can you travel back from mars

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How NASA and SpaceX Will Get People From Earth to Mars and Safely Back Again

By Chris James, The University of Queensland April 25, 2021

This artist’s concept depicts astronauts and human habitats on Mars. NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover carries a number of technologies that could make Mars safer and easier to explore for humans. Credit: NASA

There are many things humanity must overcome before any return journey to Mars is launched.

The two major players are NASA and SpaceX , which work together intimately on missions to the International Space Station but have competing ideas of what a crewed Mars mission would look like.

Size matters

The biggest challenge (or constraint) is the mass of the payload (spacecraft, people, fuel, supplies, etc.) needed to make the journey.

We still talk about launching something into space being like launching its weight in gold.

The payload mass is usually just a small percentage of the total mass of the launch vehicle.

For example, the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the Moon weighed 3,000 tonnes.

But it could launch only 140 tonnes (5% of its initial launch mass) to low Earth orbit, and 50 tonnes (less than 2% of its initial launch mass) to the Moon.

Mass constrains the size of a Mars spacecraft and what it can do in space. Every maneuver costs fuel to fire rocket motors, and this fuel must currently be carried into space on the spacecraft.

SpaceX’s plan is for its crewed Starship vehicle to be refueled in space by a separately launched fuel tanker. That means much more fuel can be carried into orbit than could be carried on a single launch.

Concept art of SpaceX’s Dragon landing on Mars. Credit: SpaceX

Time matters

Another challenge, intimately connected with fuel, is time.

Missions that send spacecraft with no crew to the outer planets often travel complex trajectories around the Sun. They use what are called gravity assist maneuvers to effectively slingshot around different planets to gain enough momentum to reach their target.

This saves a lot of fuel, but can result in missions that take years to reach their destinations. Clearly, this is something humans would not want to do.

Both Earth and Mars have (almost) circular orbits and a maneuver known as the Hohmann transfer is the most fuel-efficient way to travel between two planets. Basically, without going into too much detail, this is where a spacecraft does a single burn into an elliptical transfer orbit from one planet to the other.

A Hohmann transfer between Earth and Mars takes around 259 days (between eight and nine months) and is only possible approximately every two years due to the different orbits around the Sun of Earth and Mars.

A spacecraft could reach Mars in a shorter time (SpaceX is claiming six months) but — you guessed it — it would cost more fuel to do it that way.

Mars and Earth have few similarities. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Safe landing

Suppose our spacecraft and crew get to Mars. The next challenge is landing.

A spacecraft entering Earth is able to use the drag generated by interaction with the atmosphere to slow down. This allows the craft to land safely on the Earth’s surface (provided it can survive the related heating).

But the atmosphere on Mars is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. That means less potential for drag, so it isn’t possible to land safely without some kind of aid.

Some missions have landed on airbags (such as NASA’s Pathfinder mission) while others have used thrusters (NASA’s Phoenix mission). The latter, once again, requires more fuel.

Life on Mars

A Martian day lasts 24 hours and 37 minutes but the similarities with Earth stop there.

The thin atmosphere on Mars means it can’t retain heat as well as Earth does, so life on Mars is characterized by large extremes in temperature during the day/night cycle.

Mars has a maximum temperature of 30℃ (86ºF), which sounds quite pleasant, but its minimum temperature is -140℃ (-220ºF), and its average temperature is -63℃ (-81ºF) . The average winter temperature at the Earth’s South Pole is about -49℃ (-56ºF) .

So we need to be very selective about where we choose to live on Mars and how we manage temperature during the night.

The gravity on Mars is 38% of Earth’s (so you’d feel lighter) but the air is principally carbon dioxide (CO₂) with several percent of nitrogen, so it’s completely unbreathable. We would need to build a climate-controlled place just to live there.

SpaceX plans to launch several cargo flights including critical infrastructure such as greenhouses, solar panels and — you guessed it — a fuel-production facility for return missions to Earth.

Life on Mars would be possible and several simulation trials have already been done on Earth to see how people would cope with such an existence.

This illustration shows NASA astronauts working on the surface of Mars. A helicopter similar to the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is airborne at left. Ingenuity is being carried aboard the Perseverance rover; it was recently deployed to the Martian surface to test whether future helicopters could accompany robotic and human missions. Credit: NASA

Return to Earth

The final challenge is the return journey and getting people safely back to Earth.

Apollo 11 entered Earth’s atmosphere at about 40,000km/h (25,000 mph), which is just below the velocity required to escape Earth’s orbit.

Spacecraft returning from Mars will have re-entry velocities from 47,000km/h to 54,000km/h (29,000 mph to 34,000 mph), depending on the orbit they use to arrive at Earth.

They could slow down into low orbit around Earth to around 28,800km/h (17,900 mph) before entering our atmosphere but — you guessed it — they’d need extra fuel to do that.

If they just barrel into the atmosphere, it will do all of the deceleration for them. We just need to make sure we don’t kill the astronauts with G-forces or burn them up due to excess heating.

These are just some of the challenges facing a Mars mission and all of the technological building blocks to achieve this are there. We just need to spend the time and the money and bring it all together.

And we need to return people safely back to Earth, mission accomplished. Credit: NASA

Written by Chris James, Lecturer, Centre for Hypersonics, The University of Queensland.

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17 comments on "how nasa and spacex will get people from earth to mars and safely back again".

The main issue being ignored is the need for artificial gravity in route. Without artificial gravity in route the astronauts will have to crawl out of the spaceship once on Mars. A fully functioning astronaut is one who has been conditioned to the gravity on Mars, or Earth, during the journey. Treadmills be damned, use a revolving capsule to live and work in during the trip. Go into microgravity as required but not all of the time.

One way to get to Mars faster would be to go towards the moon, swing around the moon. Then use the Earth for gravity assist to Mars. Might then have to wait for the right time for the position of the moon.

Why? Why go there? Won’t we just start messing with the climate there, ruining the environment there like we’re doing here?

Not to mention all of the stellar and cosmic radiation that the crew would likely absorb in transit and on the surface.

So Chris, has the ‘Cabin Fever’ problem been addressed? You do know what I mean by that don’t you? Astronauts all cooped up and nowhere to go; to get away from each other, take a space stroll, some solitude, alone time. Anything to keep from killing each other. Eh?

No mention of the radiation issues. Both in deep space and on Mars. You may survive the mission only to be riddled with cancer on your return.

However…

“Space is the natural habitat of humans. A planet, is after all, is a object in space.” – Frank Herbert

So….. where’s the Boring tunneler? Clearly Elon’s companies on Earth are just a trial run and funding source for Mars. They’ll have an entire subterranean city and solar+storage farm built before anyone steps foot on the Red Planet.

Wouldn’t it be more secure to live be on Mars underground? Elon Musk’s borer would make short work of it. Especially if it could be done remotely.

Improve earth.stop spoiling earth.Lets make earth heaven again

What about if we all stop for a moment and better think about how to save our own planet earth 🌎 which is suffering due to our negligence! Let’s make our own paradise and then if you want to live in Jupiter! Go ahead and do it! But let’s save our own planet first! Stop destroying it. Spending millions of dollars in stupid stuff while our beautiful sea lions’ home have been destroy due to climate change! WHAT ABOUT IF WE THINK FIRST HOW WE CAN RECOVER OUR MOTHER EARTH 🌎 FIRST!!!

I think this will never happen as there is no signs in any religion discussing life expect this planet. This will not happen.

If humans are sent to Mars it should be with the intention of it being permanent. Not like it was going to the moon and then not going back now going on 50 plus years. Just make the commitment like Kennedy did and do it! Life’s a dance, you learn as you go.

I agree there are lots of issues with traveling to Mars

Well the climate change is because of Joe Biden so lets thank him for killing all our precious animals effected by this stupid Presidential decision on f’ing with our climate change acting like there ain’t nothing at risk with trying to change it. honestly Trump is our only saviour and I’m Mexican and had family taken by immigration but Trump has more potential than Biden ever will. Biden is hurting us Mexican more than Trump ever had. by taking the jobs we came to the US 🇺🇸 for in the first place climate change is not what we need. And our presence on Mars should and will help the chance at further life on Mars even though death is a possibility and will happen but it will also help transforming Mars to a liveable planet in the process.

There are so many issues going there. The landing might be one of the trickiest since they need a lot of supplies with them. Enough food (edible and healthy), oxygen and water. And also having enough fuel to go back. I do not see this happening any time soon.

why cracking heads for what is not necessary knowing that death will still come. pls use your time For God.

How Will We Get Off Mars?

We know how to get to Mars. We know how to land on Mars. Now comes the hard part: figuring out how to leave.

When NASA engineers look at Mars, they see a planet-sized Venus flytrap.

It lures us with the promise of scientific discovery—but the moment we land there, gravity and a harsh climate will conspire to keep us stuck on the surface.

And that’s not an option. If The Martian holds one lesson for real-life space exploration, it's that the public won't stand for spending billions of dollars only to leave astronauts stranded on another world. The most crucial part of any NASA plan for visiting the red planet, arguably, is getting off it.

The spacecraft that NASA would build to get the job done, the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), represents a formidable engineering challenge. When fully loaded with fuel, it’s too heavy to launch from Earth and land safely on Mars.

Instead, the vehicle would need to be pre-assembled and sent to the red planet—years before the astronauts arrive—where it would make its own propellant by squeezing it out of the thin Martian atmosphere.

And after that? The MAV must be built tough enough to remain fully operational despite being pummeled by massive dust storms and punishing UV radiation. When the cramped vehicle does finally take off, it needs to sustain the astronauts for days, as they maneuver to rendezvous with the orbiting vessel that will finally take them home.

The Mars Ascent Vehicle will be a mission within a mission: a crewed spacecraft launched into orbit from the surface of an alien planet.

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Hauling All Our Stuff

A mission to Mars will be humankind’s first deep space caravan. As many as five separate spacecraft might be needed to ferry the astronauts and their cargo to the red planet.

Some of that cargo can be broken down into smaller components and then reassembled by the astronauts upon their arrival. Not so the MAV. “You don't want to be on Mars trying to bolt engines on, in your space suit, essentially wearing mittens in a dusty environment,” says Michelle Rucker, a system engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center .

In NASA-speak, that makes the MAV the “largest indivisible payload element” on the mission, weighing an estimated 18 tons. To date, the most massive object that we’ve sent to the Martian surface is the one-ton Curiosity rover .

Landing an object on Mars—especially one that that weighs several tons—is not as easy as landing it on Earth, where a capsule basically falls from the sky, relying on the atmosphere to reduce the speed of its descent.

On Mars, where the air is a hundredth the thickness of Earth’s, “there's just enough atmosphere to be a pain in the butt, but not enough to do anything useful for you,” says Rucker. Or, put another way, it will burn you up but it won’t do much to slow you down.

That’s why NASA is developing technology such as the Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator —a massive, cone-shaped inflatable heat shield that would also act as a braking system.

The shield would deploy upon entering the Martian atmosphere, slowing the lander from hypersonic to merely supersonic speeds. At that point, rocket engines would kick in for a controlled landing.

Here's the kind of math astronaut Mark Watney would do to make it work: The landing will burn up around five to seven tons of propellant. When it comes time to take off from the Martian surface, the MAV will need 33 tons of propellant to break free of the red planet’s gravity, push through its atmosphere, and safely ferry the astronauts and their scientific cargo into orbit, where they can rendezvous and dock with their Earth Return Vehicle.

And that's too much to send ahead. The propellant will need to be manufactured on Mars.

Living off the Land

If expeditions to the red planet are going to have any chance of succeeding, they’ll need to live off the land .

By making fuel on Mars, NASA can shave several tons off the initial payload mass. And, after the first mission is over, the equipment can be left on Mars to serve as nascent infrastructure for expanded facilities to process not only fuel, but also water and air for future explorers.

The engines of the MAV will be powered by methane and liquid oxygen. All the ingredients needed to make that fuel—carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen—can be found on the red planet, if you know where to look.

In theory, oxygen can be extracted from the Martian atmosphere, which is 95 percent carbon dioxide (CO2), and from liquid and frozen water (H20) buried beneath the surface. The leftover carbon and hydrogen would be combined to make liquid methane.

An inflatable shield would deploy when the Mars Ascent Vehicle and its lander enter the Martian atmosphere.

Drilling for water, however, would add an unwelcome element of uncertainty to an already difficult mission. Excavating and processing is a lot more complex than simply taking atmosphere from Mars. “The other problem with underground water propellant production is that it drives you to land where you're pretty sure there's water,” says Rucker. If you need to dig and “you land somewhere where it turns out you're on top of bedrock, then all bets are off,” she says.

If hydrogen won’t be extracted from Martian water, then Plan B would be to send a payload of hydrogen to Mars as seed stock for making methane. But, for an initial mission, that idea is also off the table. Although hydrogen isn’t heavy, it requires large tanks for storage that would take up a lot of precious space.

“We've got a lander design; it kind of has a flatbed deck on top,” says Tara Polsgrove, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center . “Right now, the MAV is taking up most of the room on that deck. There's not a whole lot of room there for a hydrogen tank.”

NASA engineers could accommodate hydrogen tanks by making the MAV taller instead of wider. But, increasing the height of the spacecraft is a scenario they’d like to avoid. They’re concerned that if the vehicle is too tall, there’s a greater risk of it tipping over after landing.

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And, Rucker says, a taller MAV could place a difficult physical burden on the astronauts. If one or more of them are incapacitated during the mission, then climbing a tall ladder is the last thing they’d want. Easy access needs to be a high priority.

As such, the current plan envisions sending an ascent vehicle fully loaded with liquid methane and equipped with a chemical plant that would manufacture liquid oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.

The process is expected to take one to two years. When the MAV’s tanks are full, the human crew will be sent to Mars, secure in the knowledge that they’ll have a gassed-up vehicle waiting to get them back into space.

But NASA engineers won’t be ready to hang up any “Mission Accomplished” banners. “One of the challenges is that we're using cryogenic propellants,” says Rucker. “Once you make your propellant on Mars, then you've got to keep it cold for a couple years before you actually use it, without it boiling off.”

“We've got propellants, and right now we don't have any valves that have zero leakage,” adds Polsgrove. “You've got to think about that, which is why we're prioritizing technology development in the area of low-leakage valves.”

More broadly, engineers are concerned that time is not on their side. The MAV will require one to two years to manufacture its fuel. Then, the human crew will spend 200 to 350 days traveling to Mars, followed by their exploration of the red planet, which could last up to 500 days.

Add it all up, and that means the MAV must remain operational and ready for takeoff for as many as four years after its initial landing on Mars. “It's been sitting in the Mars environment,” says Rucker. “It's sitting in dust. There's intense UV radiation. How does your patio furniture look after it's been sitting outside for that long? That's on Earth, where it gets considerably more protection than there.”

Among the many questions that engineers need to consider when designing the MAV, one of the most important is, “What will the astronauts be wearing?”

“You've seen pictures on the space station,” says Rucker. “They're hanging out in shorts and t-shirts. When you're in stable flight with a big vehicle, you can get away with that. In the ascent vehicle, there's nowhere else to go. If you pop a hole in it somewhere, you better have a suit on.”

But, which suit? The ones that the astronauts will have been wearing while exploring the surface of Mars—the extravehicular activity suits —are heavy and bulky. If the astronauts wore those aboard the MAV, engineers would have to increase the cabin size.

And then there’s the problem of Martian dust that will be clinging to the suits. That’s not the type of stuff that astronauts should be bringing home without proper planetary protection protocols.

Rucker believes the best solution is to leave the bulky suits on Mars, where a future mission could salvage them for parts. Instead, the departing astronauts would don “intra-vehicular activity” (IVA) suits—those puffy, orange outfits that the shuttle crew wore aboard their spacecraft during launch and reentry.

The IVA suits weigh less and are slightly more flexible. And they can be kept dust-free by restricting their exposure to the “outdoor” Martian environment. The astronauts would leave their habitat and get into a rover by means of a docking port. While in the rover, they would change into their spiffy clean IVA suits and drive over to the MAV, which they would enter by means of a specially designed, pressurized tunnel.

astronauts in space suits in a space capsule

The space suits that astronauts would wear on the Martian surface are too bulky for the trip into orbit. Instead, they’ll don “intra-vehicular activity” suits.

The downside of bringing a tunnel to Mars is that it adds the weight of a piece of equipment that would be used only once. Rucker, though, thinks the tunnel could have other uses.

“I look at it as a cool thing to have,” she says. “Now, instead of a big, single habitat, you can maybe take smaller habitats and use the tunnel to join them together….It's never good to add a new element, but if it's an element that solves a lot of problems, then it might be an advantage.”

Homeward Bound

Finally, it’s time to go.

The interior of the MAV will be spartan to minimize weight. This is a one-way space taxi, not a habitat. In fact, the engineers might not even include seats—in which case, the astronauts would stand for the duration of the trip.

The rocket-powered ascent will last seven minutes. But the journey doesn’t end there. The astronauts will need to burn more fuel to maneuver into an orbit that will allow them to rendezvous and dock with the Earth Return Vehicle (ERV).

That means the astronauts could be aboard the ascent vehicle for up to 43 hours, assuming that the ERV is parked in a “one sol orbit”—an elliptical orbit ranging in altitude from 155 to 21,000 miles above the Martian surface. But, Rucker says, this remains an unresolved issue among Mars mission planners.

“The in-space propulsion guys, they want to keep that big, fat transit habitat up as high as they can,” she says. “They don't want to dip down into the Mars gravity well. They'd really love to stay at five or ten sol and make the ascent vehicle come up to it.”

The problem with that, Rucker says, is that a longer stay onboard the MAV will require additional facilities.

“You can stay in your spacesuit, and you can do without hot soup and a bathroom for forty-three hours, probably,” she says. “But you start dragging into three days, or five days, or seven days, you have to start adding all those things in and that's going to drive up the size of the ascent vehicle.”

Once docking is finally achieved—and the crew and cargo are transferred to the spacecraft that will take them to Earth—the MAV detaches and performs a final disposal maneuver, placing it into an orbit that won’t interfere with future Mars missions: an ignoble end for a small spacecraft that will have played a pivotal role in human history.

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December 21, 2020

How to get people from Earth to Mars and safely back again

by Chris James, The Conversation

There are many things humanity must overcome before any return journey to Mars is launched.

The two major players are NASA and SpaceX, which work together intimately on missions to the International Space Station but have competing ideas of what a crewed Mars mission would look like.

Size matters

The biggest challenge (or constraint) is the mass of the payload (spacecraft, people, fuel , supplies etc) needed to make the journey.

We still talk about launching something into space being like launching its weight in gold.

The payload mass is usually just a small percentage of the total mass of the launch vehicle.

For example, the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the Moon weighed 3,000 tons.

But it could launch only 140 tons (5% of its initial launch mass) to low Earth orbit, and 50 tons (less than 2% of its initial launch mass) to the Moon.

Mass constrains the size of a Mars spacecraft and what it can do in space. Every maneuver costs fuel to fire rocket motors, and this fuel must currently be carried into space on the spacecraft.

SpaceX's plan is for its crewed Starship vehicle to be refueled in space by a separately launched fuel tanker. That means much more fuel can be carried into orbit than could be carried on a single launch.

Time matters

Another challenge, intimately connected with fuel, is time.

Missions that send spacecraft with no crew to the outer planets often travel complex trajectories around the Sun. They use what are called gravity assist manoeuvres to effectively slingshot around different planets to gain enough momentum to reach their target.

This saves a lot of fuel, but can result in missions that take years to reach their destinations. Clearly this is something humans would not want to do.

A spacecraft could reach Mars in a shorter time (SpaceX is claiming six months ) but—you guessed it—it would cost more fuel to do it that way.

Safe landing

Suppose our spacecraft and crew get to Mars. The next challenge is landing.

A spacecraft entering Earth is able to use the drag generated by interaction with the atmosphere to slow down. This allows the craft to land safely on the Earth's surface (provided it can survive the related heating).

But the atmosphere on Mars is about 100 times thinner than Earth's. That means less potential for drag, so it isn't possible to land safely without some kind of aid.

Some missions have landed on airbags (such as NASA's Pathfider mission) while others have used thrusters (NASA's Phoenix mission). The latter, once again, requires more fuel.

Life on Mars

A Martian day lasts 24 hours and 37 minutes but the similarities with Earth stop there.

The thin atmosphere on Mars means it can't retain heat as well as Earth does, so life on Mars is characterized by large extremes in temperature during the day/night cycle.

Mars has a maximum temperature of 30℃, which sounds quite pleasant, but its minimum temperature is -140℃, and its average temperature is -63℃ . The average winter temperature at the Earth's South Pole is about -49℃ .

So we need to be very selective about where we choose to live on Mars and how we manage temperature during the night.

The gravity on Mars is 38% of Earth's (so you'd feel lighter) but the air is principally carbon dioxide (CO₂) with several percent of nitrogen, so it's completely unbreathable. We would need to build a climate-controlled place just to live there.

SpaceX plans to launch several cargo flights including critical infrastructure such as greenhouses, solar panels and—you guessed it—a fuel-production facility for return missions to Earth.

Life on Mars would be possible and several simulation trials have already been done on Earth to see how people would cope with such an existence.

Return to Earth

The final challenge is the return journey and getting people safely back to Earth.

Apollo 11 entered Earth's atmosphere at about 40,000km/h, which is just below the velocity required to escape Earth's orbit.

Spacecraft returning from Mars will have re-entry velocities from 47,000km/h to 54,000km/h, depending on the orbit they use to arrive at Earth.

They could slow down into low orbit around Earth to around 28,800km/h before entering our atmosphere but—you guessed it—they'd need extra fuel to do that.

If they just barrel into the atmosphere, it will do all of the deceleration for them. We just need to make sure we don't kill the astronauts with G-forces or burn them up due to excess heating.

Provided by The Conversation

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Watch CBS News

How NASA's Perseverance rover will send Martian rocks back to Earth for the first time ever

By Sophie Lewis

February 19, 2021 / 6:00 AM EST / CBS News

NASA's Perseverance rover successfully pulled off its hazardous landing on the surface of Mars — but more unprecedented challenges lie ahead. A decade from now, in 2031, it will be the first ever to send samples from the red planet back to Earth.

The plan, known as Mars Sample Return , or MSR, involves three missions spanning the next 10 years.

"The idea of bringing a sample back from Mars goes back decades," Ken Farley, the mission's project scientist, said in a statement earlier this month. "We are in a position now where if everything goes according to plan, samples will be coming back to Earth in 2031. That sounds like a long time, but this becoming a reality has always been 10 years away since I was in grad school. Now we are actually doing it."

In many ways, Perseverance resembles its older sibling rovers: Opportunity (2004), Spirit (2004), Sojourner (1997), and Curiosity (2012). But Perseverance is larger and heavier, and scientists have replaced its on-board laboratory with a sample-catching system to collect rocks and soil and prepare them for the return trip.

Never before have scientists brought a piece of another planet back to Earth.

Where are the samples coming from?

Perseverance landed at the edge of the Jezero Crater , a landscape that has long intrigued scientists but had previously been deemed too risky to land on . The crater is believed to have once contained a massive lake, billions of years ago when Mars had liquid water on its surface.

"Scientists will be looking for rocks that may have formed in water, possibly preserving evidence of the chemical building blocks of life," Lori Glaze, the director of the NASA Planetary Science Division, said in a news briefing last month.

Jezero has a well-preserved river delta, which formed when a river deposited a large amount of sediment as it emptied into a larger body of water. Life flourishes in river deltas on Earth — scientists are hoping the same was true on ancient Mars.

"Jezero would have been a place that was habitable," Farley said. "Life as we know it could have lived in that lake, and the mud of a delta is really good at preserving the biosignatures of life."

"It's not just about the sample, it's about the geologic context of that sample that will also be explored," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's director of science operations, said in a news conference Wednesday.

Collecting pieces of Mars to send home

Perseverance will obtain samples using a drill bit, which cuts cylindrical cores into the Martian surface, over the course of about two years. Cores provide researchers with a cross-sectional view of the layers and other features of the rock.

The rover will recover about 40 cores from the ground, each weighing about a half an ounce, or about the size of a piece of chalk. It will triple-seal them into sample tubes to keep them in pristine condition. And the next step is something a bit unusual: It will set them down on the Martian surface, and leave them there.

"After we drill them, we do something that seems crazy: We set them on the ground in what we call a cache," Farley said. "In the next two parts of the program, we go get them and bring them back."

In either 2026 or 2028, NASA will launch a Sample Retrieval Lander to Mars, in partnership with the European Space Agency. It will be carrying both a rover and a rocket, known as the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

After it lands at Jezero in 2028, the "Martian dune buggy" will speed across the surface, retrieve the cores left behind by Perseverance and load them into the rocket. Once sealed, the rocket will prepare for the first launch ever attempted from another planet.

The rocket will take off from the surface of Mars and drop a container about the size of a basketball, containing the samples, into orbit around the red planet.

"Much like the baton in a relay race, this container is the heart of sample return," Bobby Braun, director for planetary science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained in a news conference.

To complete the handoff, another spacecraft will also make the long journey to Mars' orbit. The massive Earth Return Orbiter, which is as large as an airplane, will rendezvous with and capture the cache of rock samples orbiting the planet and then return to Earth, hopefully in 2031.

"If it sounds complicated, it is," Glaze said. "If it sounds extreme, it most certainly is."

Scientists say the nearly two-decade timeline from the development of the project to sample retrieval makes perfect sense.

"It's just too complicated to send it all at once," Farley said. "And it makes a lot of sense to spread it out over multiple years so the amount of money you need in one year is not too much. Also, you need a lot of talent to invent and build the new things each piece of this mission needs. By developing them over an extended period, we can have enough engineers for that."

Seeking signs of past life on another planet

When looking for signs of life from billions of years ago, scientists must use massive, highly sensitive instruments. That's one reason why the samples can't be analyzed by the rover on Mars — the necessary tools are just too big and too complex.

"Some of the instruments we'll use for testing are as big as a car," Farley said. "You just can't fly something like that, so if we are ever going to obtain a quantitative history of Mars and clear evidence for potential Martian life, we have to bring samples back."

NASA is investigating either modifying existing facilities or creating new facilities to house the precious samples.

The samples will provide insights into the history of Mars, but could also help scientists better understand our origins on Earth. Scientists will be able to test new theories as they are developed, in the same way they've done for decades with the Apollo samples from the moon.

"While we do have Martian meteorites here on Earth, it's much different than having samples of Mars rocks and soil that are pristine, and that we know exactly where they came from," Glaze said. "Samples from Mars have the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the origin, evolution and distribution of life on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system."

The mission will also pave the way for future human exploration of the red planet. Precision landing technology, launching a rocket from the Martian surface and assessing soil characteristics are all crucial to ensuring the health and safety of astronauts in the future .

"MSR will foster significant engineering advances for humanity and advance technologies needed to successfully realize the first round-trip mission to another planet," said Jeff Gramling, Mars Sample Return program director at NASA Headquarters. "The scientific advances offered by pristine Martian samples through MSR are unprecedented, and this mission will contribute to NASA's eventual goal of sending humans to Mars."

Sophie Lewis is a social media manager and trending content writer for CBS News.

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Want to go to Mars? We hope you like blue sunsets, mind-melting g-forces and living underground

Science Want to go to Mars? We hope you like blue sunsets, mind-melting g-forces and living underground

Congratulations, you've won a ticket to Mars.

You may have to wait a while before you can get on a flight. Launch opportunities only come around every couple of years when Earth and Mars line up.

Your first challenge will be to actually get off Earth.

That's not as easy as it sounds ( we're still ironing out a few technical details with our spacecraft).

It's a hell of a ride. To break free of Earth's gravitational pull, you need to reach escape velocity — that's 40,000 kilometres per hour, or 11km per second.

That means you'll have to train yourself to tolerate high g-forces.

During take-off, astronauts experience at least three times the gravitational (g) force of Earth (most humans can tolerate up to 5gs before passing out), and up to 8gs on re-entry.

Once you've escaped Earth's pull, you'll feel weightless and your journey begins.

Surviving the journey

Your trip to Mars will take seven months (that's taking the shortest possible route cruising at about 78,000 kph).

In that time you will share an 8 by 11-metre space with at least four people (if you found COVID-19 lockdowns challenging, this might not be the flight for you).

Here's what your spaceship might look like:

Unfortunately, the view out the windows won't be great. Apart from when you are first leaving Earth or just arriving at Mars, you won't see much, not even stars.

That's because at least one side of your spacecraft will be illuminated by the Sun at all times, says Jonti Horner, an astronomer at the University of Southern Queensland.

"If the Sun is anywhere in your field of view or anything in your field of view is illuminated by sunlight, that will be so much brighter than the stars," he says.

As you get further and further away from Earth, you will lose real-time communication.

By the time you reach Mars there will be a delay of around 12 minutes, so you and the other passengers will need to work together if there is an emergency.

One of the greatest threats you may experience is a solar flare spewing radiation out into space.

Unlike astronauts on the International Space Station, you are not protected by Earth's magnetic field, so hopefully your spacecraft has a radiation panic room you can hunker down in for two or three days until the threat passes.

And while weightlessness makes great social media posts, it plays havoc on your body.

One approach to deal with this is to have a spacecraft that rotates to simulate the effects of gravity like they had in The Martian (unfortunately our spacecraft is much smaller, so it would spin a lot faster).

You may also need to do exercises to keep you on your toes. Literally.

Spending a lot of time in little to no gravity without exercise not only causes problems with bone density and muscle mass, it messes with the human senses, says Gordon Waddington, whose team at the University of Canberra is developing exercises to help you work out where your body is in space.

"One of the really critical things that's going to go on over [the journey] is the way your brain listens to movement is going to change, and your brain's model of your body is going to change," Professor Waddington says.

Welcome to Mars!

Sun rise over Mars taken from orbiting spacecraft

You should start getting some good photos of Mars by the time you're about 2.2 million kilometres away .

The landscape looks red thanks to the iron oxide in the soil. And you may see polar ice caps and huge volcanoes and canyons that put anything on Earth to shame.

But make no mistake: Mars is a very hostile place.

It has a very thin atmosphere, which is mainly made up of carbon dioxide.

It's also very cold — the average temperature on Mars is -63 degrees Celsius — although this varies from location, time of day and season (if you're lucky it can get up to 20C in summer).

To get an idea of conditions at Gale Crater near the equator, check out Curiosity rover's daily weather report .

And the air pressure is very low. The good news is it doesn't feel windy even when it's blowing a gale, the bad news is that the air pressure is so low that all the water in your saliva, tears, skin and lungs will evaporate immediately if you don't have a spacesuit on.

It's also why the surface of Mars is very dry — although there is evidence of vast rivers and lakes in the past, water on Mars today is in lakes under ice at the poles, as well as some vapour in the atmosphere.

And, at certain times of the Martian year (usually the southern hemisphere summer when Mars is closest to the Sun), the entire planet can be swamped by a dust storm.

The dust is so fine and dry that it's abrasive, and it will play havoc with anything that is solar powered ( look what happened to the Opportunity rover ).

But the blue sunsets are spectacular.

"The sunsets look a lot bluer than they do on Earth because the dust in Mars's atmosphere is much [finer]," Professor Horner says.

And then there's the radiation. Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, so it gets blasted by the solar wind.

Levels of radiation vary from location to location, but even in the lowlands where the atmosphere is at its thickest, you'll get hit by around 273 microsieverts a day.

That's right at the upper end of what an astronaut onboard the ISS is exposed to (unless there's a solar flare), and well above what you are exposed to on Earth.

Don't forget to keep in mind you will be living in this environment for two Earth years (did we mention that one Mars year is the equivalent of two Earth years in the brochure?) — so it all adds up.

So, you might be wondering by now about how you're going to survive …

Your home won't have much of a view

We hope you like the idea of living underground.

There may not be much of a view, but scientists believe it's the best way to reduce your risks from radiation, bombardment by micrometeorites, extreme temperatures and dust storms.

You could either dig your own shelter, or use what nature provides.

Undara lava tubes in Far North Queensland

It appears that Mars has hollowed-out caves created by lava from volcanic eruptions billions of years ago, says David Flannery of the Queensland University of Technology.

With little tectonic activity on the Red Planet and weaker gravity than Earth, these structures have remained intact since then. albeit with a few cave-ins that give them away from space.

"When we see chains of sky lights, we're pretty sure we're looking at a lava tube complex," Dr Flannery says.

"We can see some real whoppers."

But if you prefer comfort over rustic ambience and you like living in a habitat that is structurally sound, then a custom-built bunker may be more your style.

If you do decide to venture outside, you'll need specially designed suits that can withstand radiation — remember that radiation breaks down anything made out of carbon, and that includes synthetic materials. (We've just sent some space suit materials to Mars to see how they survive.)

However, it might be safer if you send out an army of robots and drones to do the work for you.

Robots could also be used to retrieve items left behind by humans or for mundane maintenance or servicing, says Navinda Kottege, whose team at the CSIRO is developing artificial intelligence software for autonomous robots.

"Hopefully human time and attention on somewhere like Mars would be reserved for science and discovery," Dr Kottege says.

We've been sending robots to Mars for a while now, but you'll need something that can travel over all terrain. Drones would be cool (we'll be taking one of those for a test run shortly).

What about food and water?

Unless you're a fan of reconstituted space food for the duration of your stay, you'll also need to grow your own high-nutrient food.

Scene from the Martian with Mark Watney in dark near potatoes.

You might want to try to grow potatoes in your underground bunker, like Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) did in The Martian.

Experiments show some types of potatoes can grow in highly salty conditions similar to the dirt on Mars, but we can't guarantee how safe they will be to eat.

The soil contains toxic chemicals called perchlorates, as well as heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and mercury.

And plonking poo on your potatoes could increase your risk of gastro or some other disease, which could make life very unpleasant 200 million km from home.

We have grown a few plants on the ISS such as microgreens, radishes and even wheat.

But one of the big problems is disease, says Adam Frew, an ecologist at the University of Southern Queensland.

Dr Frew studies plant microbiomes — the bacteria and fungi that co-exist with plants — to see if it's possible to synthesise hardier plants that could tolerate the extremes of space.

"We think that in space, plants struggle to establish the correct microbiome that they would need," he says.

In the future, you might find synthesised mung beans and potatoes on the menu.

If you do grow some plants, they're going to need water. There could be a few options here worth exploring.

You could recycle the water you brought to Mars, you could extract water from the vapour in the atmosphere, or you might be able to tap into the potential sources of water trapped in soil beneath the surface or lakes under the ice caps.

We'll let you know if any of these options are viable sometime in the future.

And of course, you're going to need oxygen. Not only so you can breathe, but to blast off Mars when the time comes to go home.

It might be possible to extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ( we're about to test that ).

If you have water, not only can you make oxygen, you might be able to make rocket fuel.

Here's a demo from Catalyst of how this might work:

Technically, it should be easier to take off from Mars than it is from Earth because of the lower gravity, but we haven't had a chance to try it yet.

The lead-up to your departure will coincide with the three-quarter mark of your mission.

You might notice that you or some of your fellow travellers get a bit tetchy around this time — this is a pretty normal phenomenon that can affect how you work as a team.

But you don't want to be left behind (look what happened to Mark Watney in The Martian) — otherwise you'll be on Mars for another two years, so try to smooth things over with a sense of humour.

All going well and you survive the seven-month return journey and the descent through Earth's atmosphere (remember those g-forces), you'll be back on Earth a little bit more than three years after you left.

To put that in perspective, the longest anyone has spent in space in one stint is 14 and a half months on the now defunct Mir space station.

However, you will have been exposed to higher levels of radiation and been much more vulnerable to the whims of the Sun than they were.

To be honest, we're not sure what impact that will have on your body.

If you're still interested in going, we'll get back to you with an update in 2030.

In the meantime ... watch Catalyst's two-part special Mars: Our Second Home? on Tuesday, February 23 and Tuesday, March 2 at 8.30pm.

In episode 1, astrophysicist Professor Tamara Davis and astronomer Greg Quicke meet the Australian scientists on a mission to solve the many challenges of putting people on the Red Planet.

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The Great Read

Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?

NASA is conducting tests on what might be the greatest challenge of a Mars mission: the trauma of isolation.

Credit... Isabel Seliger

Supported by

By Nathaniel Rich

Published Feb. 25, 2024 Updated March 8, 2024

Alyssa Shannon was on her morning commute from Oakland to Sacramento, where she worked as an advanced-practice nurse at the university hospital, when NASA called to tell her that she had been selected for a Mars mission. She screamed and pulled off the highway. As soon as she hung up, she called her partner, an information-security operations manager at the University of California, Berkeley, named Jake Harwood.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

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“Wow,” Harwood said.

“Yeah,” Shannon said. “Wow.”

They sat in silence with the information, struggling to fathom the shape and weight of it, for a very long time.

Later that morning, Nathan Jones, an emergency-room physician in Springfield, Ill., received the call that he had so fervently awaited and so deeply dreaded. His thoughts turned immediately to his wife, Kacie, and their three sons, who were 8, 10 and 12. You get only 18 years with your kids, he told himself. If you accept this opportunity, you’ll have to give up one of them.

And yet ... he couldn’t possibly turn down NASA. Mars, he had convinced himself, was his destiny. As a child, he dreamed of walking across an alien planet in a state of wonder; he hoped to attend space camp, but his family couldn’t afford it. Once his sons were old enough, he took them to Cape Canaveral for a rocket launch.

When he told Kacie the news, she nearly burst into tears.

This Mars mission, CHAPEA, would not actually go to Mars. But the success of CHAPEA (“Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog”) will hang on the precision with which it simulates the first human expedition to Mars — an eventuality that NASA expects to occur by 2040.

That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted conviction within NASA. The target date for the initial human mission has drifted slightly — in a 2018 report commissioned by Congress, NASA estimated that the first human beings would land on Mars “no later than the late 2020s” — but the certainty has not wavered, even if technical hurdles remain. Rachel McCauley, until recently the acting deputy director of NASA’s Mars campaign, had, as of July, a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first human mission launches. Many of these concern the mechanical difficulties of transporting people to a planet that is never closer than 33.9 million miles away; keeping them alive on poisonous soil in unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate communication; and returning them safely to Earth, more than a year and half later. Many other problems involve technical details so arcane that McCauley wouldn’t even know how to begin explaining them to a well-intentioned journalist lacking an advanced engineering degree. But McCauley does not doubt that NASA will overcome these challenges. What NASA does not yet know — what nobody can know — is whether humanity can overcome the psychological torment of Martian life.

Enter CHAPEA. Instead of asking questions about aeroshell sensor design and terrain-relative navigation, it promised to ask questions about people. For 378 days, four ordinary people would enact, as closely as possible, the lives of Martian colonists, receiving directives, feedback and near-total surveillance from mission control. They would eat astronaut food, conduct basic experiments, perform maintenance duties, respond to endless surveys and enjoy highly structured down time. This level of extreme verisimilitude is necessary to ensure that the experiment accurately determines whether human beings can thrive while living millions of miles from everybody they’ve ever known.

Experimenters wanted to learn whether crew members could eat low-salt, prepackaged astronaut meals for hundreds of days without losing their appetite, weight and positive attitude. Whether they could live in harmony with strangers in a confined space. Whether they could preserve a cohesive professional environment when they are out of contact with Earth for as long as three weeks at a time. Such questions are of paramount importance, because no mission to Mars can succeed if its inhabitants cannot maintain their health, their happiness and, most critical of all, their sanity.

And so before NASA can safely judge whether astronauts will thrive on Mars, NASA must first determine whether astronaut-imitators can thrive on a stage set designed, with maximum fidelity, to look like Mars.

“Mars is calling!” began the announcement that NASA published on its website in August 2021. Unlike most NASA missions, CHAPEA was open to the general public, or at least a reasonably broad swath of it: citizens or permanent residents between the ages of 30 and 55 with a master’s degree in a STEM field. Applicants were told to expect the experience to be “mentally demanding.”

Among the not-insignificant percentage of the country that idolizes NASA, this news was tantamount to learning that Willy Wonka would open his mysterious factory to five lucky contest winners. NASA offered four golden tickets to Mars — or rather Mars Dune Alpha, a 1,700-square-foot habitat built inside a warehouse at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The habitat was constructed as future Mars dwellings will be constructed: by 3-D printer. For “ink,” Martian colonies will use Martian regolith. Because NASA does not possess sufficient quantities of Martian rock, CHAPEA used a proprietary, airtight cement-based material called Lavacrete, which extrudes from a 3-D printer layer by layer, like orange toothpaste. (Though Lavacrete can be printed in any color, NASA engineers chose to dye the habitat that peculiar hue of orange misleadingly called “Martian red.”)

At one end of the rectangular habitat, four identical 6-by-11-foot cells serve as bedrooms. In the middle lies the “lounge,” a small room with a television and four reclining chairs. The other end is occupied by several desks with computer monitors, a medical station and a crop garden. The vegetables are not intended for subsistence but for mental health: Growing plants, one CHAPEA researcher said, may “provide psychological benefits for astronauts living in isolated, confined environments away from Earth.” Rooms have different ceiling heights, in order, according to its builder, to “avoid spatial monotony and crew member fatigue.” A hatch opens to a Martian backyard: a tented sandbox of reddish sand and two treadmills, to be used for “spacewalks” by virtual-reality-goggled crew members. The walls of the backyard are painted with a mural of Martian cliffs. There are no windows.

The duration of the experiment is the most glaring violation of verisimilitude. Orbital geometries dictate that the shortest possible round-trip mission to Mars will last about 570 days, a scenario possible once every 15 years, next in 2033; a typical Martian tour of duty will last at least 800 days.

To preserve the integrity of the experiment, NASA has refused to disclose any additional details about what the crew will experience during their 378-day confinement, which will end on July 6, 2024. NASA has emphasized only that participants will experience “resource limitations, equipment failure, communication delays and other environmental stressors.” But if Alyssa Shannon and Nathan Jones were to take NASA at its word about its dedication to realism, they could assume that certain conditions would have to be present. Crew members on a mission to Mars will, for instance, have to form durable emotional bonds with total strangers, relying on them for the comforts and consolations of the relationships they abandoned on Earth. Crew members will have to respond to every emergency themselves, without the possibility of intervention, or even guidance, from a mission command too distant to reply promptly to an S.O.S. They would have to come to terms with their inability to care for a sick child, comfort an upset spouse or visit a dying parent.

Future Mars voyagers will not only have to tolerate these conditions. In order to win the privilege of long-distance space travel, they will have to pursue the opportunity with devout, single-minded purpose. They will have to want to travel to Mars more than almost anyone else in the world. They will have to embrace the knowledge that, for at least 570 days, they will be the most isolated human beings in the history of the universe.

An illustration of astronauts in the reflection of one astronaut’s visor.

Alyssa Shannon had fantasized about colonizing Mars since childhood. She spent weeks on the floor of her bedroom playing with a Lego spaceship that converted into a Martian base station. Later she read Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles,” James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — any Martian sci-fi she could find. She knew she could tolerate hardship and extended periods in isolation: She was an avid backpacker, having hiked the John Muir Trail in 23 days and trekked across Spain in 40. She would miss cooking — her specialty was whole-wheat sourdough pizza — but she was willing to sacrifice her culinary passion in service of humanity’s future. Her partner, Jake, understood. Her decision to apply, he said, “reaffirmed what I knew about her: When it comes time to do something important, requiring a major commitment, she’s the kind of person who will follow through.” While she waited to hear back from NASA, Alyssa didn’t discuss it much: The prospect was almost too exciting to bear.

Nathan Jones, the father of three, told his identical twin, Matthew, that he felt the mission had been designed for him — and that he had been made for the mission. Matthew agreed. Nathan could talk to anyone and seemed to solve any problem he faced. He had spent years as a night-shift paramedic, saving lives in the backs of speeding ambulances. He had volunteered on medical missions in the jungles of Honduras, treating health emergencies for members of remote Indigenous tribes without being able to speak their language (or, for that matter, much Spanish). Jones was the emergency specialist in his household too, responsible for repairing every leak, dysfunctional appliance and clogged toilet. He figured he could handle Mars — or, at least, “Mars.”

Kacie, his wife, wasn’t certain she could handle it. When Nathan announced that he had applied, she was dumbfounded. Why, she asked, would you choose to leave our family for a year?

Another version of this question was posed by various professional observers of the American space program: the historians, ethicists and NASA consultants who spend much of their professional lives imagining the future of space exploration and planetary colonization. What, they wondered, did NASA hope to learn from CHAPEA that it did not know already?

The psychic perils of separation from one’s social world are well understood. “Don’t we already know what isolation does to people?” asks J.S. Johnson-Schwartz, a professor of philosophy at Wichita State University who studies the ethics of space exploration. “What uncertainty exists about what’s going to happen when you lock people inside a room for a year? Just because the room is painted to look like Mars doesn’t mean it’s going to change the results.”

The findings to which Johnson-Schwartz referred were from the last 80 years of isolation research, a field of study initiated during World War II, when the British Royal Air Force grew concerned about pilots’ performance during solo reconnaissance flights. Officers noticed that the longer a pilot stayed in the air, the fewer German submarines he detected. The psychologist Norman Mackworth determined that the monotony of the mission was responsible. But inattention wasn’t the worst of it: Monotony weakened the pilots’ competence in even the most basic tasks.

Mackworth’s conclusions inspired a series of studies by the psychologist Donald O. Hebb at McGill University in Montreal, in which male students earned $20 a day to lie on a bed in a lighted, soundproofed gray cubicle. Hebb confirmed Mackworth’s findings and added a disturbing new wrinkle. Monotony didn’t only cause intellectual impairment. It led to “change of attitude.”

At first Hebb’s students slept a lot and ruminated on their studies and their personal problems. Later they fell into reminiscences, recreating movies they had watched or trips they had taken. Some counted to incredibly large numbers. Eventually, however, they lost the ability to focus. Several students reported “blank periods” during which they did not have a single thought.

Next came the hallucinations: a procession of marching squirrels hauling sacks over their shoulders. Nude women frolicking in a woodland pool. Giant eyeglasses marching down a street. An old man wearing a battle helmet in a bathtub rolling across a field on rubber wheels. Dogs, endless dogs. One student complained of a phantom “sucking my mind out through my eyes.” The delusions made the students vulnerable to manipulation. When played recordings about ghosts, poltergeists and ESP, they were far more likely to believe such phenomena were real, even long after the experiment ended.

Hebb’s findings inspired a boom of isolation studies. Subjects were confined within iron lungs, water tanks and subterranean caves; the results were consistent. “These experiments were extremely useful to many different people,” says Jeffrey Mathias, a historian of science at Cornell University, who is writing a book about the history of isolation research. Besides attracting neuroscientists and psychologists, the research also drew the interest, and funding, of the U.S. intelligence community. The C.I.A. incorporated findings into their practice of “coercive counterintelligence interrogation,” or what today might be called “brainwashing” or “torture.”

The isolation studies were also closely monitored by the Air Force, which directed the nascent U.S. space program before the creation of NASA in 1958. Worried that spaceflight might drive astronauts insane, the Air Force conducted the first iteration of a CHAPEA-like experiment at the Air Force’s School of Aeronautic Medicine in San Antonio in 1955. Prospective astronauts were enclosed for a week within a spaceship cockpit slightly larger than a coffin perpetually illuminated by bright fluorescent lights. The airmen were assigned an overwhelming number of technical tasks and, in some cases, given huge doses of amphetamines.

Their experience followed a familiar trajectory: Initial high spirits gave way to what one researcher called a “gradual increase in irritability,” which abruptly flipped into “frank hostility.” Many participants, including a few who hadn’t taken speed, hallucinated. One pilot saw “little people” perched on the instrument panel. “I can’t say if I thought they were alive or not,” he said. “I really don’t know.” Another pilot abandoned the experiment after three hours and demanded psychiatric care.

Similar studies followed — in blackened anechoic chambers and pill-shaped capsules dangling from high-altitude balloons — before the entire line of inquiry was put to rest by Project Mercury. During the successful solo missions that marked the formal start of the American space program in the early 1960s, astronauts did not suffer from any obvious psychological distress, placating Hebb’s researchers. All future long-duration expeditions remained in Earth’s orbit, allowing crew to communicate easily with family and friends; the International Space Station flies about as far from Earth as Manhattan is from Washington. Although government agencies, particularly those concerned about crew performance aboard nuclear submarines, continue to examine the effects of isolation, NASA did not.

NASA had not solved the problem of isolation in outer space. It realized it did not need to solve it. At least not until half a century later, when a new challenge presented itself: a human mission to a planet so distant that a cry for help would have to travel through the solar system for 22 minutes before it was heard.

It was the lag in communication that particularly worried the partners and families of the CHAPEA crew. All contact with the habitat would be delayed by the amount of time that it would take to beam information hundreds of millions of miles from Earth to Mars. Even the tersest exchange (“How’s it going?” “OK.”) would take 44 minutes.

But 44 minutes was the best-case scenario, because any communication will have to flow through a single node. Every unit of information — not just messages but surveillance footage, audio recordings, experimental and biostatic records — will have to wait its turn in a digital queue, with precedence given to the most urgent signals and the smallest packets of data. The upshot was that anything approaching a normal human conversation with an Earthling was unthinkable. The most modest digital postcard — a short, grainy video of a child blowing out a birthday candle — might take weeks to arrive. And during one three-week period in the middle of the experiment, representing the farthest distance (more than 250 million miles) between the two planets, there would be no contact at all.

Alyssa Shannon’s partner, Jake, the cybersecurity expert, dedicated himself to gaming the digital traffic snarl. “I have to figure out how to make sure my stuff goes faster than everyone else,” he said. “I know enough about tech to get the lowest bit rate possible. The lowest-grade image quality will travel faster. Black and white instead of color. I need to calculate the smallest transmittable unit that’s still me, smiling.”

Nathan Jones emphasized to NASA’s experimenters that he wanted to be kept as busy as possible. He didn’t want too much idle time to worry about his wife and their sons — how, when they were having tough days, he wouldn’t be able to give them “Dad hugs.” He didn’t want to dwell on the lost band performances, piano recitals, cross-country meets and soccer games, or about how his oldest son might be six inches taller by the end of his Martian sojourn. Nor did he care to consider what his friends in central Illinois, who responded to the news of his mission with bafflement and concern, might think. “That’s been the hardest part,” he said. “Their jaws hit the floor. They ask Kacie: ‘Why would you let your husband do this? How are you going to be OK?’ This looks crazy to a lot of people. Maybe it is. It’s not the kind of thing folks around here do.”

Kacie alternated among feelings of anger, fear, grief, defeatism, pride and resolve. There were times when she told Nathan that he shouldn’t go or that she wouldn’t let him go. “As a mother,” she said, “I don’t know that I could even consider leaving my children for a year.” But ultimately she was won over by his enthusiasm.

In the months before the crew was sealed within the habitat — the moment of “ingress,” NASA called it — Nathan threw himself into an extensive “Honey do” list. He worked in the backyard garden, planting tomatoes, cucumbers, blackberries, melons and strawberries for his family to harvest in his absence. He taught them how to garden and weed and clip the hedges. After he left for his final month of training in Houston, Kacie noticed that her sons would stand in the yard and survey the plot with their hands on their hips, in subconscious mimicry of their father.

Nathan also renovated two bathrooms, reconstructed the family car’s carburetor, replaced fixtures and trimmed the lower branches of the pine trees. He gave Kacie the passwords to their accounts and detailed directions on how to file their taxes. He taught her how to use the chain saw. He paid a professional photographer to take a family portrait and over spring break splurged for a Disney cruise. He drafted birthday and holiday cards, gifts and letters for every month (“We’re halfway there!”; “One month to go!”). He hid additional Post-it notes under couch cushions and under mattresses, or in places that Kacie might encounter in moments of stress, like the circuit breaker. “You can do it,” he wrote on the note he hid inside his toolbox. “You got this.”

A final envelope he addressed to Kacie, to open on their 15th wedding anniversary.

Jones and Shannon respected NASA’s discretion about the mission. But if they had wanted better to imagine the next year of their lives, they could have read up on a previous series of Mars simulations that shared some of CHAPEA’s objectives. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) experiment was conducted with NASA funding between 2013 and 2017 in a domed habitat on the reddish slope of the Mauna Loa volcano, 3,000 feet below the observatory there that keeps a continuous measurement of the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Civilians were selected to live inside the habitat for as long as 12 months at a time. HI-SEAS studied the nutritional and “psychosocial” benefits of various meal plans, as well as the volunteers’ behavior and mental acuity and the coping strategies they developed to withstand confined isolation.

“Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars,” a memoir-in-essays by Kate Greene, one of HI-SEAS’ original crew members, includes chapters titled “On Boredom,” “On Isolation” and “Dreams of Mars, Dreams of Earth.” Greene describes how the crushing monotony of the mission changed her. “Somewhere along the way,” she writes, “mental fatigue had become my baseline state.” The crew had difficulty sleeping, were disturbed by the constant monitoring and recording and found that the scheduled leisure time “felt a little forced.” Minor irritations began to madden Greene: the sound of sandals on the stairs, the way a crew member grazed her shin when crossing her leg under the table. She found herself desperately missing quotidian aspects of life on Earth, where she left behind her wife, aging parents and an ailing brother. The smell of fresh pineapple, in a routine sensory test, was enough to make her cry.

HI-SEAS followed Mars500 , the longest Mars simulation yet attempted. Administered by Russia’s ingenuously nomenclatured Institute of Biomedical Problems, Mars500 locked six male crew members together for 520 days, between June 2010 and November 2011, in a faux spacecraft and a faux landing module, and on a faux Mars. The Russian experimenters had hypothesized that, over time, the astronauts would lose motivation, work less effectively and suffer intensifying feelings of isolation from family and friends. After the experiment concluded, the scientists announced that their hypotheses had been “largely confirmed.” Crew members lost trust in the commanders and mission control when communications grew less frequent, developed nutritional problems and grew homesick and depressed. “The 520 days are really not easy to get through,” Wang Yue, a Chinese participant who lost 22 pounds and much of his hair, told China Daily. “It’s impossible to stay happy all the time. After all, I’m human, not a robot.”

Despite the consistency of results, the appetite for Mars simulations appears insatiable. CHAPEA is one of more than a dozen current analogue experiments NASA is participating in, including HERA, a 650-square-foot habitat that regularly houses four participants for as long as 45 days in confined isolation. Since NASA ended its participation in HI-SEAS, a conglomerate of public and private organizations has staged 12 additional missions on Mauna Loa. For nearly a quarter-century, the nonprofit Mars Society has directed research stations in the Utah desert and on a remote island in northern Canada. Mars analogues have been conducted on Dome C of the Antarctic Plateau, in a semiarid tract of northeastern Brazil, in the northern Sahara, within Austria’s Dachstein ice caves and in the Dhofar region in the Sultanate of Oman.

“We’ve seen similar things happen many times,” acknowledges Kelly C. Smith, a philosopher at Clemson University who specializes in the ethics of space exploration and advises NASA, which has no ethicists on staff. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a waste of time. The stakes are higher than in the past, after all. We’re doing this because we’re planning missions to other worlds.”

It is likely that the first travelers to Mars will have a similar psychological profile to that of Shannon, Jones and the two other participants selected by NASA for the crew: Ross Brockwell, a public-works operations manager in Chesapeake, Va., and Kelly Haston, a stem-cell biologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. All four were not only NASA enthusiasts and in perfect physical health but habitually sought out extended periods of isolation. Brockwell routinely retreated to a camp he had built on undeveloped land in Virginia, living off the grid. Haston is an ultramarathoner, having run some 70 trail races in the last decade, including several hundred-milers. Loneliness was something she had read about in books but never, as far as she could recall, experienced. A passion for isolation might have been as important to NASA’s screening process as educational attainment and blood glucose levels.

The CHAPEA participants should further benefit from their devotion to the cause. Louise Hawkley, an expert on social isolation at the University of Chicago, emphasizes that psychological responses are heavily influenced by whether people choose isolation or have it thrust upon them. A prisoner sentenced to life would be expected to suffer more than a monk who takes a vow of silence. But Hawkley points out that the participants’ loved ones, however supportive they might be, lacked the same autonomy: “Even if the crew member is fine, what happens to the family left behind?” Hawkley wondered if NASA will study the psychological effects of the mission on the families.

It will not. Nor did CHAPEA’s architects seem to have a strong grasp of the history of isolation research. In interviews, they discounted the predictive value of previous experiments, including HI-SEAS. “I don’t believe they were doing the performance metrics that we’re doing,” says Grace Douglas, CHAPEA’s principal investigator, who admitted she wasn’t “fully familiar” with the previous four-year experiment. “Our metrics are going to be at a higher level of detail and more extensive. The resource plan is more accurate.”

Rachel McCauley was the NASA official responsible for funding CHAPEA. When asked what she hoped to learn about human psychology, she dismissed the premise of the question. “The big reason why I funded it,” she said, “is because I need an even more refined answer to the question, How much food does it really take for a Mars mission?”

What about the mission’s psychological aspect? The monotony? The loneliness?

“I’m a hardware person first,” McCauley said. She is, to be precise, a solid-propulsion systems engineer. She has the distinction of being the member of our species who has been most responsible for determining the best method to catapult humanity to Mars. In order to do so, she had to know how much weight a spaceship will carry. McCauley could estimate, down to the milligram, the mass of every nut and bolt, every antivortex baffle and cargo-bay door. But how many corn tortillas and yogurt packets will four astronauts, under psychological duress, consume in 378 days? That question, or some version of it, was what McCauley needed answered. She also needed to know how much clothing they’ll need. Clothes are heavy.

Mathias, the isolation historian, was not surprised to learn that the psychological questions were a secondary consideration for NASA. But his skepticism about CHAPEA went further. Mathias questioned whether any experimental rationale could justify yet another isolation study. “I wonder if the scientific value of these simulation experiments is beside the point,” he said. The experiments, instead, seemed to him “a way of willing the colonization of Mars into being. A form of wish fulfillment — or cosplaying, to put it less poetically. This is about satisfying an urge. There seems to be a compulsion to keep repeating these fake Mars missions until we actually do it. There’s something very beautiful about this idea, but also very macabre at the same time.”

The analogue experiments reflect the utopian promise of our Martian future. For a human mission to Mars is not the highest ambition of the space program. It is just the beginning, a small step for mankind before the giant leap of planetary colonization.

Five months before CHAPEA’s call for applications, Dennis Bushnell, then chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center and a nearly 60-year veteran of NASA, published “Futures of Deep Space Exploration, Commercialization and Colonization: The Frontiers of the Responsibly Imaginable.” Martian colonization has always been imaginable, particularly to this nation of colonizers. But in his paper Bushnell noted that the prospect has in recent years “moved from extremely difficult to increasingly feasible.” Colonization has also become increasingly desirable, because of “possibly existential societal issues, including climate change, the crashing ecosystem, machines taking the jobs, etc.” — the et cetera perhaps reflective of the obviousness of planetary decline.

A more surprising aspect of the paper is Bushnell’s prediction for how the physical hostility of Mars will be overcome: Colonists will “morph into an altered species.” He cites projections that suggest that “travelers that colonize Mars will, over time, due to the reduced g and radiation exposure, evolve into Martians.” The ultimate promise of NASA’s Mars mission is the chance to begin again — if not, exactly, as human beings, then as Martians.

There is a beautiful and macabre poetry to this rationalization. “Utopia,” after all, derives from the Greek: ou (“not”) and topos (“place”). If we manage to inhabit the not-place of Mars, enjoying a carefree life of not-problems, not-regret and not-environmental-ruin, it makes sense that we should be not-people. We should be Martians. Let people, with all their baggage and fragility and foolishness, stay home.

Mathias likened the incessant Mars analogue experiments to a traumatic repetition: a compulsion to restage a trauma in an irrational, futile attempt to undo a profound damage. “The urge to try to recreate a perfect world is always going to be about rehearsing what we got wrong here,” he said. “We’re not chasing Mars. We’re mourning Earth.”

In late May, a month before sealing themselves within the habitat, the four crew members and two alternates reported to Houston for a final month of training and evaluation. Three weeks before the ingress, NASA hosted a “family weekend” for the crew’s loved ones. The visitors were given a tour of the Johnson Space Center. They met a real astronaut, saw replicas of spaceships, walked around in the red sandbox that crew members would use for their “spacewalks” and asked questions directly of CHAPEA’s lead researcher, Grace Douglas. The three Jones boys were proud to learn how their father was helping to shape the future of humanity.

But the most valuable part of the weekend, the families agreed, was the chance to meet one another. During a barbecue by the hotel pool, they shared their anxieties about the coming year. They exchanged techniques for managing stress and pledged to keep in close contact through a private Facebook page.

On Jake Harwood’s final evening in Houston, Alyssa Shannon prepared a shrimp salad in the hotel kitchenette. It was bittersweet: the last meal she would fix in more than a year. Before leaving Oakland, she had frozen about a dozen feasts for Jake and their friends to enjoy during her absence. She would miss cooking. There would be no pizza on Mars.

The couple gazed out the window at a full moon. There would be 13 more, Jake told her, before she returned from Mars. He would be counting down the full moons until they saw each other again.

They awoke at dawn and watched the sun rise. Alyssa drove him to the airport. “It was hard to say goodbye,” Jake said, if not as hard, he anticipated, as their final phone call before the ingress, which he referred to as the “big one.” But Alyssa’s final phone call from Houston came five days earlier than he expected.

Alyssa announced that NASA had removed her from the mission. The investigators pulled her into a room and told her that she had been “excluded from continuing.” She would be replaced by one of the alternates, Anca Selariu, a microbiologist in the U.S. Navy. Alyssa did not know why she had been removed. The investigators refused to tell her, she said. They said only that their decision had not been based on her performance. They added that sometimes, in the final tests before a mission, they found something that was not “medically serious” but might present a hazard. Like an increased risk of kidney stones.

“Do I have an increased risk of kidney stones?” Alyssa asked.

Kidney stones was just an example, the investigators insisted. But they refused to say more, lest they compromise the integrity of the experiment.

Alyssa doubted that she had been torpedoed by a medical condition. She wondered instead if she wasn’t “exactly the right mix of introvert and extrovert they were seeking.” Or perhaps they had grown concerned about the crew’s social dynamic? If so, Alyssa couldn’t say why. The investigators, she said, told her that she could make up any excuse she wanted, and they wouldn’t deny it. “But lying is so unsatisfying,” she said. “And you have to remember the lie. It’s too challenging. I want to go to the truth. There was a reason, and they couldn’t tell me what it was.”

The uncertainty plagued her, but not as much as the loss she felt from the death of a dream she had nurtured since the Lego Martian colonies of her childhood. She couldn’t help feeling wounded. “This has been hard on my ego,” she said. “It’s a big upheaval. It’s been uncomfortable.” She sighed. “But I have to trust that my departure is for the best of the mission. By stepping back I’m just serving in a different way.”

Her sudden banishment led to some logistical awkwardness at home. “When an astronaut comes back,” Kate Greene wrote, “Earth isn’t where it was.” When Alyssa came back, she found herself suddenly without a job, income or home. Her hospital had promised her a position in 13 months, but in the meantime someone had been hired to replace her. Nor would NASA pay her the full stipend she had been promised, which she says was about $60,000. She didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits. And she had rented her apartment for a year. Though she knew she would be able to move in with Jake, they hadn’t previously decided to live together.

Jake could not disguise his excitement. He met her at the airport and brought her to his house, where they shared a pizza.

Alyssa, an indefatigable optimist, began brainstorming over dinner. Perhaps she would use the sudden windfall of free time to set out on a major backpacking adventure or a cross-country road trip. Maybe she would begin a new career. Or maybe she wouldn’t go back to work — ever. Jake listened, humoring her. Then, with great tenderness, he proposed that she take a couple of weeks to herself before deciding what to do with the rest of her life.

On the afternoon of Sunday, June 25, the couple opened NASA’s YouTube channel. The four crew members stood on a platform in front of the habitat. They wore black jumpsuits embossed with the reddish CHAPEA mission patch: Mars Dune Alpha, rendered not inside a Houston warehouse but at the foot of a Martian sierra, the same mountain range painted on the wall of the sandbox.

“The knowledge we gain here will help enable us to send humans to Mars and bring them home safely,” Grace Douglas said. The crew members expressed their gratitude to NASA. When Anca Selariu said, “I just can’t believe that I’m here,” Alyssa teared up.

As soon as Nathan Jones began speaking about his family, he broke down. Kelly Haston patted his shoulder. “To my wife and kids,” he finally said, through a sob, “I love you to Mars and back.”

Douglas opened the door to the habitat. It was not a special hatch with airlocks or anything: It was just a plain white office door. The crew, waving, entered. Douglas shut the door firmly behind them.

From inside the sealed habitat, the crew could be heard whooping with joy.

In Springfield, Kacie Jones was watching with her sons. She had felt it was important that she be alone with the boys, without any extended family, not knowing how they would respond to the sight of their father leaving for a year. In the end, the boys were fine. Kacie was not. But about 22 minutes after the habitat door closed, she received a text message. It came from Mars.

“I love you,” Nathan wrote.

Kacie took a deep breath. “We’re finally in it,” she told herself. “Which means now we can move forward.” She took the boys for tacos, put them to sleep and set the alarm clock so that she had enough time, in the morning, to get them ready for camp.

At Jake’s house in Oakland, after Alyssa closed the laptop, there was a moment in which they did not know what to do with themselves. They figured Alyssa’s family would worry about her, so she put on a costume spacesuit and dressed Bun Bun, a stuffed rabbit that she had planned to bring to Fake Mars, in a tiny NASA spacesuit. Jake snapped portraits and sent them to her family to let them know she was all right. Or at least that, once the sting of missing out on a year on Mars had subsided, she would be all right. That staying on Earth, with her recipe collections and Bun Bun and her devoted partner, might not be such a terrible outcome after all.

Then she baked a whole-wheat sourdough pizza, and she and Jake ate it, together.

Nathaniel Rich, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “Second Nature: Scenes From a World Remade.” Isabel Seliger is an artist and illustrator in Berlin. She often illustrates science articles with narrative elements.

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Why Is It Absolutely Impossible To Return From Mars To Earth?

A tiny unmanned probe could deliver a soil sample from Mars, but even that can lead to problems in one launch. If we mean manned travel with a single launch, this is almost impossible.

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To launch a substantial spacecraft from Earth into interplanetary space, we need something about the same size as the Saturn V. This eventually got us to the Moon and back, and to fly to Mars, the spacecraft needs to be able to carry a reasonable payload as well.

So what about the return? Well, we’ll have to take the second rocket with us.

Mars has about 40% of Earth’s gravity and a thin atmosphere, so we need about 1/3 the size of Saturn V to get home.

To return to Earth, there will be a need for a rocket about the size of a Falcon Heavy fully fueled when taking off from Mars.

So, a larger rocket would be needed than Saturn V. In fact, more than anything previously invented, not based on nuclear weapons or science fiction.

Mars has an atmosphere. The atmosphere is convenient for slowing down spaceships, but unfortunately, it is not dense enough for the parachutes to work properly.

Thus, we will need even more rocket power for a braked landing, and this fuel will have a serious volume, which further increases the launch mass. We will also need a heat shield, which for such a large ship needs to be commensurately massive, further reducing the payload.

It would probably be a little easier if Mars had no atmosphere at all. At least then the landing could be more precisely controlled.

Part of the reason that any space agency has such a low success rate on Mars is that the density of its atmosphere changes quite dramatically. This means that sometimes the atmosphere is dense and stops the ship (or burns it), while other times it is too diffuse and barely slows down the ship.

This is why engine landing is the preferred method at the moment. However, such a landing should be fully automated due to a time delay (there is a huge distance between Mars and Earth, and the speed of light is not infinite). Landing anything on Mars is still a huge technical achievement, no matter how many times it is done.

That is why it is difficult to return to Earth from Mars , and a direct return flight is impossible. The only two real options are nuclear-powered spacecraft (hypothetical), or fueling on Mars and traveling with multiple launches (also hypothetical).

This will include sending a small refinery forward, sending an empty rocket (optional), filling it or some tank with Martian fuel, sending a disposable rocket with astronauts, landing your astronauts in a nice light spacecraft, completing astronaut tasks, refueling the first rocket, and finally flight home.

What happens if the average temperature on earth rises to 60°c, nasa sent humans to the moon with only 4kb ram, but is 4gb not enough to play modern video games now, nasa captured earth-size ufos refuelling from the sun’s plasma, what will happen if the earth’s magnetic field disappears for 1 day.

[…] Why Is It Absolutely Impossible To Return From Mars To Earth? […]

You need to learn the difference between “hypothetical” and “absolutely impossible.”

NASA is never going to return mars samples then

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When Humans Finally Get To Mars, Will They Ever Be Able To Come Home?

There are a few elements necessary in order to make a return trip from mars possible..

Fueling dreams of Mars

Elon Musk recently described his plans to make human beings an interplanetary species, starting with a trip to Mars. But how exactly does the SpaceX CEO intend to bring people back from the red planet?

The most crucial element necessary to both trips is fuel, which must be created using the raw materials at hand – and Mars has a lot of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Thus, using the proven Sabatier reaction , carbon dioxide could be used to react with hydrogen to form methane for fuel.

This chemical processes would need an ample source of energy. This could come from solar panels (assuming Elon Musk can bring a ton of super energy efficient ones to the red planet). Luckily, once the process is up and running, the end products of burning methane and carbon dioxide are the same as the starting ingredients. Therefore, the process should produce enough oxygen to power the craft's engines.

Location, Location, Location

A place to set up a chemical plant that will carry out the above actions is crucial. If water is used to power the plant, there's only a couple places where it can be established. There's a ton of water located in the polar ice caps. However, those are essentially Mars' "danger zone," offering incredibly harsh conditions.

According to Musk's presentation: "the first ship will have a small propellant plant, which will be expanded over time." Having a small plant presents some complications, though. It would take more time to start building a chemical plant to process fuel, and mean more resources are needed to keep people fed. Unless the perfect location can be found, the first group would have to be small enough to operate and expand the propellant plant, and have enough pre-produced fuel for a return trip.

Based on these challenges, it is clear that the first trip would be composed of people sent to build the basic infrastructure to allow for continued existence on Mars. The folks from SpaceX and NASA are aware of this, of course. And, given enough time and preparation, would eventually come up with the best way to tackle the situation.

If the human mind can conceive of life on Mars, then it can probably figure out how to make it happen.

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NASA’s Epic Gamble to Get Martian Dirt Back to Earth

There are two kinds of places in the universe, as far as we know. The part here, on Earth, with all the life. And the rest of the universe: endless, sterile nonlife out to the ends of infinite creation. But right now, there is a mission in the works to bring back dirt from Mars and see if life really is alien to the rest of the universe.

It’s called the Mars Sample Return mission. During the next 12 years or so, NASA and the European Space Agency will team up to send a rover to the red planet, where it will collect a variety of soil samples. Another rover will then gather the samples, and the samples will be put in a rocket and launched from Mars. The rocket carrying samples will rendezvous with an orbiting spacecraft that will come back to Earth, bringing the soil samples with it.

The Earthlings in charge of this enterprise are, to put it mildly, almost giddy at the thought of getting their hands on Martian regolith. “A single sample… will change how we think about everything,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. “It will be the most valuable thing on Earth.”

Mars Sample Return—MSR in NASA’s inevitable initialism—will mark the first time that humans make a round trip to Mars, and it will be the first physical, tangible, two-way cause-and-effect connection between Earth and another planet. For the first time in recorded history, we’ll be able to physically touch and interact with a pristine piece of another planet.

First, however, we have to get MSR to Mars and get some dirt. The details are devilish, indeed.

Outer space is no more than 60 miles straight up—a bit more than the width of Rhode Island, a bit less than the width of New Hampshire—but energetically, it’s very far away indeed. To get into the lowest of low-energy orbits, you need to accelerate to more than 17,000 mph, which requires rocket engines that convert fuel into kinetic energy at obscene rates.

And those burn rates must be controlled precisely; if you convert your rocket fuel’s chemical energy into kinetic energy too quickly, you exceed the material limits of the engines. This immediately results in an aptly named RUDE—Rapid Unplanned Disassembly Event, also known as a catastrophic explosion. If you convert that fuel into speed too slowly, you make an unexpectedly quick return to Earth, culminating in severe impact braking and an immediate RUDE.

We could build a rocket so sturdy that it’d never explode, but no realistic amount of energy (short of a string of nuclear explosions) would be able to lift the thing into orbit. And anything light enough to get easily into orbit would be so flimsy it wouldn’t survive the trip. If the Earth were 50 percent bigger in diameter, no amount of engineering in the universe would get a rocket all the way to orbit; there would simply be too much gravity for any design or any chemical propellant to overcome. As it is, even the most advanced rocket still tests the outer limits of 21st century materials and design.

And that’s just getting to orbit—getting to Mars is a whole other ballgame. The International Space Station orbits at about 250 miles above the Earth; the Moon is 1,000 times farther away than that. Mars, meanwhile, is 1,000 times farther away than the Moon.

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Think of it this way: If the distance from Earth to the very beginning of space were the length of a baseball bat, the distance from Earth to the ISS would be about the length of a four-door car. One-thousand times greater than that is about 2.5 miles, or about a 10-minute bike ride. One-thousand times that is 2,500 miles, or the distance from New York to San Francisco.

Because the vast distance is only one of the many obstacles that complicate a trip to Mars, the odds of actually getting something there in working condition aren’t anything you’d accept when booking your next flight to Rhode Island or New Hampshire. Since the first attempt in 1960, only 19 of 45 missions to Mars—just over 40 percent—have been complete successes.

Even after more than a half-century of experience and technological development, every mission to land on Mars is still a one-of-a-kind gamble. Today, with all our knowledge, this complexity and difficulty mean it costs around $1.5 million in shipping and handling for every pound of robotics and instrumentation you want to send to the Martian surface.

That is why it is so heroically challenging to touch and do things on another world. As of right now, there is no such thing as “just sending stuff to Mars.” That may change someday, but today it takes billions of dollars, thousands of engineers and scientists, and decades of experience to so much as dig a hole on Mars, a task anyone on Earth can do with five minutes and a five-pound shovel (which would run you a cool $7.5 million just to ship to the red planet). Mars is our astronomical next-door neighbor—it’s about as easy a trip as we can take—but our ability to interact with it is just barely this side of nonexistent.

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Passive observation, looking up in the sky, has been the only option for interacting with Mars for almost all of human history. Over the last 400 years, we’ve been eyeballing the planet with increasingly powerful telescopes, but there are limits to what you can learn about a place with passive observation alone. (You would need a telescope with a primary mirror bigger than South Carolina to look at individual pebbles on Mars.) So, starting in 1965, we sent cameras out to Mars orbit, then had them snap photos and transmit them back.

But if you’re willing to go the all the way down the Martian gravity well and touch down on the surface with a lander or rover, the range of scientific possibilities explodes. Humans did this successfully for the first time in 1976, with the Viking missions. Landers and rovers can physically interact with their environment and do exciting new things like flip a rock over to see what’s on the other side, scrape away the top surface of a rock to see what it looks like inside, or drill holes into the ground. Scientists can then deploy instruments, like the X-ray diffraction instrument on the Curiosity rover (used to observe crystalline structure in rocks), that need to be right next to a target to work. The tricky part here is that science continually generates bigger and more complex questions; solve one riddle, and you end up with two new ones. Anyone who has found themselves intellectually run aground by a 4-year-old repeatedly asking “Why?” has experienced this phenomenon firsthand. Over time, answering those questions requires ever-increasing scientific firepower. Even on Earth, hunting for signs of life from billions of years ago isn’t easy and requires both field investigation and detailed analysis in the laboratory. There’s only so much you can do at the scene of the investigation; eventually, you need to send samples back to the lab for further analysis. We are now getting to the point where we’re asking the kinds of questions about Mars that we can’t answer with fieldwork alone. Broadly speaking, scientists want to bring back Mars samples to address three different sets of questions: geological, biological, and technological. Geologists want to understand, in detail, the history of Mars and see what conditions have prevailed there over the last few billion years. Biologists want to figure out if those conditions gave rise to life. The technologists want samples so they can figure out the details, feasibility, and risks of sending humans there someday. As challenging as a round trip to Mars is, it makes more sense as a way to answer today’s scientific questions than sending the lab equipment to Mars. For example, geologists would love to send an ion microprobe that can measure elemental abundances at the scale of millionths of a meter; the abundances of particular isotopes can then be used to determine the age of a specific bit of rock in a sample. But those machines are big and power-hungry. Shrinking one down to size and getting it to Mars would be a costly engineering project you’d need to manage before even looking at your first Mars sample. But even if you manage to make it lean and portable, room for science payloads is zero-sum. Adding an ion microprobe means taking off something else. Further, anything you can send is sharply limited in capability. The enormous cost of shipping instruments not only restricts what you can send to Mars, but it also puts a considerable squeeze on their power and mass, bounding their precision and capabilities. The limitations on precision and delicacy go beyond the instruments to the handling of the samples themselves. The immense distance to Mars means the fastest the speed of light will let you send a signal to Earth to Mars and back again is just over six minutes round trip (in the worst-case scenario, that roundtrip time for a signal climbs to almost 45 minutes). That means there’s an enormous lag between telling your robot to do something, seeing if it worked, and then telling it to go the next step. The time needed to do something, observe the results, decide what to do, and then act is critical. Doing anything with up to a 40-minute lag is an exercise in patience and a recipe for missed opportunities. Compare this with human reaction times of about a quarter second. In an eight-hour shift, a person on Earth is limited—at absolute theoretical maximum—to about 78 round trip communications with something on the surface of Mars. If you bring that sample back to Earth, the time needed to send a signal back and forth to an instrument drops to nearly zero. A scientist in the lab could (in theory) complete tens of thousands of interactions with a sample in the same eight hours. Once you can handle and interact with a sample continuously, it allows you to do all kinds of new science, like looking for extraordinarily small things like fossils of ancient microbes, imprints of mold spores, and trails left by stone-eating bacteria. In the lab, investigators can pick apart rocks with incredible care and precision. Scientists have been thinking for decades about the kinds of experiments they could do once they have samples back on Earth. Indeed, the most recent report , “The Potential Science and Engineering Value of Samples Delivered to Earth by Mars Sample Return,” says “Potential [signs of life on Mars] can be investigated thoroughly only by observation-guided sample preparation, followed by investigations by laboratory consortia that apply state-of-the-art techniques.” The change in both how samples can be processed, and the tools used to examine them will be huge. Let’s just take one example out of hundreds or thousands. In theory, it might not only be possible to find impressions left by hypothetical Martian mold spores in ancient rocks but also to immediately test the sedimentary rock to determine how long ago those spores landed in Mars mud. And all that could be done in the space of days or weeks. The ability to do all that “observation-guided sample preparation followed by investigations” would be such a huge breakthrough that the scientific value of going even from zero Martian soil to a little Martian soil is effectively immeasurable. Not so the price tag; MSR will cost at least $7 billion. This graduation from sending information back to Earth to sending actual Martian stuff back to Earth involves fundamental changes in the way we think about space exploration. Up to now, we’ve been able to go to Mars and choose among a whole world of different samples—but we could only do so much with them. With MSR, it’ll be the opposite.

It’s like ordering a cocktail at a bar versus making one at home: At the bar, there’s lots more booze to choose from and, therefore, a vast array of cocktails to be had—but drinks cost a lot and the bar will eventually close. At home, you are limited to whatever few bottles you have on hand, but you can pour as much as you want, whenever you want—and you don’t have to so much as put on pants to do it. It’s going from a binge every few years to making a steady habit of it, scientifically speaking. Instead of relying on multimillion-dollar missions, the ability to get a sample in front of any instrument you can think of will depend solely on the willingness of a NASA courier to make a hand delivery. Well, that and your ability to convince NASA that the samples will be used for something more worthwhile than biological compatibility tests involving making very expensive cocktails with Mars dirt. This change has intriguing implications. Among other things, it means that the space mission won’t really begin until all the space hardware has flown and safely returned samples to Earth, about six or so years after the mission first lifts off in 2026. MSR won’t truly end until whatever year scientists exhaust the final soil sample, and that could take decades. Some of the best lunar science is being done today by examining samples of the Moon collected 50 years ago by Apollo astronauts.

For all the firsts that MSR’s engineering mission will achieve in space, the true mission, the scientific mission, won’t begin until all the space travel is over. “That’s what makes it so hard,” Zurbuchen says. “The delayed gratification version of a mission.”

Still, there needs to be something else extraordinarily compelling that is worth MSR’s multibillion-dollar shipping charges. And there is: The mission is going to alter the meaning of the term “life on Earth.”

There’s a paradox about life in space. On the one hand, we know that space is utterly hostile to life. There’s lots of life on Earth, but the highest we have ever found an animal was in 1973 when a Rüppell’s griffon vulture (unsuccessfully) played chicken with a commercial airliner about seven miles up in the air. (The vulture lost.) That’s only about a tenth of the way to space; beyond that, we have found no complex life at all. On the other hand, there’s something of a consensus that there’s probably life somewhere else—after all, space is rather large. There are many times more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth: one estimate puts it at something like 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (60 sextillion) stars, give or take a factor of 100. On average, each of them has several planets, and doing the math, that’s… a whole lot of chances for life to arise somewhere else. Life as we know it is limited to a minuscule biological range, topping out seven miles up. On the other hand, we guess that this seven-mile limit doesn’t represent the limit on all life everywhere. These two extremes present a question: When we talk about life, are we talking about a lot of life scattered across the universe, or just the rare, tiny, tragically isolated dot here and there? When we look at the night sky, are we looking at nothing but pure death, or thousands and thousands of different biomes? We have no idea. But we do know a few things about life itself and the solar system in which we live. For instance, living creatures need some sort of solvent that enables them to metabolize food. “Life has to have the right conditions, energy, and time,” says NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green. “You take in a liquid, you eat food”—digestion requires liquid solvents to extract nutrients— “Then the liquid is used to eliminate the waste. Liquid is critical.” For everything on Earth, the liquid in question is water.

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There is a band around every star that called the habitable (or Goldilocks) zone—a region where you might find a planet that would be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface. Our sun’s habitable zone today includes Earth. Mars and Venus, our solar system’s other terrestrial planets, are respectively at the very outer and inner edges of that zone. Mercury, the other rocky planet in the inner solar system, orbits far too close to the sun for liquid water to exist on its surface. While the surfaces of Mars and Venus are each somewhere between very and monumentally hostile to life today, we have come to realize they weren’t always. Billions of years ago, for instance, Mars had a much thicker atmosphere that was better able to trap heat. This means that in the distant past, Earth wasn’t the only planet with oceans—Mars and Venus had them too. So, part of what MSR is intended to do is search for evidence of ancient life on Mars. “We are looking for life not only in space,” Green says, “but in time.” Evidence from previous missions to Mars has accumulated, building toward the conclusion that the red planet may have previously hosted life. “There are 4,700 minerals on Earth, but 300 of them can only be created by biological processes. Right now, with our mineralogy experiment on Curiosity, we've seen about 250 or 280 of those minerals,” Green says.

Likewise, thermodynamics and statistics put a pretty strong upper limit on the size of molecules that will come together through happenstance and inorganic processes alone—about 150 atomic mass units. Curiosity has found molecules twice that large, suggesting biological processes may have been at work. Mars’ past is still being explored, but MSR will probably provide the final proof that life once existed there. “Almost nobody believes that if you go to Mars and you dig a hole, something will come crawling out,” Zurbuchen says. Today’s Martian surface is still way too hostile for any organic life complex to skitter across the rocks. But it turns out there’s an enormous grey area between the ability to support that complex life on the surface and the sheer, inhospitable lethality of deep space that physically separates Earth and Mars. We know that life requires the right conditions, energy, and time—all of which were present on the ancient Martian surface. But what MSR will do, according to Zurbuchen “almost no matter what, is tell us how easy it is to create life in an Earth-like environment”—on a Goldilocks planet with liquid water on its surface, like ancient Mars or Venus. The big question now is whether life just crops up almost automatically on planets in their star’s habitable zone, or if life really is a long shot, even when the conditions are right. This result will come at an exciting time. The James Webb Space Telescope will start giving us our first data about exoplanet environments soon after its launch, slated for 2021. Among other things, the telescope may be able to make measurements of the atmospheres of exoplanets in the habitable zone of other stars, potentially revealing signs that there could be life on those worlds. In 2025, NASA plans to launch the Europa Clipper mission to do flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa. It has an icy surface covering vast salt-water oceans. The mission could find biological signatures indicating that life can arise even outside of a star’s habitable zone. In 2026, the Dragonfly mission —a robot quadcopter—will leave for Saturn’s moon Titan, which has oceans of liquid methane on its surface. Dragonfly could give us evidence that life can be based on a liquid other than water. This quartet of missions—MSR, the James Webb Telescope, Europa Clipper, and Titan Dragonfly—have the potential to radically alter our notion of how common life is in the universe. By the mid-2030s, we may have evidence of a fundamentally different universe—one dotted with life—rather than the hostile, sterile one we know about today. We’ve learned in the last 30 years that rocks from Venus, Earth, and Mars may have—very infrequently in the distant past—traveled from one world to another. Giant meteor impacts, like the one suspected of killing the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, can blow chunks of rock all over the solar system.

And we’ve also discovered that, as hostile as space is to humans, under the right conditions, a microbe living on one of those rocks might be able to survive the trip. This raises the possibility that the entire evolutionary tree of life on Earth may not be limited to just life on Earth—branches of that tree may come from other worlds. If, that is, there has ever been life on other worlds. But we can’t really get at any of our questions about Mars until we can touch a pristine sample of Martian soil with our own hands. And in doing that, we may discover that not only is there life out there in space, but that our life here comes from space as well.

G. Ryan Faith writes about and consults on space and space policy issues. He served as committee staff supporting the House Subcommittee on Space. Prior to that, he was Defense and National Security Editor at VICE News. You can follow him on Twitter at @Operation_Ryan or reach him by email at [email protected].

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Bringing Mars rocks back to Earth: On Feb. 18, Perseverance Rover landed safely on Mars – a lead scientist explains the tech and goals

Professor of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University

Disclosure statement

Jim Bell receives funding from NASA for his work on the Perseverance rover mission.. He is also an unpaid member of the Board of Directors of The Planetary Society, engaging in activities including education and advocacy of space exploration with elected officials.

Arizona State University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

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Dusty, black and white image showing martian surface and shadow of Perseverance

Editor’s note: On Feb. 18, NASA’s Mars 2020 mission arrived at the red planet and successfully landed the Perseverance Rover on the surface. Jim Bell is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and has worked on a number of Mars missions. He is the primary investigator leading a team in charge of one of the camera systems on Perseverance. We spoke with him in late January for The Conversation’s new podcast, The Conversation Weekly .

Below are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the goal of this mission?

What we’re looking for is evidence of past life, either direct chemical or organic signs in the composition and the chemistry of rocks, or textural evidence in the rock record. The environment of Mars is extremely harsh compared to the Earth, so we’re not really looking for evidence of current life. Unless something actually gets up and walks in front of the cameras, we’re really not going to find that.

A topographic, top down photo with colors showing the ancient river delta in the Jezero Crater

Where is the Perseverance Rover landing to look for ancient life?

There was a three- or four-year process that involved the entire global community of Mars and planetary science researchers to figure out where to send this rover. We chose a crater called Jezero . Jezero has a beautiful river delta in it, preserved from an ancient river that flowed down into that crater and deposited sediments. This is kind of like the delta at the end of the Mississippi River in Louisiana which is depositing sediments very gently into the Gulf of Mexico.

On Earth, this shallow water is a very gentle environment where organic molecules and fossils can actually be gently buried and preserved in very fine-grained mudstones . If a Martian delta operates the same way, then it’s a great environment for preserving evidence of things that were flowing in that water that came from the ancient highlands above the crater.

There’s lots of things we don’t know, but there was liquid water there. There were heat sources – there were active volcanoes 2, 3, 4 billion years ago on Mars – and there are impact craters from asteroids and comets dumping lots of heat into the ground as well as organic molecules. It’s a very short list of places in the solar system that meet those constraints, and Jezero is one of those places. It’s one of the best places that we think to go to do this search for life.

The Perseverance Rover in a NASA lab on earth.

What scientific tools is Perseverance carrying?

The Perseverance Rover looks a lot like Curiosity on the outside because it’s made from something like 90% spare parts from Curiosity – that’s how NASA could afford this mission. Curiosity has a pair of cameras – one wide angle, one telephoto.

The Mastcam-Z cameras side by side. They are cylindrical, copper colored tubes with square lenses.

In Perseverance, we’re sending similar cameras, but with zoom technology so we can zoom from wide angle to telephoto with both cameras – the “Z” in Mastcam-Z stands for zoom. This allows us to get great stereo images. Just like our left eye and our right eye build a three-dimensional image in our brain, the zoom cameras on Perserverance are a left eye and a right eye. With this, we can build a three-dimensional image back on Earth when we get those images.

3D images allow us to do a whole range of things scientifically. We want to understand the topography of Mars in much more detail than we’ve been able to in the past. We want to put the pieces of the delta geology story together not just with two-dimensional, spatial information, but with height as well as texture. And we want to make 3D maps of the landing site.

Our engineering and driving colleagues really need that information too. These 3D images will help them decide where to drive by helping to identify obstacles and slopes and trenches and rocks and stuff like that, allowing them to drive the rover much deeper into places than they would have been able to otherwise.

And finally, we’re going to make really cool 3D views of our landing site to share with the public, including movies and flyovers.

A diagram showing the sample collection tubes which are made from titanium and include a sealing mechanism.

What else is different about this mission?

Perseverance is intended to be the first part of a robotic sample return mission from Mars. So instead of just drilling into the surface like the Curiosity Rover does, Perseverance will drill and core into the surface and cache those little cores into tubes about the size of a dry-erase marker. It will then put those tubes onto the surface for a future mission later this decade to pick up and then bring back to the Earth.

Perseverance won’t come back to the Earth, but the plan is to bring the samples that we collect back.

In the meantime, we’ll be doing all of the science that any great rover mission would do. We are going to characterize the site, explore the geology and measure the atmospheric and weather properties.

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How will you get those samples back to Earth?

This is where it gets a little less certain, because these are all ideas and missions in the works. NASA and the European Space Agency are collaborating on a concept to build and launch a lander that will send a little fetch rover that goes and gets the little tubes, picks them up and brings them back to the lander. Waiting on the lander would be a small rocket called a Mars Ascent Vehicle , or MAV. Once the samples are loaded into the MAV, it launches them into Mars orbit.

Then you’ve got this grapefruit- to soccer-ball-sized canister up there, and NASA and the Europeans are collaborating on an orbiter that will search for that canister, capture it and then rocket it back to the Earth, where it will land in the Utah desert. What could possibly go wrong?

If successful, that’ll be the first time we’ve done that from Mars. The scientific tools on the rovers are good, but nothing like the labs back on Earth. Bringing those samples back is going to be absolutely critical to getting the most out of the samples.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb. 4. The editor’s note was updated to reflect the successful landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars.

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Bringing Mars Back To Earth

April 26, 2018

NASA and the European Space Agency are now working together to explore options for a pair of missions that could take the next steps to bring samples back from Mars.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Thousands want to take one-way trip to Mars, but will you pay their way?

Organizers of the Dutch-based Mars One project opened up their website on Monday to take applications for a one-way trip to Mars in 2022.

That's right: These astronauts won't be coming back. The idea is to jump-start a permanent settlement on Mars, with more supplies and settlers arriving every couple of years.

The organizers say the $6 billion cost for the first landing would be covered through reality-TV deals and merchandising, but they skirted pointed questions about the plan's financial feasibility.

Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp compared the non-profit venture to the London Olympics, which reportedly brought in $3.8 billion in revenue for last summer's 17-day spectacle . "If you can make $1 billion per week just by having a large audience in the entire world, then suddenly $6 billion doesn't sound like so much anymore," he said.

He declined to provide a detailed breakdown of the costs during Monday's news conference in New York, largely because he didn't want to give away any competitive information about the talks being conducted with potential suppliers. "It would be very stupid for us to give the prices that have been quoted per component," he told reporters.

He acknowledged that the mission's financial aspects posed the greatest challenge. However, he said the drama surrounding Mars One's plan to send four-person crews to Mars, with no promise of return, was "exactly the greatness that makes it possible to finance this."

"It's easier to finance a mission to Mars than to finance a mission to the moon," he said.

Thousands register interest

There has certainly been lots of enthusiasm for the mission: Lansdorp said Mars One has received more than 10,000 emails from more than 100 countries around the world, voicing willingness to sign up for a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. Starting Monday, anyone 18 or older can formally apply — provided that they pay an application fee. Lansdorp said the fee ranges from $5 to $75, depending on the standard of living for the country of residence. U.S. residents, for example, will be charged $38.

Each applicant will have to submit a one-minute video explaining why he or she should be among the first humans on Mars. Applicants will be screened for physical and mental fitness, and will have to speak English. They should also be "mature and interesting," Mars One says. But chief medical director Norbert Kraft said there are no formal academic or professional prerequisites. "We will give the training," he said.

Mars One's business plan calls for the latter stages of the selection process to be broadcast on TV and the Internet. Twenty-four to 40 finalists would be chosen to go through years of training. At the end of the process, Mars One expects at least six crews to be ready for flight. Each crew would consist of two women and two men. Having six crews available would ensure against the possibility that someone gets sick — or gets "cold feet" — when it's time to fly to Mars, Kraft said.

The venture's time line calls for the first in a series of preparatory robotic missions to lift off in 2016. An exploratory rover would be sent to Mars in 2018, and another rover would head out in 2020 to get the chosen target site ready for human habitation. Eight robotic missions would be sent before the human crew sets out in 2022 on a seven-month cruise, Lansdorp said. The landing is currently scheduled for April 2023, "exactly 10 years from today," he said.

Organizers say the $6 billion raised through broadcast and marketing rights would cover costs through the first landing in 2023. Billions more would be required to keep the colony going and growing beyond that.

Lansdorp said the project would be presented to international broadcasters at the Mipcom conference in Cannes, France, this October. He acknowledged that the time line might be delayed due to technical difficulties. "This will not be easy," he said. "There is lots of engineering and testing to be done before the first humans land." But he said the Mars One group is already in discussions with spaceflight companies including SpaceX and Paragon Space Development Corp. about the launch plans.

Grant Anderson, Paragon's senior vice president of operations, said his company was working on a concept design study that would be delivered to Mars One this summer. "The Mars One program is doing this right," Anderson said.

One of the potential scenarios would employ expanded SpaceX Dragon capsules for the missions, Lansdorp said. SpaceX's billionaire founder, Elon Musk, has repeatedly said it's technically possible to put humans on Mars in 10 years . There's already a "Red Dragon" plan for Mars landings , with an estimated price tag of $400 million or less per mission.

Reality check

Veteran rocket engineer Robert Zubrin, who is president of the non-profit Mars Society, agrees that Mars One's plan is technically feasible — but adds that it's incredibly challenging. "They have set a very high bar for themselves, and I'm not sure they have the resources," he told NBC News.

Former NASA mission planner Scott Hubbard, who is now a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, said landing on Mars safely ranked among the biggest challenges. "Anyone familiar with the 'seven minutes of terror' knows that getting anything substantial [to the Martian surface] is not a trivial issue," Hubbard said. Other challenges include weathering the radiation exposure and health effects of long-term weightlessness on the way to Mars; and truly being able to have astronauts live off the land once they get to Mars, with no possibility of heading back to Earth.

"It's certainly a bold concept, something that I don't know a government would ever contemplate," Hubbard said. He said the project could end up costing much more than the currently projected $6 billion.

The one-way nature of the Mars One trips didn't bother Zubrin: "There's nothing fantastical about that," he said. "We're all on a one-way trip to somewhere."

But Zubrin said another attention-getting trip, the Inspiration Mars plan to send a husband-and-wife crew on a flyby past the Red Planet in 2018 , would be far less demanding. The price tag for that trip is thought to be on the order of $1 billion, and it already has the backing of millionaire space tourist Dennis Tito. A successful flyby in 2018 could conceivably generate interest in more ambitious missions, Zubrin said.

"If Inspiration Mars can do that, they will have significant credibility to raise large amounts of money to take humans to the Martian surface," Zubrin said.

When it comes to reality TV, money and the willingness to take on risks are the keys to success, said Hollywood producer David Krieff. He should know: Ten years ago, Krieff helped put pop singer Lance Bass through Russian cosmonaut training for a reality-TV project that would have sent him to the International Space Station. The project fizzled out when TV executives, potential sponsors and insurers got cold feet.

Krieff had some words of advice for Mars One's organizers: "I wish them luck, but I would say have the money in the bank — and most of all, have all the liabilities taken care of," he said. "The risks and the insurance and the money is a lot of work. These things are always more expensive than you expect."

More about missions to Mars:

How to take a one-way trip to Mars
Mars flyby in 2018? So crazy it might work
NBC News archive on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page , following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter , delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

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

Nuclear engines or not, you're gonna need a lot of PTO to get to the Red Planet.

By Eva Botkin-Kowacki | Published Feb 21, 2023 6:00 AM EST

The icy white south pole of Mars, with red soil all around.

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.

The proposed DRACO nuclear propulsion rocket designed by DARPA, which could mean it doesn't take as long to travel to Mars. Concept art.

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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Mars declared unsafe for humans to live as no one can survive for longer than four years

Nasa are hoping to land humans on mars in a matter of years.

Emily Brown

Astronomers have high hopes to get humans to Mars, but since the planet has been declared unsafe for us to live on, we'll have to settle for a quick visit.

After successfully landing robots on the red planet, NASA is now continuing its plans to send humans up to join them.

The space agency has explained that Mars is 'one of the only other places we know where life may have existed in the solar system', so exploring it could help offer insights to the past and future of our own planet.

NASA has suggested that the technology to take humans to Mars could be available as early as the 2030s - but don't start dreaming about life in outer space just yet.

Last year, researchers combined studies from the likes of UCLA, MIT, Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, and GFZ Potsdam to look into the potential impacts of life on Mars.

Humans would be exposed to radiation on Mars.

Researchers sought to answer two questions: one focused on the impact of particle radiation and whether it would pose too grave a threat to human life, and the second about whether the timing of a mission to Mars could protect astronauts and the spacecraft from radiation.

To find the answers they were looking for, the scientists used geophysical models of particle radiation for a solar cycle and models of how radiation could affect both human passengers and a spacecraft.

Following the study, which was published in the Advancing Earth and Science Journal, the researchers found that it would not possible for humans to stay on Mars long-term.

They found that human exposure to radiation threats, including particle radiation from the Sun, distant stars, and galaxies, would exceed safe levels after four years on the planet.

Humans couldn't live on Mars for more than 4 years.

The scientists did determine that the spacecraft used to travel to Mars should provide enough protection trip to and from the planet - but if the material used to build the spacecraft is too thick, then it could actually increase the amount of secondary radiation.

Researchers also claimed the best time to leave Earth would be when the solar activity is at its peak and the most dangerous particles are deflected, thus shielding the astronauts from the worst of it.

The researchers explained: "We estimate that a potential mission to Mars should not exceed approximately four years.

"This study shows that space radiation imposes strict limitations and presents technological difficulties for the human mission to Mars, such a mission is still viable."

So while there's still every possibility that humans could reach Mars in a matter of years, we won't be able to rely on the planet as a new home.

As if we needed another reason to take better care of the one we have!

Topics: Space

Emily Brown is UNILAD Editorial Lead at LADbible Group. She first began delivering news when she was just 11 years old - with a paper route - before graduating with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University. Emily joined UNILAD in 2018 to cover breaking news, trending stories and longer form features. She went on to become Community Desk Lead, commissioning and writing human interest stories from across the globe, before moving to the role of Editorial Lead. Emily now works alongside the UNILAD Editor to ensure the page delivers accurate, interesting and high quality content.

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Elon Musk Claims ‘Almost Anyone’ Can Afford $100,000 Ticket to Mars Through Work and Saving, Despite Financial Challenges for Majority

E lon Musk’s vision for affordable travel to Mars, outlined during a conversation with Chris Anderson at a TED conference in 2022, represents a significant leap forward in human space exploration. Musk’s suggestion that a ticket to Mars could potentially be priced at $100,000 aims to democratize access to space colonization, envisioning a future where such journeys are within reach for a broader segment of the population. SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company, has been at the forefront of efforts to make this vision a reality, with ambitious plans to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars in the coming decades.

Central to Musk’s strategy is the development and successful launch of the Starship rocket, which represents a crucial milestone in achieving the goal of affordable Mars travel. However, the journey towards realizing this vision is not without challenges, as demonstrated by the recent loss of a Starship rocket during reentry following its third successful launch into space. This highlights the ongoing complexities and achievements in space exploration.

Musk envisions a future where individuals can finance their journey to Mars through various means, including selling assets, government sponsorship, or loans. By making Mars travel economically feasible for approximately 1 million people, Musk believes it will be possible to establish a thriving city on the red planet.

However, Musk’s statement has sparked debate regarding its realism and sensitivity to economic disparities. With many Americans facing financial constraints and struggling to save for even small emergency expenses, the idea of setting aside $100,000 for a trip to Mars seems impractical for a large portion of the population. Critics, including former President Barack Obama, have emphasized the importance of addressing pressing challenges on Earth before venturing into extraterrestrial colonization, highlighting the need for environmental conservation and sustainable development.

In today’s financial climate, where saving for significant life goals can be challenging, Musk’s vision underscores the value of smart financial planning. Whether one’s aspirations involve retiring comfortably, buying a home, or contemplating interplanetary travel, seeking advice from a financial advisor is crucial to aligning financial plans with long-term goals.

As SpaceX continues to advance its technology for Mars missions, the discussion surrounding affordable space travel raises important questions about priorities and the inclusivity of future space communities. The ethical, financial, and environmental implications of space colonization are likely to remain topics of intense debate as humanity ventures further into the cosmos.

Elon Musk Claims ‘Almost Anyone’ Can Afford $100,000 Ticket to Mars Through Work and Saving, Despite Financial Challenges for Majority

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image of bacterium streptococcus pyogenes

Mystery in Japan as dangerous streptococcal infections soar to record levels

Health officials racing to identify cause of rise in streptococcal toxic shock syndrome, which has a 30% fatality rate

Experts warn that a rare but dangerous bacterial infection is spreading at a record rate in Japan , with officials struggling to identify the cause.

The number of cases in 2024 is expected to exceed last year’s record numbers, while concern is growing that the harshest and potentially deadly form of group A streptococcal disease – streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS) – will continue to spread, after the presence of highly virulent and infectious strains were confirmed in Japan.

The National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) said: “There are still many unknown factors regarding the mechanisms behind fulminant (severe and sudden) forms of streptococcus, and we are not at the stage where we can explain them.”

Provisional figures released by the NIID recorded 941 cases of STSS were reported last year. In the first two months of 2024, 378 cases have already been recorded, with infections identified in all but two of Japan’s 47 prefectures.

While older people are considered at greater risk, the group A strain is leading to more deaths among patients under 50, according to NIID. Of the 65 people under 50 who were diagnosed with STSS between July and December in 2023, about a third, or 21, died, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported.

Most cases of STSS are caused by a bacterium called streptococcus pyogenes. More commonly known as strep A – it can cause sore throats, mainly in children, and lots of people have it without knowing it and do not become ill.

But the highly contagious bacteria that cause the infection can, in some cases, cause serious illnesses, health complications and death, particularly in adults over 30. About 30% of STSS cases are fatal.

Older people can experience cold-like symptoms but in rare cases, the symptoms can worsen to include strep throat, tonsillitis, pneumonia and meningitis. In the most serious cases it can lead to organ failure and necrosis.

Some experts believe the rapid rise in cases last year were connected to the lifting of restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic.

In May 2023, the government downgraded Covid-19’s status from class two – which includes tuberculosis and Sars – to class five, placing it on a legal par with seasonal flu. The change meant local authorities were no longer able to order infected people to stay away from work or to recommend hospitalisation.

The move also prompted people to lower their guard, in a country where widespread mask wearing, hand sanitising and avoiding the “three Cs” were credited with keeping Covid-19 deaths comparatively low. About 73,000 Covid-19 deaths were recorded compared with more than 220,000 in Britain, which has a population just over half that of Japan.

Ken Kikuchi, a professor of infectious diseases at Tokyo Women’s Medical University, says he is “very concerned” about the dramatic rise this year in the number of patients with severe invasive streptococcal infections.

He believes the reclassification of Covid-19 was the most important factor behind the increase in streptococcus pyogenes infections. This, he added, had led more people to abandon basic measures to prevent infections, such as regular hand disinfection.

“In my opinion, over 50% Japanese people have been infected by Sars-CoV-2 [the virus that causes Covid-19],” Kikuchi tells the Guardian. “People’s immunological status after recovering from Covid-19 might alter their susceptibility to some microorganisms. We need to clarify the infection cycle of severe invasive streptococcal pyogenes diseases and get them under control immediately.”

Streptococcal infections, like those of Covid-19, are spread through droplets and physical contact. The bacterium can also infect patients through wounds on the hands and feet.

Strep A infections are treated with antibiotics, but patients with the more severe invasive group A streptococcal disease are likely to need a combination of antibiotics and other drugs, along with intensive medical attention.

Japan’s health ministry recommends that people take the same basic hygiene precautions against strep A that became a part of everyday life during the coronavirus pandemic.

“We want people to take preventive steps such as keeping your fingers and hands clean, and exercising cough etiquette,” the health minister, Keizo Takemi, told reporters earlier this year, according to the Japan Times.

Infectious diseases
Asia Pacific

How long would it take to walk around Mars?

The answer depends on many factors, including velocity, rest breaks and terrain.

a person in a brown spacesuit walking on a reddish-orange desert

Humans have long had a fascination with Mars, and NASA has ambitious plans to send astronauts there within the next few decades. Anyone walking on Mars would likely explore only a small fraction of the planet's surface.

But without oceans or other bodies of water, could an astronaut walk all the way around the Red Planet? How long would it take to walk around Mars?

Unsurprisingly, a long time — though exactly how long might be hard to say. If the astronaut could travel continuously at a walking speed, it would be a simple calculation.

Related: Boiling blood and radiation: 5 ways Mars can kill

"We would need essentially two parameters," said Erdal Yigit , an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University who studies the atmospheres of planets. Those parameters are the astronaut's velocity (speed and direction) and the distance they would travel.

If the person traveled along Mars' equator , they would walk about 13,300 miles (21,400 kilometers) to get all the way around the planet. Walking around Mars through its poles would shave off about 100 miles (160 km), but the extreme cold would pose an even greater challenge than the harsh conditions on the rest of the planet, Yigit said.

The person's velocity would be about 3.1 mph (5 km/h), which is also an average walking speed on Earth, straight along the equator, Yigit said. Despite Mars' reduced gravity (about 40% of Earth's), Yigit doubts a person's walking speed would be much different on Mars. Like any back-country hiker on Earth, this person would likely be carrying a heavy load of supplies — such as oxygen, water and food — and would be wearing a heavy spacesuit.

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If someone were to walk continuously around Mars at that speed, the calculation would be simple: Just divide the distance by the velocity. That would mean it would take about 4,290 hours. There are about 24.7 hours in a Martian day (called a sol), so it would take roughly 174 sols to walk around Mars continuously. That's a little over a quarter of a Martian year, which is 668.6 sols.

ripples line the face of a reddish-orange wind-blown sand dune on Mars

Of course, no one would be able to complete that walk continuously — on Mars, Earth or anywhere. Even if the person were able to bring enough oxygen, water and food with them, and could eat and drink while walking, they would still need to stop to sleep. Assuming the astronaut slept about eight hours each night, it would add about 56 sols. If the person stopped for four or five more hours each sol to eat, rest, change clothes, clean themselves, and set up and deconstruct some type of campsite, it would take another 30 or 35 sols, depending on how long they were stopped.

All in all, a more realistic estimate might be at least 265 sols, about 40% of the Martian year. But that calculation does not account for potential obstacles, such as rough terrain. Mars has many mountains, including some that are taller than any on Earth, as well as valleys, craters and many other geological features that would be tough to navigate.

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Of course, it is very unlikely that anyone will be walking all the way around Mars anytime soon. People have circumnavigated Earth on foot, though it is, of course, impossible to truly walk or run all the way around, due to the oceans. But humans have walked on only a small portion of the moon , despite traveling there multiple times. And walking so far and for so long on Mars would pose many logistical problems, like bringing enough food, water and oxygen and protecting the person from the dangerous impacts of radiation.

Although it's highly unlikely that humans will walk around the entire Red Planet, sending astronauts to the surface still has many advantages over rovers, Yigit said.

Rovers "are susceptible to dust and other kinds of electrical problems; something may happen," he said. With humans "even if there are problems, we can find solutions around them."

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].

Rebecca Sohn is a freelance science writer. She writes about a variety of science, health and environmental topics, and is particularly interested in how science impacts people's lives. She has been an intern at CalMatters and STAT, as well as a science fellow at Mashable. Rebecca, a native of the Boston area, studied English literature and minored in music at Skidmore College in Upstate New York and later studied science journalism at New York University.

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COMMENTS

Humans to Mars
Temperatures on Mars can range from -284 degrees F to 86 degrees F. The atmosphere on Mars is 96% carbon dioxide. One day on Mars lasts about 37 minutes longer than an Earth day. A year on Mars is almost twice as long as a year on Earth. Gravity on Mars is about one-third of the gravity on Earth.
How NASA and SpaceX Will Get People From Earth to Mars and Safely Back
The final challenge is the return journey and getting people safely back to Earth. Apollo 11 entered Earth's atmosphere at about 40,000km/h (25,000 mph), which is just below the velocity required to escape Earth's orbit. Spacecraft returning from Mars will have re-entry velocities from 47,000km/h to 54,000km/h (29,000 mph to 34,000 mph ...
How to get people from Earth to Mars and safely back again
Safe landing. Suppose our spacecraft and crew get to Mars. The next challenge is landing. A spacecraft entering Earth is able to use the drag generated by interaction with the atmosphere to slow ...
6 Technologies NASA is Advancing to Send Humans to Mars
The roundtrip mission, including time in transit - from and back to Earth - and on the Martian surface, will take about two years. ... Astronauts bound for Mars will travel about 140 million miles into deep space. Advancements in propulsion capabilities are the key to reaching our destination as quickly and safely as possible.
How Will We Get Off Mars?
The process is expected to take one to two years. When the MAV's tanks are full, the human crew will be sent to Mars, secure in the knowledge that they'll have a gassed-up vehicle waiting to ...
How to get people from Earth to Mars and safely back again
Suppose our spacecraft and crew get to Mars. The next challenge is landing. A spacecraft entering Earth is able to use the drag generated by interaction with the atmosphere to slow down. This ...
How NASA's Perseverance rover will send Martian rocks back to Earth for
"In the next two parts of the program, we go get them and bring them back." In either 2026 or 2028, NASA will launch a Sample Retrieval Lander to Mars, in partnership with the European Space Agency.
Want to go to Mars? We hope you like blue sunsets, mind-melting g
Congratulations, you've won a ticket to Mars. You may have to wait a while before you can get on a flight. Launch opportunities only come around every couple of years when Earth and Mars line up.
Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?
That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted conviction within NASA. The target date for the initial human mission has drifted slightly — in a 2018 report commissioned by ...
Why Is It Absolutely Impossible To Return From Mars To Earth?
A tiny unmanned probe could deliver a soil sample from Mars, but even that can lead to problems in one launch. If we mean manned travel with a single launch, this is almost impossible. ... we need something about the same size as the Saturn V. This eventually got us to the Moon and back, and to fly to Mars, the spacecraft needs to be able to ...
When Humans Finally Get To Mars, Will They Ever Be Able To ...
The folks from SpaceX and NASA are aware of this, of course. And, given enough time and preparation, would eventually come up with the best way to tackle the situation. If the human mind can ...
Why Is It So Hard to Travel to Mars?
Mars orbit with less fuel. For safety and operational reasons, the spacecraft that will travel to Mars will likely not land on the surface immediately upon reaching the Red Planet. "For a human ...
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The immense distance to Mars means the fastest the speed of light will let you send a signal to Earth to Mars and back again is just over six minutes round trip (in the worst-case scenario, that ...
NASA has early plans to send astronauts to Mars for 30 days
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 ...
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NASA's Mars 2020 mission has arrived and landed the Perseverance Rover on the red planet. The rover's goal is to collect rock and soil samples to be brought back to Earth in the future.
Bringing Mars Back To Earth
Bringing Mars Back To Earth April 26, 2018 NASA and the European Space Agency are now working together to explore options for a pair of missions that could take the next steps to bring samples back from Mars. Credits NASA/JPL-Caltech. Downloads. Transcript. 102 KB. application/pdf. Download. 1920 x 1080. 264 MB. video/mp4. Download. 1280 x 720.
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Organizers of the Dutch-based Mars One project opened up their website on Monday to take applications for a one-way trip to Mars in 2022. That's right: These astronauts won't be coming back. The ...
How long does it take to get to Mars?
Therefore, a light shining from the surface of Mars would take the following amount of time to reach Earth (or vice versa): Closest possible approach: 182 seconds, or 3.03 minutes. Closest ...
How long does it take to get to Mars?
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 ...
Mars declared unsafe for humans to live as no one can survive ...
Astronomers have high hopes to get humans to Mars, but since the planet has been declared unsafe for us to live on, we'll have to settle for a quick visit. ... The scientists did determine that the spacecraft used to travel to Mars should provide enough protection trip to and from the planet - but if the material used to build the spacecraft is ...
Elon Musk Eyes Interstellar Travel After Claiming SpaceX's Starship
Topline. SpaceX's Starship rocket will be on Mars by the end of the decade and a future version will travel between the stars, billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday, days after the company ...
We're Going to Mars!
HOST PADI BOYD:Mars Perseverance is a pioneer… a robotic scientist that will travel to Mars and attempt to learn its secrets. HOST PADI BOYD:The rover will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center soon. The launch window is from July 23 to August 11, but no matter when it launches from Earth… If all goes as planned, roughly seven months ...
Elon Musk Claims 'Almost Anyone' Can Afford $100,000 Ticket to Mars
Elon Musk's vision for affordable travel to Mars, outlined during a conversation with Chris Anderson at a TED conference in 2022, represents a significant leap forward in human space exploration ...
Mystery in Japan as dangerous streptococcal infections soar to record
Experts warn that a rare but dangerous bacterial infection is spreading at a record rate in Japan, with officials struggling to identify the cause.. The number of cases in 2024 is expected to ...
How long would it take to walk around Mars?
If the person traveled along Mars' equator, they would walk about 13,300 miles (21,400 kilometers) to get all the way around the planet.Walking around Mars through its poles would shave off about ...

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