launch vehicle is a rocket-powered vehicle designed to send spacecraft or satellites into space.)

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Step 2: Build bigger spacecraft

A Mars voyage requires a spacecraft that can carry multiple people, along with all the supplies for a three-year round-trip, including potential cargo items, said Bret Drake, an engineering specialist with Los Angeles-based Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit organization that researches launch vehicles, satellite systems, ground control systems and space technology for the federal government.

"To sustain a crew all the way to Mars means being able to launch rather heavy payloads, because you have to have the fuel and supplies for the round-trip," added Logsdon. "And there's no 7-Eleven on Mars where you can stock up to come home," he told Live Science.

One alternative is to create a giant spacecraft; another is to develop multiple smaller modules that can be launched separately into orbit and then assembled in space, Logsdon said. (Some of these modules could hold people while others could hold supplies, for instance).

Either way, the basic technology is there, Zubrin said. "It has to be larger than any we've built before," he said. Even so, "there isn't new science here."

Currently, Lockheed Martin is developing a four-person spacecraft called the Orion , which will sit atop the heavy-lift launch system, called the Space Launch System (SLS), that NASA is developing to take people into deep space. Orion already completed one successful test flight on Dec. 5, 2014, and is set to take a trip around the moon in 2018. 

Step 3: Build bigger rockets

Launching a bigger spacecraft into deep space requires bigger rockets on any launch vehicles used. NASA plans to conduct a second test of what will be the world's largest rocket, which will be part of the SLS, sometime in 2021, according to NASA . SpaceX is also developing the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is designed to launch heavier payloads, including people, into space.

Step 4: Stick the landing

After people enter Mars' orbit, they need to land on the Red Planet. With past missions, friction, thermal effects and parachutes could provide the deceleration needed to land. But a parachute won't have enough stopping power for such heavy crafts.

However, scientists are making progress on that front.  

For instance, SpaceX has shown that high-speed crafts can decelerate using supersonic retropropulsion, which involves firing engines while landing, Drake said. "We now have a feasible technical solution for how to get large vehicles to the surface of Mars," Drake said.

Step 5: Figure out long-term habitation on a space station

Astronauts have logged many weeks and months on the International Space Station (ISS), demonstrating the feasibility of long-term habitation systems, such as those that provide safe water, process waste, and filter air in space. Similar systems could be used for a stay on Mars, experts say.

The difference, however, is that the ISS is in low Earth orbit, just a few hours' trip to the home planet. If anything breaks, Earth can still come to the rescue. That won't be possible on Mars, which is at least a six- to nine-month journey, even when the planets are at their closest point to each other.

"One key advancement for the life-support system is increasing the reliability of the systems," Drake said. "For Mars missions, there are no quick-abort modes back to Earth, nor ground-up resupply if systems fail. So the life-support systems need to be reliable, and maintainable by the crew, for long periods of time — many years," Drake said.

Step 5: Avoid deadly cosmic radiation

Astronauts going on a Mars mission will need protection from two forms of radiation: solar proton events (or solar flares) and galactic cosmic radiation .

The first "can be mitigated by proper vehicle design, along with a dedicated storm shelter, such as a water wall made from the life-support system water supply," Drake said. (This would involve literally lining the walls with the water used for drinking and showering.)

Shielding people from galactic cosmic radiation is trickier. In free space, cosmic radiation levels are extremely high. However, the Mars Science Laboratory, which landed on the Martian surface aboard the rover Curiosity, has measured cosmic radiation levels and showed that radiation exposure at the surface of the red planet is similar to levels seen aboard the ISS, Drake said. Because the ISS is located in low Earth orbit, it is below the two doughnut-shaped radiation belts called Earth's Van Allen belts , which block from Earth many of the charged particles spewed from the sun, as well as from cosmic rays, Logsdon said.

One strategy may be to make the trip through free space very quickly, minimizing the exposure to the area with the highest radiation, Drake said.

"It's safer to be on the surface of Mars than free space," Drake said.

Step 7: Get to the moon

Before making the three-year round-trip to Mars, many of these long-term space systems will be tested in cislunar orbit, according to NASA's timeline of the journey to Mars . Sometime between 2018 and 2030, NASA plans to send crewed missions on spacewalks in the region of space near the moon. Some of these missions could last a year, in preparation for the epic voyage to Mars.

The plans also include a trip to redirect and sample material from an asteroid.

This will provide an opportunity to test out all of the elements of the Mars mission, while not being too far from Earth in case something goes wrong, Logsdon said.

Step 8: Build housing on Mars

Once people have taken the effort to get to Mars, they won't just turn around. The outbound voyage would take six to nine months, but explorers can't return until Mars and Earth are in good alignment relative to the sun, which could take 14 months, Logsdon said. (The return trip will be much shorter if the Earth and Mars are on the same side of the sun, rather than on opposite sides.)

In a way, Mars pioneers would be similar to "the explorers of the 16th century that went on ships across the ocean and were gone from their home country for a long time," Logsdon said.

Given that, it makes sense to make some kind of permanent structure, Logsdon said.

"You need, on the Martian surface, some sort of habitat," Logdson said. "You're not going to live inside a spacesuit all the time. Though it seems far-fetched, the movie "The Martian" showed a relatively realistic depiction of a potential Mars living setup, he added.

Original article on  Live Science .

Tia is the managing editor and was previously a senior writer for Live Science. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Wired.com and other outlets. She holds a master's degree in bioengineering from the University of Washington, a graduate certificate in science writing from UC Santa Cruz and a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Tia was part of a team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that published the Empty Cradles series on preterm births, which won multiple awards, including the 2012 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

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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

Before anyone could visit the Red Planet's icy south pole, seen here, humans would spend two or three years traveling through space. ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Bill Dunford

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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If we successfully land on Mars, could we live there?

It seems like everyone has Mars on the mind these days. NASA wants to send humans to the red planet by 2030, and SpaceX wants to get there even sooner, with plans to have people there by 2024.

Mars is a favorite theme in Hollywood, with movies like The Martian and this year’s Life exploring what we might find once we finally reach our celestial neighbor, but most of them aren’t addressing the biggest questions — once we get there, how will we survive long-term?

The atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, 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. That makes getting to the surface tricky. How will NASA get there? How can we hope to survive against such odds?

Landing Ideas: Then and Now

Traveling to Mars is just the first leg of the journey — when Earth and Mars are closest to each other, the trip will take a mere 260 days. Once we get there, the challenge becomes landing on the planet’s surface. What type of landing system will get our astronauts and colonists safely to the surface?

Back in 2007, scientists considered four possible solutions to get astronauts to the surface. One idea was a Legged Landing System based off the Lunar Lander. This system could provide the option to both land and take off from the red planet. Secondly, the SLS System, or Sky-Crane Landing System, would use population systems to lower rovers and other equipment onto the surface. This system can unload cargo and take off again. The third design discussed was an Air Bag Landing System, which would rely on a rocket that cuts its thrust above the surface of the planet as well as an air bag for the equipment to land on. However, this wouldn’t be the best option for people. Lastly, scientists considered Touchdown Sensing. Equipment senses the surface and the landing site, and compensates accordingly.

Ten years later, scientists have other ideas on how to land manned missions to Mars. According to Richard (Rick) McGuire Davis, Jr., Assistant Director for Science and Exploration and co-leader of the Mars Human Landing Sites Study at NASA, “landers will have to dive deep into the Martian atmosphere and skirt closer to the surface than we have done in the past… [since] the Martian atmosphere is thickest near the surface.” When asked about the previous methods of technology mentioned above he said, “The lander is so heavy that many technologies will not work, such as airbags, sky-cranes and parachutes. In fact, to slow down, we will be heavily reliant on jets.” How heavy will the crewed missions be? This supersonic retro-propulsion technology is required to be able to deliver the “projected 20 metric ton” spacecraft to the surface of Mars. For comparison, the Curiosity rover was only 1 metric ton.

Once we make it to Mars, what comes next?

Habitation Built to Last

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, with completed prototypes expected in 24 months.

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. To get an idea for what to expect, think about the ISS. “The International Space Station has really taught us a tremendous amount of what is needed in a deep space habitat,” said Davis. “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.” Expect big robust equipment to travel across the stars to Mars during the first manned mission. Whatever the astronauts use must be up for the long journey.

Davis also posed an interesting question: how much space is needed for each crewmember? Could you imagine spending months in one location, surrounded by the same walls day in and day out? How far apart would they have to be to keep claustrophobia at bay? “In the days of the Space Shuttle, missions ran for 7-15 days, and there was not a lot of space for each crewmember. In a space station, where crewmembers are onboard for a much longer time (typically 6 months), we have found that crewmembers simply need more space.”  Based on this logic, it’s possible that habitable bases on Mars will require more square footage for inhabitants.

Science fiction also does a great job helping the public imagine what this future mission will look like. The recent film The Martian , portrayed the kind of habitats NASA is investigating for a Mars. Nine pieces of technology showcased in the movie are accurate to the kind of equipment astronauts on the planet will use.

Keeping the food and medicine supplies stocked on Mars is the best way to make a habitat self-sustaining, but with a thin atmosphere and reduced sunlight, it can be difficult to get anything to grow. Artificial leaves, designed to work in harsh conditions , could offer a solution for first aid.

These leaves, made of silicone rubber, can take a little bit of sunlight and turn it into enough power to fuel the necessary chemical reactions to make medicine and other compounds. Lead researcher Tim Noel, assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology said, “[The] device harvests solar energy and re-emits it to a wavelength region which is useful for the chemistry within the channels. [It has the ability to make the] reaction conditions…uniform wherever you are.”

In other words, it can use sunlight during the day on Mars, even though it is potentially exposed to more harmful UV rays. The channels inside the leaf are protected because your device can re-emit the energy it collects at a safer wavelength, which allows any chemical processes to take place. “This could be helpful when the irradiation on a certain planet is too energetic. [Since] light is basically everywhere … [theoretically] you can use that energy to start making the required molecules, whether they are pharmaceuticals, agrochemcials or solar fuels.”

Right now, methylene blue is being used as the photocatalyst to produce drugs. A catalyst’s job is to speed up a reaction, so the methylene blue allows the scientists to produce drugs faster than they could without it. Tim and his team are working hard now to make a diverse set of reactors. They hope to have the device onboard for the trip to Mars. Nature has given us the perfect tools to survive nearly anywhere. They just need a little bit of tweaking to survive off Earth.

Terraforming: It Won’t Be Quite Like the Movies at First

When you think of astronauts on Mars, what comes to mind? Did you picture a red planet turning green with time and continued human colonization? Unfortunately, those days are far in the future, if they even happen at all.  During the interview, Davis explained, “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.”  What does this mean?

The first few trips to Mars will only include the essentials. One of NASA’s first goals for its astronauts is to learn how to live on the planet. Since it differs greatly from Earth, survival is an important skill for astronauts to master. “The initial base will probably include a habitat and a science lab. [The inside of] these modules will be much like the space station, but there will be differences.” One example Davis gave included preventing toxic dust from getting into the habitat and lab. Microbial life is another threat to astronauts. Without more research on the planet, NASA can’t say for certain what dangers could threaten human life. With this in mind, all scientists involved with the Mars mission will take these and other potential risks under consideration.

After the NASA base is well established and the astronauts learned survival basics, things get more interesting. “Eventually, since it costs so much to send things from Earth, we will want to farm on Mars. Such a farm will really be green houses to protect the plants against the challenging Martian environment,” said Davis. Keep in mind the Martian soil isn’t like the soil on Earth.  It lacks organics “[the] rotting biological materials that plants need.” Fortunately, it contains the minerals they require. Davis said that his team calls this soil regolith and it will need to be cleansed of some toxic materials. And NASA scientists can get the job done.

Detoxified soil isn’t the only thing astronauts will need to grow plants. They’ll also need to utilize the water from Mar’s ice-capped poles. Davis said, “Many anticipate that the first human base will be located adjacent to these billion-year-old ice deposits, so that humans can easily produce the volumes of water that they will need to support water intensive activities like farming.” As of yet there is no word about which pole will be more beneficial, if there’s a difference at all.

Before speaking to Davis, I believed that future Martian farms would be equivalent to greenhouses here on Earth. It seemed logical. That’s how people control plant growth here. However, while the plants will need a higher pressure to grow, the plants “[don’t] have to be [at] an Earth-like pressure. In fact, we can pressurize the greenhouse with carbon dioxide, which is the main component of the Martian atmosphere.” This sounds like a win-win for both the scientists and the plants. 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 Earth2.0. Maybe one day it will, but for the time being, it just has to function for NASA scientists to live and work.

Time Will Tell

Mars has captured the imagination of humans for decades. These plans are just the next step in the process of getting the Mars Mission from the ‘drawing room floor’ to a funded mission with a launch date. NASA isn’t the only ones with their eyes on Mars. Others are already coming up with their own plans for the red planet. Scientists and enthusiasts have speculated on everything from nuking the planet into habitability to creating a magnetic shield around the planet to encourage it to ‘grow’ its own atmosphere.

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. Mars’ 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. As it is technology is the Achilles heel of the mission now. We might have a way to get to Mars before we have a means of safe exploration.

Those of us who have grown up watching the Apollo missions, space shuttles take-off and now the Falcon rockets climbing through the atmosphere likely won’t see Mars colonized in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t negate the wonder we all feel every time one of those rockets soars into the sky. It’s not just a rocket, but a source of inspiration for generations to come – one of which will step foot on Martian soil.

Megan Ray Nichols is a freelance science writer and the editor of Schooled By Science. When she isn’t writing, Megan enjoys hiking, swimming and going to the movies. She invites you to follow her on LinkedIn and subscribe to her blog here .

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Smithsonian Voices

From the Smithsonian Museums

NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM

For 20 years, Robots Have Inhabited Mars. What Keeps Them Humming?

NASA’s robotic exploration team has proven they have the right stuff

Matthew Shindell

This year marks a significant milestone in the exploration of our solar system. NASA has had wheels on the ground of Mars every day during the last two decades. Beginning with the landings of the  Spirit  and  Opportunity  rovers in January 2004, a lineage of increasingly sophisticated mobile and stationary robots— Phoenix, Curiosity, InSight,  and  Perseverance —have explored the Red Planet, pushing themselves to their operational limits.

These missions have changed our perceptions of the Red Planet, says space historian Matthew Shindell in his recently published book,  For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet . Shindell, a curator of planetary science and exploration at the National Air and Space Museum, says that the “Red Planet went from being an extreme desert version of Earth to being a planet that a seemingly separate evolutionary path had rendered still and lifeless.’’

In the following excerpt from his book, Shindell looks back at the accomplishments of the past 20 years, when NASA’s plucky robotic explorers became the new heroes of the Space Age and paved the way for future human exploration of Mars.

On February 12, 2019, a team of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, sent one final set of commands to the Mars Exploration Rover (MER)  Opportunity.  Affectionately nicknamed “Oppy,” the rover had been exploring Mars for 15 years. It had proven itself to be a resilient robotic adventurer, surviving broken wheels, sand traps, and the harsh Martian climate. But now it had been unresponsive for months. Its final message to Earth arrived on June 10, 2018, on the eve of a giant dust storm that darkened the Martian sky.

The storm, which Oppy had first detected at the end of May, grew dense enough to cut off sunlight to the rover’s solar panels. The mission team hoped that Oppy could ride out the storm in hibernation mode, using minimal power to keep itself warm. But the final downlink indicated that the rover’s battery was close to dead. To those who worked with her, Oppy wasn’t an “it” but a “she,” and they knew that without battery power, she would have no way of protecting her aging circuits from the cold.

The final transmission from the rover noted that the high levels of dust in the atmosphere had turned the sky dark. The dust storm lasted for two months, and during this time JPL received none of the automated pings from Oppy that mission controllers were expecting.

They didn’t give up all hope, but they knew that her battery had most likely died. They watched as robotic spacecraft in orbit around Mars tracked the storm, waiting to see the surface features of the planet emerge from the cloud of dust. As the Martian sky finally cleared toward the end of June, JPL engineers expected that it could take months for Oppy’s solar panels to recharge her. But one final problem presented itself: Oppy’s solar panels were blanketed with dust, unable to generate sufficient power to bring the rover back online. Though they tried for eight months to revive her, the mission controllers eventually had to let her go.

When the news spread that NASA was giving up on reaching Oppy, the science writer Jacob Margolis translated the rover’s last bit of data (with some poetic license) into the message, “My battery is low and it’s getting dark,” and posted it on Twitter (now known as X). Oppy’s “last words” were quickly made into memes and cartoons that were tweeted and posted widely on the internet. Along with these came heartfelt thank-yous for the many years of exploration and discovery. The well-wishings came not just from those who had designed, built, or operated the rovers, but from people who had enjoyed hearing about the discoveries made on Mars.

For some who had grown up with Oppy on Mars, losing the rover was like losing a piece of their childhood. Margolis remembered first being shown the rover’s images as a kid: “I was enraptured by the promise of NASA’s most ambitious rover mission yet and that we could potentially confirm that water, and maybe even life, once existed there. It’s one of my favorite science memories.”

Many of Oppy’s mourners perhaps knew very little of the esoteric knowledge the rover helped collect, but nonetheless were impressed by Oppy’s seeming tenacity. They were probably inspired by the dramatic horizons captured by her panoramic imaging system or they had enjoyed her occasional selfies atop rocky outcrops. As NASA had learned over the previous quarter century, the public engages with rover missions in ways not inspired by flyby or orbiter missions, and the desert-like landscapes of Mars, even if devoid of alien civilizations, can be used to evoke romantic notions of exploration and discovery. The public mourning of Oppy speaks to an expectation that robotic exploration of Mars is connected to the human future—to human exploration of Mars, or even human settlement.

Intrepid Explorers

When a rover lands on Mars, it demonstrates the incredible feats nations can accomplish when government funding, political will, and technological know-how are aligned with national priorities. Among other things, it demonstrates an impressive level of technocratic ability and organizational power. For the United States, sending missions to Mars has typically been an occasion for great fanfare. These occasions are by design meant for global consumption, as are the events surrounding arrival at Mars and the descent to the surface.

During the Cold War, these moments were one way of providing a civilian face for space technology and infrastructure while demonstrating the capabilities of these technologies through peaceful means. Even though the Cold War context for space exploration no longer exists, these displays of techno-scientific gymnastics have not become irrelevant. The U.S. continues to use space as an arena in which to show off its economic and technological might, to build alliances, and to compete with adversaries. These moments are still used to legitimate political claims of global leadership—in space and on Earth.

Since 1997, because of longer-lived spacecraft and a mostly continuous stream of missions, Mars exploration has been a largely uninterrupted activity introducing a new cast of orbiters, landers, and rovers. This enterprise has produced more data, in more spectral wavelengths and at higher resolution, than was achieved in the first decades of exploration. It has transformed Mars into a known world—one that still holds questions, to be sure. The orbiting missions have done the lion’s share of the science, at least when it comes to geographic coverage and description of planetary-scale phenomena.

But it’s the landers, and especially the rovers, that have engaged the public imagination. The fact that this exploration has been done robotically, without human “boots on the ground,” has not, by and large, dampened the public’s appetite for exploration—an appetite fed by new media that provide constant access to images and stories and which encourage followers to imagine themselves in the Martian landscape.

The robots themselves are often presented as intrepid explorers, reminiscent of an earlier era of terrestrial exploration and the romantic notions that went along with it—one in which human explorers risked their lives to reach the inhospitably extreme environments of the North and South Poles. 

Oppy’s “last words” recall those of the seasoned adventurer Lawrence Oates, who died on Robert Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole (1910–13). Suffering from frostbite and gangrene, Oates knew that his lingering on was only putting the other members of the expedition at risk. He walked out of his tent into a blizzard, telling his crew, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Scott interpreted this act of self-sacrifice as the ultimate example of a British army officer’s bravery and resolve.

Or consider another arctic explorer, Alfred Wegener—famous today as the originator of the theory of continental drift—who died in Greenland in 1930 while attempting to resupply his expedition. He had insisted that exploratory science demanded heroics. Clues to the inner workings of the universe were, he believed, much more significant than himself. His men built an ice-block mausoleum around him, with a large iron cross to mark the grave. Like Oates and Wegener, Oppy now rests in the spot where her exploration ended. Rovers and their imaging systems have made Mars seem closer than ever before and have allowed even greater fidelity in our imaginings of humans on Mars.

Managing Martians

The  Spirit  and  Opportunity  rovers survived much longer than expected, and in the process were able to cover much more ground and do a lot more science than originally anticipated.  Spirit  traveled five miles over its seven years on the planet, while  Opportunity  covered just over 28 miles over 14 years.

Launched on November 26, 2011,  Curiosity  landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. The landing site, a 96-mile-wide impact crater, was selected on the basis of infrared data that indicated the crater might once have held a large lake. At the site, science teams using  Curiosity ’s instruments confirmed that the floor of the crater contained clays and sulfates. The rover spent several years ascending a three-mile-tall mound of sedimentary debris nicknamed Mount Sharp (officially named Aeolis Mons) and studying its mineralogy one layer at a time.

The science teams speculated that the base of the mound was the remnant of sediment laid down over perhaps as many as two billion years by a lake that once filled the crater. Some have proposed that the lake was a temporary but recurring body of water created by a series of flash floods. The minerals and their presence in Mount Sharp speak to a time when Mars’ climate was saturated with water. The science teams are still trying to get these layers to tell them when and why Mars became the dry world we know today.

Other spacecraft have followed. InSight arrived in late 2018 carrying instruments to detect Marsquakes and subsurface temperatures. Most recently, in February 2021, NASA’s  Perseverance  rover landed in Jezero crater, another site on Mars suspected to have held an ancient lake. The feature that most attracted scientists when selecting this landing site was what appears to be a river delta where sediments from water flowing into a lake within the crater were deposited.

Perseverance , similar to  Curiosity  in many ways, is specifically tuned to look for biosignatures—signs that life might once have enjoyed Mars’ warmer, wetter past. For the first time, it carries a drill that can collect rock core samples that NASA plans to retrieve and send back to Earth in a series of future robotic missions. It also carried a successful technology demonstration: a small autonomous rotorcraft, or Mars helicopter, named  Ingenuity  (see  “The Little Copter That Could” ), which captured the imagination of a world still in the throes of a pandemic. We may see increasingly capable helicopters sent to Mars in the future.

Landers and rovers enable humans to replay the history of terrestrial exploration on another world. These spacecraft are tools, of course—not explorers in their own right. The explorers are on Earth, in large teams of scientists and engineers from universities and research centers around the world.

Who are these Mars explorers? Within the story of Mars exploration, Donna Shirley, who joined JPL in 1966 as one of its few women engineers (and the only one with an engineering degree), served as development lead of the Pathfinder mission and then went on to become the manager of the lab’s Mars Exploration Program. In 1998, Shirley published  Managing Martians , a memoir of her time at JPL, which describes her path from engineering student to leader of a team of 30 engineers designing  Sojourner  and making the rover a reality.

The charismatic scientists who managed to catch the public’s eye in the 1990s put forward an image of Mars exploration that was a far cry from the “cool militarism of the old Cold War space program” and instead presented the new model of “nerds in love.”

At their best, Mars memoirs convey a level of enthusiasm about exploration and the production of knowledge that is difficult to find in more academic histories or ethnographies of Mars exploration. They’re also much more personal than those academic accounts. The astrobiologist Sarah Stewart Johnson’s  The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World  (2020) delivers a well-curated chronology of previous eras of Mars exploration and recounts the stories of those whose passions and research have informed her own thinking about the Red Planet, as she applies the still young science of extremophiles to the question of life on Mars.

The people she describes in her book are kindred spirits: Some are from past eras, peering at the fuzzy red disk of Mars through observatory telescopes or from hot-air balloon gondolas, and others are contemporaries working alongside her in university laboratories or at far-flung field sites. In their stories she finds the “great strides forward, the longing for answers.” Johnson’s account is one of a participant in history, of being among the first cohort of women to explore Mars.

Two Futures

Toward the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, at least two futures for Mars seem to lie ahead. One path leads to a Mars that remains distant from human activity. Scientists and engineers will likely find new ways of exploring this Mars and drawing from it the secrets of its past. Perhaps they will find some form of Martian life or evidence that it once existed. Perhaps they will uncover planetary knowledge or new technologies that will help abate or alleviate the impacts of climate change. It’s even possible that this extended period of interest in Mars science will wane, replaced by missions to the icy ocean moons of the outer planets. All of this can happen without one human ever setting foot on Mars.

The other path leads to humans on Mars. We don’t yet know exactly what this future will look like—whether it will be small-scale scientific expeditions, an orbiting Mars station, or full-scale efforts to build new communities or even cities on Mars. Perhaps all of these things can happen, and perhaps one will lead to the others.

At present, however, there is no solid plan for such endeavors. It’s possible that the success or failure of the currently planned Artemis missions to the moon will at least partially determine the fate of a human Mars. Will NASA and its partners succeed in building a sustainable presence on the moon? Or will we find ourselves living through another Apollo: another impressive technological spectacle that is abandoned when the goal is reached and the price has grown too high? There is no agreed-upon answer to the question of what ends these efforts at the moon, let alone Mars, will serve. Who will benefit from a human presence on Mars? Will these journeys serve a larger purpose, such as developing new technologies that help us live better on Earth? Or will they be used to extract new wealth from a new environment? Will they lead to a utopia, a dystopia, or something in between?

Meanwhile, NASA’s most recent Mars rover,  Perseverance,  is meant to pave the way for human exploration of Mars. Not only is it collecting rock samples to be sent back to Earth by follow-on robotic missions for laboratory analysis—work that will no doubt help in better characterizing the Martian environment and in determining what will be required to keep humans alive there—but it also carries experiments directly related to human needs.

One experiment, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), first proposed in the early 2000s, has shown that oxygen can be produced from the planet’s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Oxygen is, of course, required for humans to breathe, but it is also a component of rocket fuel that could be used for the return journey to Earth. Spacesuit materials can also be found on the Perseverance rover, and another experiment is recording how those materials hold up to the Martian elements over time. While these components don’t add up to a fully realized map to Mars, one can imagine how each is an incremental step toward the planet.

We can call Mars the most Earth-like planet in our solar system. And yet Mars remains distinctly uninhabitable—or at least very inhospitable. The surface is cold and constantly bombarded by radiation; the atmosphere is incredibly thin and made up mostly of carbon dioxide. The soil, if we can call it soil, is toxic to anything we would want to grow there, and the dust storms that occasionally cover the entire planet carry a very fine powder that would damage skin, eyes, and lungs. In short, for the first astronauts on a return trip to Mars, the Red Planet would be one of the most hazardous worksites ever attempted.

For anyone who tried to live on the planet in the long term, Mars would present more challenges than the most remote and hostile places on Earth. And yet so much of the discourse surrounding Mars today treats the planet as a new frontier—a territory filled with nothing but wide-open spaces waiting to be transformed by the human hand.

Right now, the idea of going to Mars does not dominate our culture. It mostly belongs to small communities of experts and enthusiasts. It has a larger cultural resonance, as it has for centuries, because it allows us to tell stories about ourselves that engage the imagination. This is as true about technical plans for Mars expeditions as it is about science fiction novels, films, and television series.

If and when we do go to Mars, it will by necessity be such a massive undertaking that it will become one of the largest technological and cultural projects of its time. It will both shape and enact ideas about ourselves and our relationships to each other, our world, and the cosmos. For this reason, I think the most important question we can ask now is not “How will we get to Mars?” but “Who do we want to be when we become Martians?”  

Reprinted with permission from For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet by Matthew Shindell. Published by the University of Chicago Press, © 2023. All rights reserved.

Matt Shindell  curates the National Air and Space Museum’s collection of spacecraft, instruments, and other artifacts related to the exploration and study of the solar system.

This article is from the Spring 2024 issue of  Air & Space Quarterly , the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today.  Explore the full issue.

Want to receive ad-free hard-copies of  Air & Space Quarterly ?  Join the Museum's National Air and Space Society to subscribe.

Mission Timeline Summary

While every mission's launch timeline is different, most follow a typical set of phases - from launch to science operations.

Pre-launch Activities 

Preparation for the mission, including pre-project planning, science definition and instrument selection, landing site selection, assembly and testing, and delivery to the launch site.

Liftoff from Earth.

Cruise: The Trip to Mars

The interplanetary cruise phase is the period of travel from Earth to Mars and lasts about 200 days. The phase begins after the spacecraft separates from the rocket, soon after launch. Engineers on Earth keep close tabs on the mission during cruise. Major activities include:

• Checking spacecraft health and maintenance
• Monitoring and calibrating the spacecraft and its onboard subsystems and instruments
• Performing attitude correction turns (slight spins to keep the antenna pointed toward Earth for communications, and to keep the solar panels pointed toward the Sun for power)
• Conducting navigation activities, such as trajectory correction maneuvers, to determine and correct the flight path and train navigators before orbit insertion or atmospheric entry. The last three correction maneuvers are scheduled during approach.
• Preparing for entry, descent, and landing (EDL) and surface operations, a process which includes tests of communications, including the communications to be used during EDL.

The mission is timed for launch when Earth and Mars are in good positions relative to each other for landing on Mars. That is, it takes less power to travel to Mars at this time, compared to other times when Earth and Mars are in different positions in their orbits. As Earth and Mars orbit the Sun at different speeds and distances, about once every 26 months they are aligned in a way that allows the most energy-efficient trip to Mars.

Orbiter’s Journey

The approach phase begins two months prior to Mars orbit insertion.

Mars Orbit Insertion

Mars Orbit insertion is the point in the mission when a spacecraft arrives just short of Mars, firing onboard rockets to slow its speed relative to the planet, and it is captured into a long, looping orbit.

Aerobreaking

Aerobraking is a spaceflight technique wherein an orbiting spacecraft brushes against the top of a planetary atmosphere. The friction of the atmosphere against the surface of the spacecraft slows down and lowers the craft's orbital altitude. The solar panels are used to provide the maximum drag in a symmetrical position that allows some control as the spacecraft passes through the atmosphere. 

Instead of using onboard jets and propellant to adjust a spacecraft's orbit, aerobraking uses the atmosphere as both a brake and a steering wheel. The technique, however, shares more elements with sailing than with driving: successful aerobraking depends upon precise navigation, knowledge of weather, and a solid understanding of the forces the craft can withstand.

Science Operations

Orbiters begin their primary science phase when they enter science orbit and their instruments and other systems are calibrated and ready to collect science data.

Communications Relay

At the end of their primary missions, orbiters support the Mars Exploration Program by providing communications support to future Mars missions during approach, navigation, and relay. The relay orbit is similar to that of the primary science orbit. In general, this orbit allows for relay access to any point on Mars. Most locations on Mars will have contact opportunities once or twice per day.

Relay activities and other activities in support of newly arrived missions have highest priority during the relay phase. Electra, the navigation and telecommunications relay payload, can provide UHF coverage to Mars landers and rovers on the surface using its nadir-pointed (pointed straight down at the surface) antenna.

Rover/Lander’s Journey

To ensure a successful entry, descent, and landing, engineers began intensive preparations during the approach phase, about 45 days before the spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere. It lasted until the spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere, which extends 2,113 miles (3,522.2 kilometers) as measured from the center of the Red Planet.

Entry, Descent, and Landing

Entry, Descent, and Landing – often referred to as "EDL" – is the shortest and most intense phase of a rover mission. It begins when the spacecraft reaches the top of the Martian atmosphere, traveling at high speeds. It ends about seven minutes later, with the rover stationary on the Martian surface. To safely go from those speeds down to zero in that short amount of time, while hitting a narrow target on the surface, requires “slamming on the brakes” in a very careful, creative, and challenging way.

Instrument Checks and First Drive  

After landing, when engineers first conduct tests to ensure the rover is in a "safe state."

Surface Operations

For spacecraft that land on the surface of Mars, the surface operations phase is the time when spacecraft learn about Mars through day-to-day scientific activities of the rover.

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Could people breathe the air on Mars?

Ph.D. Student in Geological Sciences, University of Florida

Assistant Professor of Geology, University of Florida

Disclosure statement

Phylindia Gant is a student collaborator on the M2020 rover. She receives funding through the University of Central Florida's NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium. She is a first year Geology PhD student at the University of Florida.

Amy J. Williams receives relevant funding from NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover and M2020 rover Participating Scientist Programs, as well as through the University of Central Florida's NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium and Space Florida, and the Florida Space Institute. She is an assistant professor of Earth & Planetary Science at the University of Florida.

University of Florida provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

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Could people breathe on Mars? – Jack J., age 7, Alexandria, Virginia

Let’s suppose you were an astronaut who just landed on the planet Mars . What would you need to survive?

For starters, here’s a short list: Water, food, shelter – and oxygen.

Oxygen is in the air we breathe here on Earth. Plants and some kinds of bacteria provide it for us.

But oxygen is not the only gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s not even the most abundant. In fact, only 21% of our air is made up of oxygen. Almost all the rest is nitrogen – about 78%.

Now you might be wondering: If there’s more nitrogen in the air, why do we breathe oxygen?

Here’s how it works: Technically, when you breathe in, you take in everything that’s in the atmosphere. But your body uses only the oxygen; you get rid of the rest when you exhale.

The air on Mars

The Martian atmosphere is thin – its volume is only 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere. To put it another way, there’s 99% less air on Mars than on Earth.

That’s partly because Mars is about half the size of Earth. Its gravity isn’t strong enough to keep atmospheric gases from escaping into space.

And the most abundant gas in that thin air is carbon dioxide. For people on Earth, that’s a poisonous gas at high concentrations. Fortunately, it makes up far less than 1% of our atmosphere. But on Mars, carbon dioxide is 96% of the air!

Meanwhile, Mars has almost no oxygen; it’s only one-tenth of one percent of the air, not nearly enough for humans to survive.

If you tried to breathe on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit supplying your oxygen – bad idea – you would die in an instant. You would suffocate, and because of the low atmospheric pressure , your blood would boil, both at about the same time.

Life without oxygen

So far, researchers have not found any evidence of life on Mars. But the search is just beginning; our robotic probes have barely scratched the surface.

Without question, Mars is an extreme environment. And it’s not just the air. Very little liquid water is on the Martian surface . Temperatures are incredibly cold – at night, it’s more than -100 degrees Fahrenheit (-73 degrees Celsius).

But plenty of organisms on Earth survive extreme environments . Life has been found in the Antarctic ice, at the bottom of the ocean and miles below the Earth’s surface. Many of those places have extremely hot or cold temperatures, almost no water and little to no oxygen.

And even if life no longer exists on Mars, maybe it did billions of years ago, when it had a thicker atmosphere, more oxygen , warmer temperatures and significant amounts of liquid water on the surface .

That’s one of the goals of NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission – to look for signs of ancient Martian life. That’s why Perseverance is searching within the Martian rocks for fossils of organisms that once lived – most likely, primitive life, like Martian microbes.

Do-it-yourself oxygen

Among the seven instruments on board the Perseverance rover is MOXIE , an incredible device that takes carbon dioxide out of the Martian atmosphere and turns it into oxygen.

If MOXIE works the way that scientists hope it will, future astronauts will not only make their own oxygen; they could use it as a component in the rocket fuel they’ll need to fly back to Earth. The more oxygen people are able to make on Mars, the less they’ll need to bring from Earth – and the easier it becomes for visitors to go there. But even with “homegrown” oxygen, astronauts will still need a spacesuit.

Right now, NASA is working on the new technologies needed to send humans to Mars . That could happen in the next decade, perhaps sometime during the late 2030s. By then, you’ll be an adult – and maybe one of the first to take a step on Mars.

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Can We Live on Mars? A Thought Experiment

Every human being is on Earth or, in a small number of cases, in orbit just above it. That may not be true in the future. In the coming years, people could return to the Moon and continue on to explore new frontiers like Mars. NASA sees Mars as a goal for the 2030s, but SpaceX is keen to send rockets directly to the red planet , and Elon Musk has frequently mused about forming a colony. Visiting Mars is one thing, but can we colonize it? Some technological and biological questions are outstanding, but this bit of science fiction might be realized in our lifetimes. Let's explore the current state of science and figure out if we can colonize Mars.

Getting to Mars

If you want to colonize Mars, you must get there, which means you need a big rocket. Space agencies have been sending small probes and landers to Mars for decades. While Mars is the planet next door, getting there takes a lot of power. For example, the Perseverance rover has a total mass of about 2,200 pounds (1,025 kilograms), and launching it took a 1.3 million-pound Atlas V rocket. That was followed by months of travel with a much smaller cruising stage. Robots don't need food, water, or protection from the environment, so any effort to get humans to Mars would require launching vastly more mass, which means we need big honking rockets .

Few rockets even in the testing stage could support crewed missions to Mars. NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) is capable of reaching the outer solar system—it was initially slated to handle the Europa Clipper mission, but that was handed off to SpaceX due to delays. Indeed, SLS development has been extremely slow. The enhanced versions that could be used for Mars launches are still years away, and SLS is disposable. That means a long lead time , as NASA has to build a rocket with a specific mission in mind. NASA has said it hopes to launch a crewed mission to Mars in the 2030s, but no one would be staying long-term. Supplying a Martian colony with disposable SLS-style rockets would be expensive.

SpaceX has two vehicles that are theoretically capable of reaching Mars. There's the Falcon Heavy, which is currently flying and has proven it can launch a 13,000-pound car beyond the orbit of Mars . This rocket is also going to launch the aforementioned Europa mission. However, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has presented Starship as the Mars rocket since the earliest teasers. This rocket, however, is not yet fully operational.

Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket in the world, and it's being designed for full reusability like the Falcon 9. We're currently awaiting Starship's fourth orbital launch attempt. The first two ended in catastrophic failures , and the third was mostly successful until it attempted to reenter Earth's atmosphere. Musk has made a lot of big promises, but the strength of the Falcon 9 suggests SpaceX could pull this off.

For all his machinations and overpromising, Musk is the wealthiest person on Earth. His actual net worth varies based on the ebb and flow of markets, but even if Tesla tanked tomorrow, he'd still be obscenely rich with a fleet of privately owned rockets at his disposal. When a guy like Elon Musk says he's going to Mars multiple times over a period of years, you accept that he might actually do it. More likely, though, he'd send other people to Mars first to see how it goes. We've passed Musk's earliest predictions for a Mars mission, but he's now suggesting we could be just years away from a crewed landing.

Within a decade, there is a strong likelihood that we will have multiple vehicles capable of carrying people and materials to Mars. So, we can check this one off.

Living on Mars

So, we've gotten to Mars. Perhaps Starship exceeded expectations and regularly blasts colonists to the red planet, or maybe NASA or the CSA moved with uncharacteristic speed to establish the first outpost on Mars. Regardless of how we get there, we need to contend with the environment of an inhospitable surface. Mars has a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide, endless expanses of dusty landscape, and about one-third of Earth's gravity. Can humans even live on Mars?

In a perfect universe, we would change Mars to be more like Earth. However, the technology necessary to terraform another planet is even more science-fiction than building a city on Mars. Elon Musk, again making outlandish proposals, once suggested we nuke the polar regions of Mars to thicken the atmosphere, but it's not just the atmosphere. Mars has no magnetic field, which means the atmosphere will be continuously stripped away by solar wind .

The lack of a magnetic field also means colonists would be exposed to intense radiation, up to 700 times more than they would encounter on Earth. Any human living on Mars must take extreme precautions to avoid radiation exposure. Habitats could be built underground or with shielding to lessen exposure, but any jaunt to the surface would be like getting a chest X-ray. Over years, the chance of radiation sickness and cancer becomes quite high.

Building a settlement that could protect residents from radiation will be a lot of work, and even SpaceX with a working Starship fleet might be hard-pressed to send all the necessary materials for construction. That's why NASA and others have been investigating in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) for the Moon and beyond. The agency has engaged with companies to build prototype habitats from simulated Martian and lunar regolith. NASA has made plans to ship a 3D printer to the Moon to test these construction techniques, but this won't happen for 5-10 years, based on the rate of Artemis launches.

Even with a properly shielded home, possibly made from Mars itself, you still have to contend with physics. Living on a planet with one-third of Earth's gravity might sound like fun, but there could be adverse side effects, and this is just a function of the planet's mass—there's no way to fix it. We talked to JPL's Adam Steltzner before the Perseverance landing, and he noted how little data we have on human physiology in low gravity. Your eyes may change shape , your muscles will atrophy, your spinal and lymphatic fluids might not flow correctly, and there could be novel pregnancy risks not seen on Earth. We don't even know if bones will grow and heal correctly without normal Earth gravity . If humans can't be happy, healthy, and fruitful on Mars, what's the point of going?

While we may soon have rockets capable of sending large groups of people and heavy payloads to Mars, the technology that would let those people safely live on Mars is much further out. We may not even be aware of some of the physiological issues we must solve.

The Martian Maybe

Back to Elon Musk, who, despite his penchant for exaggeration, could have the means to build a home for humans on Mars. Musk has famously presented ambitious timelines, claiming SpaceX could plant a colony on Mars in the 2020s . It's plausible that Starship will be a workhorse rocket later this decade, but shipping anyone off to Mars at that time would be ill-considered. Transportation is just the first step.

For all the talk about the fantastic adventure of colonizing another planet, few people would want to spend the remainder of their lives in a glorified tent in an arid, radioactive desert. The construction, manufacturing, and medical technology necessary for Mars colonization simply does not exist yet and may never exist. We might find that humans could never live safely or comfortably on a planet like Mars. Maybe .

We can't say anything more than "maybe" until our exploration of the red planet hits a new milestone: crewed missions. Once we have seen how humans fare on short Martian excursions, we can begin planning for long-term habitation. If we're lucky, crewed landings could happen in 10-15 years, but NASA's plans for the Moon are already slipping , and the Moon is a stepping stone to Mars. Still, we cannot rule out the possibility that the world's richest man will toss a few adventurers into a rocket somewhat sooner.

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May 20, 2024

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Exploring extremes in the search for life on Mars

by University of Minnesota

People might assume the search for life on Mars ended when NASA's first rovers sent back images of the planet's barren, inhospitable surface. However, as scientists broaden their understanding of the extreme conditions in which life can flourish here on Earth—and expand their notions of what extraterrestrial life might look like—the search for life on Mars continues.

In recent years, NASA missions have found evidence of abundant perchlorate salts on the Martian surface. Perchlorate salts can collect and combine with water from the atmosphere to form concentrated solutions called brines. Because liquid water is so essential to life, NASA has described their strategy in searching for life on Mars as "follow the water." As a result, perchlorate brines have attracted a lot of attention.

In new research published in the journal Nature Communications , investigators at the College of Biological Sciences studied in the lab how the unique geochemical environment on Mars could shape life in the past or present.

The team, led by Assistant Professor Aaron Engelhart, looked at two types of ribonucleic acids (RNAs—molecules that are essential to known living organisms) and protein enzymes from Earth to see if and how they functioned in perchlorate brines. They found:

• All the RNAs worked surprisingly well in perchlorate brines.
• Protein enzymes didn't function as well as RNAs in perchlorate brines. Only the proteins that evolved in extreme environments on Earth—in organisms that live at high temperatures or in high salt—could function.
• In perchlorate brines, RNA enzymes can do things they don't normally do on Earth, such as generating new molecules that incorporate chlorine atoms. This reaction had not been observed by scientists before.

"Taken together, these results show that RNA is uniquely well-suited to the very salty environments that are found on Mars, and could be found on other bodies in space," said Engelhart. "This extreme salt tolerance could influence how life may have formed on Mars in the past, or how it is forming in the conditions on Mars today."

The team is continuing to investigate the chlorination chemistry they found, as well as other reactions RNA can perform in high-salt conditions.

Journal information: Nature Communications

Provided by University of Minnesota

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Scientists Are Very Worried About NASA’s Mars Plan

We could find hints of ancient life in Martian rocks—if we can ever bring them back to Earth.

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Updated at 10:40 a.m. ET on May 22, 2024

In the Martian lowlands, one rocky crater is dotted with small holes, winding from the floor to the rim like breadcrumbs. Their clean and cylindrical appearance is distinctly unnatural, suggesting the work of aliens—which it is. For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover’s belly.

Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission, known as MSR for short, is one of the boldest undertakings in NASA history, as consequential as it is complicated. The endeavor, which involves sending an extra spacecraft to the red planet to retrieve the samples, serves as a precursor to getting future astronauts home from Mars. It’s a test of whether the United States can keep up with China’s space program, which is scheduled to return its own Mars samples in the 2030s. It could uncover new information about our planetary neighbor’s history, and reveal a picture of the cosmic wilderness that was the early solar system. Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard.

If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth. NASA officials recently announced that the sample-return effort has become too expensive and fallen worryingly behind schedule. The latest estimated cost of as much as $11 billion is nearly double what experts initially predicted, and the way things are going, the samples won’t arrive home until 2040, seven years later than expected. At a press conference last month, NASA chief Bill Nelson repeatedly called the state of the Mars Sample Return mission “unacceptable,” a striking chastisement of his own agency, considering that MSR is an in-house effort. Officials have put out a call—to NASA’s own ranks and to private space companies—for “quicker and cheaper” plans that don’t require “huge technological leaps” to bring the samples home.

Read: Scientists really, really want a piece of Mars

NASA officials say that they remain committed to the return effort, but researchers—including the agency’s collaborators who work on the project—are concerned. “The path forward is not clear,” Aileen Yingst, a geologist at the Planetary Science Institute who works on the Perseverance mission, told me. Scientists who study Mars are worried that the mission will be downsized. Scientists who don’t study Mars—and a few who do—are frustrated, because MSR consumes so much of NASA’s budget. Scientists can’t imagine NASA giving up on the mission entirely, but the debacle has even prompted some whispered jokes about China coming along and claiming the tubes on the surface before NASA can fly them home. Last year, an independent review ordered by NASA ominously warned that “by abandoning return of Mars samples to other nations, the U.S. abandons the preeminent role that [President John F. Kennedy] ascribed to the scientific exploration of space.”

If and when the MSR tubes come home, their contents could dramatically shift our understanding of Mars. The first NASA spacecraft to land on Mars, in 1976, carried instruments designed to examine Martian soil for evidence of tiny, metabolizing life forms but didn’t find anything conclusive. Some bits of Martian rock, ejected by colliding asteroids, have made it to Earth as meteorites. (And scientists have tried to find proof of life in these, too). But such fragments arrive scorched by atmospheric reentry, their composition altered and contaminated from the journey. Pristine samples are far more tantalizing.

MSR would deliver Martian dirt straight from an area that scientists believe holds a promising chance at containing signs of life from 3.5 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover is exploring the shores of what scientists believe was once a lake, at a crater called Jezero, where the sedimentary rock may bear signs of a once-habitable world, or preserved life itself. The samples might also offer hints about Earth’s origin story. The rocks that existed here 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was just getting started, have since been crushed, melted, and eroded away. But Mars, a world lacking plate tectonics and serious weather, still bears rocks from the time of its very formation.

Read: The most overhyped planet in the galaxy

The promise of such samples has been a top research priority for planetary scientists for over a decade. The original plan to do so, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is accordingly ambitious, involving several different spacecraft to retrieve the capsules, launch them into Martian orbit, and fly them back to Earth. No astronauts are involved, but Mars scientists have likened the mission choreography to the Apollo program in terms of complexity.

That plan was apparently destined to unravel from the start. NASA’s independent review found that MSR had “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning" and was "organized under an unwieldy structure," with "unclear roles, accountability, and authority.” Technically ambitious missions always cost more, and MSR is arguably one of the most complicated that NASA has ever undertaken. But the scientists who help NASA set exploration priorities have no control over the budgets of the resulting programs—Congress does.

Last summer, some congressional appropriators briefly threatened the entire MSR effort with cancellation. This February, facing uncertainty over the money that Congress would allocate for MSR in the next fiscal year, the JPL laid off more than 500 employees. (Congress has since allocated a fraction of what NASA spent on the mission last year.) Thanks to budget concerns, NASA has delayed the launch of a telescope that would monitor potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth, and put on hold a proposed mission to study Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

Some scientists fear that MSR will draw resources away from other potential projects to search for life in places that they now believe to be far more promising than Mars. The search for alien life in the solar system has long been guided by water, and in the 1990s, when NASA kicked off a golden age of Mars missions, the red planet’s ice regions seemed appealing. But in the years since, other celestial bodies have become more compelling. A moon of Saturn, Titan, is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has bodies of liquid on its surface, even if that liquid is methane. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, are both likely icy worlds with subsurface oceans; on the latter, cracks in the ice release plumes of salty water, hinting at something like deep-sea hydrothermal activity on Earth. NASA is launching an orbiting mission to Europa later this year, and the latest survey of planetary scientists advised NASA to start working on another to Enceladus. “If I could go anywhere, I would go to Enceladus,” Brook Nunn, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, told me.

Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful

Even some Mars scientists believe that Mars is no longer the top candidate. Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College, has spent decades studying Mars. “If anybody should be enthusiastic about the returned samples, it’s me, and I am,” she told me. But now she works on a NASA mission to Venus, a planet that might rival Mars as a candidate for extraterrestrial life, and she says she wouldn’t prioritize MSR over her current research.

For scientists who support Mars exploration, MSR is a problem, siphoning funds away from other efforts to study it. “There’s so many aspects to studying a planet that do not involve analyzing small amounts of rocks in the lab,” says Catherine Neish, a planetary scientist at Western University, in Canada, who’s working on an international mission to map the ice deposits in Mars’s mid-latitude regions. NASA pulled its financial support from that project in 2022, citing MSR’s cost as part of its motivation. And planetary scientists have recommended prioritizing a mission to drill deep into the ice at the Martian poles, far from Perseverance’s domain, where conditions could be just comfortable enough to support small life forms now.

NASA is well aware of the all-consuming nature of MSR. As the mission is redrawn, officials have said they are even willing to consider proposals that would bring home just 10 sample tubes, one-third of the amount initially planned. Lindsay Hays, a program scientist at NASA’s planetary-science division, told me that NASA will seek input from the science community about which sample tubes to return. “NASA has a responsibility to use taxpayer funds in the most effective and efficient way possible,” she said. “But it’s also part of our mandate to the nation to do things that have never been done before.”

Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA

Most planetary scientists aren’t happy with a potentially scaled-back approach either. “You’ve decimated the science, because now you’re not going to get the diversity that you could have if we brought back the full suite of samples,” Phil Christensen, a geologist at Arizona State University who co-chaired the community’s latest decadal survey, told me.

A badly delayed sample-return mission would fracture NASA’s grand vision for its Martian future. By the 2040s, NASA intends to be focused not on the red planet’s soil, but on sending astronauts there and, crucially, bringing them back. That operation relies on having successfully practiced launching off from Mars, which NASA hasn’t yet managed with MSR. Instead, the agency is back at the drawing board, hoping to find a way out of an $11 billion pit. Officials expect to finish reviewing new proposals and come to a decision on the mission’s future in the fall. Meanwhile, Perseverance chugs along, excavating the mythical oasis of Jezero Crater with each curated tube.

This article originally misstated which planet Enceladus orbits. It also misstated the target region of a Mars ice-mapping region.

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Nasa’s space launch system is the rocket for the ride to mars.

NASA is going to Mars , and here on Earth, the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is the first stop for building the world’s most powerful rocket for the ride – the Space Launch System (SLS).

The SLS will be NASA’s first exploration-class vehicle since the Saturn V took American astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago. It will expand our reach in the solar system, launching crews aboard the new Orion spacecraft to explore multiple, deep-space destinations. A fleet of robotic spacecraft and rovers are already on and around Mars, but to fly to and land humans safely on Mars requires a next-generation spacecraft – Orion. SLS will ensure it gets there.

The first SLS rocket, known as the Block I configuration with a 70-metric-ton (77 ton) lift capability, will be powered by twin boosters and four RS-25 engines . The next planned evolution of the SLS, Block 1B, would use a more powerful exploration upper stage to enable more ambition missions and a 105-metric-ton lift capacity, while a later evolution, Block 2, would add a pair of advanced solid or liquid propellant boosters to provide a 130-metric-ton (143-ton) lift capacity. In each configuration, SLS will continue to use the same core stage and four RS-25 engines.

The initial Block 1 configuration of SLS will stand 322 feet tall, higher than the Statue of Liberty. It will produce 8.4 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, the equivalent of 13,400 locomotive engines, and be capable of carrying 154,000 pounds of payload, about the same as 12 fully grown elephants. Block 1B and Block 2 each will be more than 363 feet tall, which is taller than the Saturn V rocket. The Block 2 configuration will provide 9.2 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and weigh 6.5 million pounds.

Marshall manages the SLS Program for the agency and has unique capabilities for the design and testing of different parts of the rocket. Marshall is the hub for work on several structural test articles for both the core and the upper stage of the rocket. Teledyne Brown Engineering of Huntsville is the prime contractor for the launch vehicle stage adapter, which connects the SLS core stage and the upper stage.

Two new test stands also are being built at Marshall to perform structural loads testing for the core stage , which is being manufactured at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Avionics and the flight computer also will be housed in the SLS core stage. Marshall has installed a structure and simulation capability to test the avionics system and model the environments the vehicle will experience during launch. The Boeing Company of Chicago is the prime contractor for the SLS core stage, including its avionics.

Marshall also oversees RS-25 testing at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and booster qualification testing at prime contractor Orbital ATK’s test facility in Promontory, Utah. The SLS Program has an inventory of 16 RS-25 flight engines being upgraded for SLS specifications, built by prime contractor Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento, California.

On the program side, SLS recently completed its critical design review at Marshall. The in-depth review – the first in almost 40 years for a NASA exploration class vehicle — provides a final look at the design and development of the integrated rocket before full-scale fabrication begins. “We’ve picked the right vehicle for the journey to Mars,” said Garry Lyles, chief engineer for the SLS Program Office at the Marshall Center.

More SLS work at Marshall:

Base heating testing

Anti-geyser testing

Hydrogen Burn-Off Igniter testing

Scale-Model Acoustic testing

For more information on SLS, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/sls

Kimberly Henry Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama 256-544-0034 [email protected]

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Ancient life on Mars could finally be discovered following landmark NASA deal

Could we finally get the answers we're looking for.

Tom Earnshaw

A landmark deal has been signed that means its all systems go when it comes to, hopefully, finding ancient extraterrestrial life on Mars.

Humanity has been obsessed with findings signs of alien life for decades so that we can finally know the answer to whether we're alone in the universe or not.

Earth's next door neighbour has always the fascination in pop culture, with even the iconic David Bowie naming songs after the otherworldly phenomenon.

Well, it looks like it is finally full steam ahead when it comes to looking for signs of life on Mars after a new agreement was signed by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

In four years time, the ESA will launch its ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, which will send the latest Mars rover to the Red Planet in search for ancient alien life.

It is just the latest development in a resurgence placed upon space exploration, with a separate $5 billion NASA probe heading to a nearby Milky Way moon in the search for alien life .

There's also massive plans to establish a first of its kind base on the Moon , with NASA then setting its sights firmly on a first ever manned trip to Mars .

But before astronauts land on the Red Planet, it is full steam ahead with the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover.

The agreement between NASA and the ESA, signed on Thursday (16 Mars), means that the US space agency will now put together a commercial launch provider for the rover.

It'll also provide heater units and elements of the propulsion system needed to land on Mars.

A new instrument on the rover will be the first drill to a depth of up to 6.5 feet (two meters) deep below the surface to collect ice samples that have been protected from surface radiation and extreme temperatures.

Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said: "The Rosalind Franklin rover’s unique drilling capabilities and onboard samples laboratory have outstanding scientific value for humanity’s search for evidence of past life on Mars.

"NASA supports the Rosalind Franklin mission to continue the strong partnership between the United States and Europe to explore the unknown in our solar system and beyond."

The rover will also be collecting samples that, it is hoped will showcase the building blocks of life in the soil samples.

This has been made possible through NASA teaming up with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales).

The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover will touch down on Mars in 2029.

The future of humanity's exploration of Mars could also decided during the current period of volatility on the surface of the Sun, which are set to rock the Red Planet once again .

Topics:  Space , Technology , Science , NASA , US News , World News , Weird , Aliens

Tom joined LADbible in 2024, specialising in SEO and trending content. He moved to the company from Reach plc where he enjoyed spells as a content editor and senior reporter for one of the country's most-read local news brands, LancsLive. When he's not in work, Tom spends his adult life as a suffering Manchester United supporter after a childhood filled with trebles and Premier League titles. You can't have it all forever, I suppose.

@ TREarnshaw

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