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Rock Sampled by NASA's Perseverance Embodies Why Rover Came to Mars

Mars has eclipses, too.

NASA's Curiosity Searches for New Clues About Mars' Ancient Water

slide 4 - Nowhere on Earth can we fully replicate the conditions on Mars.

HELICOPTER BLOG

Unlocking the martian skies.

slide 5 - A halo imaged on sol 965, in the final image taken by Perseverance’s Navigation cameras before conjunction and the end of the cloudy season.

Perseverance Pays off When Studying the Martian Atmosphere

Rover Images Ingenuity's Final Destination

Data: today's weather (°f), data: today's weather (°c), data: sunrise, sunset, data: atmosphere, data: season, data: pressure, recent images.

Perseverance's 360-Degree View From 'Airey Hill'

Mars Disappearing Solar Wind: MAVEN Visualizations

Curiosity Views Mud Cracks in the Clay-Sulfate Transition Region

Curved Bands of Rocks at 'Skrinkle Haven'

Curiosity Finds a Book-Like Rock

Ingenuity at 'Airfield Mu'

Curiosity Views Feather-Shaped Iridescent Cloud

Perseverance's Three Forks Sample Depot Selfie

Mastcam-Z Views the Eastern Edge of Jezero's Delta

Perseverance Views Depot in the Distance

Compare: distance from sun, compare: deepest canyon, compare: diameter, compare: length of day, compare: highest mountain, compare: largest impact crater, compare: temperature, compare: year, latest findings, april 3, 2024, april 24, 2023, december 21, 2022, october 27, 2022, october 21, 2022, october 20, 2022, october 19, 2022, october 7, 2022, september 19, 2022, september 15, 2022.

Mars’ atmosphere is composed primarily of carbon dioxide (about 96 percent), with minor amounts of other gases such as argon and nitrogen. The atmosphere is very thin, however, and the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Mars is only about 0.6 percent of Earth’s (101,000 pascals).

Scientists think that Mars may have had a thicker atmosphere early in its history, and data from NASA spacecraft (the MAVEN mission) indicate that Mars has lost significant amounts of its atmosphere through time. The primary culprit for Mars’ atmospheric loss is the solar wind!

Astrobiology

Astrobiology is a relatively new field of study, where scientists from a variety of disciplines (astronomy, biology, geology, physics, etc.) work together to understand the potential for life to exist beyond Earth. However, the exploration of Mars has been intertwined with NASA’s search for life from the beginning. The twin Viking landers of 1976 were NASA’s first life detection mission, and although the results from the experiments failed to detect life in the Martian regolith, and resulted in a long period with fewer Mars missions, it was not the end of the fascination that the Astrobiology science community had for the red planet.

The field of Astrobiology saw a resurgence due to the controversy surrounding the possible fossil life in the ALH84001 meteorite, and from the outsized public response to this announcement, and subsequent interest from Congress and the White House, NASA’s Astrobiology Program was formed.

Also at this time, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program began to investigate Mars with an increasing focus on missions to the Red Planet. The Pathfinder Mission and Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) were sent to Mars to “Follow the Water,” recognizing that liquid water is necessary for life to exist on Earth. After establishing that Mars once had significant amount of water on its surface, the Mars Science Laboratory (which includes the Curiosity rover) was sent to Mars to determine whether Mars had the right ingredients in the rocks to host life, signaling a shift to the next theme of “Explore Habitability”. MEP developed the Mars 2020 Rover Mission to determine whether life may have left telltale signatures in the rocks on Mars’s surface, a further shift to the current science theme “Seek the Signs of Life”.

Finding fossils preserved from early Mars might tell us that life once flourished on this planet. We can search for evidence of cells preserved in rocks, or at a much smaller scale: compounds called biosignatures are molecular fossils, specific compounds that give some indication of the organisms that created them. However, over hundreds of millions of years these molecular fossils on Mars are subject to being destroyed or transformed to the point where they may no longer be recognized as biosignatures. Future missions must either find surface regions where erosion from wind-blown sand has recently exposed very ancient material, or alternately samples must be obtained from a shielded region beneath the surface. This latter approach is being taken by the ExoMars rover under development where drilled samples taken from a depth of up to 2 meters will be analyzed.

Get the Scoop on Mars Samples

Illustration shows the concept for multiple robots to team up to bring Mars samples back to Earth. Depicted are the Perseverance rover, a helicopter, orbiter, lander, and vehicle to launch off Mars.

Learn how Mars Sample Return would retrieve Mars samples collected by the Perseverance rover and bring them to Earth for study.

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Rock sampled by nasa's perseverance embodies why rover came to mars.

After arriving at Gediz Vallis channel, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this 360-degree panorama using one of its black-and-white navigation cameras on Feb. 3. The formation has scientists intrigued because of what it might tell them about the history of water on the Red Planet.

NASA's Curiosity Searches for New Clues About Mars' Ancient Water

NASA’s Perseverance puts its robotic arm to work around a rocky outcrop called

Team Assessing SHERLOC Instrument on NASA's Perseverance Rover

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Lifting the veil on Mars.

Expanding our robotic presence.

Setting the stage for human exploration.

More About Mars

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Mars 2020 Perseverance Landing Press Kit

Why this mission.

Billions of years ago, Earth and Mars were more similar than they are today. Both had liquid water at the surface; both had magnetic fields to protect their surface from the Sun’s radiation. Life developed on Earth at that time, so could it also have developed on Mars?

NASA has sent rovers, landers, and orbiters to the Red Planet to investigate that key astrobiological question. Scientists can study rocks and sediment on the Martian surface to learn what environments once existed, whether and for how long liquid water was once present, and what the climate was like in the past. This record can reveal when and where Mars had the ideal conditions for life.

But Perseverance is different: It’s the first Mars rover designed to collect samples that will one day be returned to Earth. Despite the immense technical capabilities of the rover’s science instruments, there are far more powerful laboratories and science tools on our planet than we could hope to send to Mars. As with the Moon samples returned by the Apollo missions, Mars samples would benefit future generations of scientists who will study them using advanced technology, some of which hasn’t been invented yet.

The Mars 2020 mission also looks ahead to the day when astronauts travel to Mars. It carries technologies that could help land humans or equipment on the planet and even help produce rocket propellant and breathable oxygen. These efforts, detailed below, will feed into NASA’s plans for sending humans to Mars, with the Artemis program returning astronauts to the Moon as the first step.

Science Goals

Perseverance will contribute to the overarching goals of nasa’s mars exploration program:.

To reach the first three goals, NASA has determined the following more specific science objectives for Perseverance:

Understand the geology of the field site explored by the Perseverance rover.
Determine whether Perseverance’s landing site , Jezero Crater, could have supported microbial life in the distant past, and search for evidence that such ancient life may have left behind.
Select and collect samples representing the geologic diversity of the Perseverance field site, focusing on materials with the highest potential to preserve signs of life and planetary evolution. Keep these samples pristine, isolating them from Earth-sourced contaminants.

NASA has also tasked the Mars 2020 team with a mission objective to prepare for future human exploration by conducting the following investigations:

With the MOXIE experiment, demonstrate a technology that converts carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen. In the future, oxygen generated this way could be used by astronauts for rocket propellant and for breathing. More on MOXIE below.
With data from the MEDA instrument, study how atmospheric dust could affect future technology, including human life support systems.
Study how Mars weather could affect human explorers. More on MEDA below.
With MEDLI2, use sensors in the rover’s heat shield and back shell to better understand entry into the Martian atmosphere. This can help spacecraft engineers design safe landings for future astronauts traveling to Mars. More information on MEDLI2 is here .

Payload Instruments

Perseverance’s science instruments are state-of-the-art tools for acquiring information about Martian geology, atmosphere, environmental conditions, and potential signs of life (biosignatures) from the past. The mission’s science supports the field of astrobiology , which aims to understand the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe.

Perseverance has seven primary payload instruments.

Principal Investigator: Jim Bell, Arizona State University, Tempe

Mastcam-Z is a pair of next-generation science cameras on Perseverance’s remote sensing mast, or “head.” This pair of zoomable cameras can be used to shoot video and to create high-resolution, color stereo/3D panoramas of the Martian landscape in multiple spectra of light. These images also help rover operators drive and position the rover’s arm instruments. Analysis of the landing site’s geology viewed in Mastcam-Z images will help scientists determine the history of the landing site region.

Serves as Perseverance’s primary scientific “eyes.”
At maximum zoom, can see a feature as small as a house fly from as far away as the length of a soccer field.
Can build 360-degree color and stereo panoramas for science and rover driving.

MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer)

Principal Investigator: Jose Rodriguez-Manfredi, Centro de Astrobiología, at the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial, Madrid, Spain

MEDA is a set of sensors distributed over Perseverance’s mast and body that measures wind speed and direction, air pressure, relative humidity, ambient temperature, and solar radiation. Solar radiation affects the surface environment and is important to understand more fully before sending humans to Mars. A skyward-facing camera, SkyCam measures how tiny airborne particles, or aerosols, such as dust and ice can affect sunlight reaching the surface.

This set of sensors was built by an international team led by Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología.

Measures how Martian weather changes within one day and across the seasons.
Helps scientists understand how dust responds to environmental changes and when its properties change, or if it influences engineering systems and the interpretation of other instruments’ observations.
Through SkyCam, studies types and abundances of clouds.

MOXIE (Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment)

Principal Investigator: Michael Hecht, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge

MOXIE is a technology demonstration that will show whether such technology could be used to help launch rockets off the surface of Mars in the future. (The “I” in MOXIE stands for “in-situ resource utilization,” or ISRU – the concept of using resources found where a spacecraft lands rather than bringing those resources from Earth.) MOXIE converts carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen, which is required in massive quantities in order to launch rockets. To burn enough rocket fuel to launch themselves back to Earth, future astronauts will require tens of metric tons of liquid oxygen. The MOXIE experiment aboard Perseverance is about the size of a car battery and can produce enough oxygen to sustain a small dog. A system that produces breathing oxygen for human missions would need to be about 200 times larger.

Weighs about 38 pounds (17 kilograms).
Is designed to produce 0.022 pounds of oxygen per hour (10 grams of oxygen per hour).

PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry)

Principal Investigator: Abigail Allwood, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Southern California

Located on the end of Perseverance’s robotic arm, PIXL aims a tiny but powerful X-ray beam at rocks. This produces a different “glow,” or fluorescence, depending on the rock’s elemental chemistry. PIXL creates postage stamp-size “maps,” revealing how and where these chemicals are positioned relative to each other as well as to a rock’s textures and structures. That information can help scientists determine how these features formed, including whether they were biological in nature.

Can detect over 20 chemical elements.
Takes just 10 seconds to perform a highly accurate analysis of a single point as small as a grain of sand.
Uses a hexapod, a device that features six mechanical legs connecting PIXL to the robotic arm and that is guided by artificial intelligence to get the most accurate aim.

RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment)

Principal Investigator: Svein-Erik Hamran, University of Oslo, Norway

RIMFAX is the first ground-penetrating radar to be carried by a rover or lander to Mars. Such radar systems have been used by orbiting spacecraft, but bringing them to the surface offers much higher-resolution data. RIMFAX determines how different layers of the Martian surface formed over time.

The Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI) in Kjeller, Norway, provided the instrument.

Is based on the design of ground-penetrating radar used to study rock and ice at Earth’s poles.
Takes its name from “Hrímfaxi,” the horse in Norse mythology that faithfully brings the night.
Helps pave way for future generations of RIMFAX that could detect water ice deposits for use by astronauts. (Jezero Crater, however, is too warm to harbor subsurface water ice.)

SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals)

Principal Investigator: Luther Beegle, JPL

SHERLOC is located near PIXL on Perseverance’s robotic arm. As PIXL looks for elemental chemistry, SHERLOC looks for organic molecules and minerals. While the presence of organic molecules helps scientists determine which samples to collect for future return to Earth, the presence of different minerals helps explain how a sample was formed. SHERLOC flashes an ultraviolet laser over surface material, which emits a subtly different glow depending on which organic compounds and minerals are present. SHERLOC also has a camera for taking microscopic images of rock grains and surface textures.

Features a camera called WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering).
Has a calibration target that includes five spacesuit materials and a sample of a Martian meteorite .

Principal Investigator: Roger Wiens, Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico

This next-generation version of Curiosity’s ChemCam instrument is located on Perseverance’s mast. Like its predecessor, SuperCam uses a pulsed laser to study the chemistry of rocks and sediment. It also uses three new techniques to probe the mineral content of its targets and the hardness of the rocks. One of these techniques heats small amounts of the target to around 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (10,000 degrees Celsius), creating a bright “spark.” SuperCam can then determine the chemical makeup of these rocks from the plasma generated by the laser zaps.

SuperCam is a collaboration between Los Alamos National Laboratory and France’s Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP), which provided key parts of the instrument, including a special microphone. Spain built and tested the SuperCam calibration target assembly. The Spanish contributions were supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN), and by the University of Valladolid as well as local and regional governments.

Can analyze material from up to 20 feet (7 meters) away with its laser.
Records the sound of laser zaps up to 12 feet (4 meters) away with a microphone. The sounds will help scientists understand the property of the rocks, including their hardness.
Can use artificial intelligence to identify and zap rock targets (in addition to the targets chosen by scientists) as the rover awaits new instructions from Earth.

Science Team Leadership

Project Scientist: Ken Farley, Caltech, Pasadena, California

Deputy Project Scientists: Katie Stack Morgan, JPL Ken Williford, JPL

How NASA is planning to get humans to Mars

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

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

How will NASA get to Mars?

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

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

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

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

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

How will Artemis II help accomplish this goal?

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

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

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

When does NASA plan to go to Mars?

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

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

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

Who will go?

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

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

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

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Summit takes stock of hurdles, technologies, support needed to reach Red Planet by 2030s

MISSION TO MARS By the 2030s, NASA and the aerospace industry want to send a crew to explore Mars, seen in this simulated image based on data from the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter.

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NTP or NEP? —

Report: nasa’s only realistic path for humans on mars is nuclear propulsion, "it's the kind of technology challenge that nasa was built for.".

Eric Berger - Feb 12, 2021 8:56 pm UTC

NASA originally studied nuclear thermal propulsion in the 1960s. Here is concept art for the Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) program.

Getting humans to Mars and back is rather hard. Insanely difficult, in fact. Many challenges confront NASA and other would-be Mars pioneers when planning missions to the red planet, but chief among them is the amount of propellant needed.

During the Apollo program 50 years ago, humans went to the Moon using chemical propulsion, which is to say rocket engines that burned liquid oxygen and hydrogen in a combustion chamber. This has its advantages, such as giving NASA the ability to start and stop an engine quickly, and the technology was then the most mature one for space travel. Since then, a few new in-space propulsion techniques have been devised. But none are better or faster for humans than chemical propulsion.

That's a problem. NASA has a couple of baseline missions for sending four or more astronauts to Mars, but relying on chemical propulsion to venture beyond the Moon probably won't cut it. The main reason is that it takes a whole lot of rocket fuel to send supplies and astronauts to Mars. Even in favorable scenarios where Earth and Mars line up every 26 months, a humans-to-Mars mission still requires 1,000 to 4,000 metric tons of propellant.

Going nuclear

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers some answers about two such ways. Conducted at the request of NASA, a broad-based committee of experts assessed the viability of two means of propulsion—nuclear thermal and nuclear electric—for a human mission launching to Mars in 2039.

"One of the primary takeaways of the report is that if we want to send humans to Mars, and we want to do so repeatedly and in a sustainable way, nuclear space propulsion is on the path," said Bobby Braun, director for planetary science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, in an interview.

The committee was not asked to recommend a particular technology, each of which rely on nuclear reactions but work differently. Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) involves a rocket engine in which a nuclear reactor replaces the combustion chamber and burns liquid hydrogen as a fuel. Nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) converts heat from a fission reactor to electrical power, like a power plant on Earth, and then uses this energy to produce thrust by accelerating an ionized propellant, such as xenon.

"If you look at the committee's recommendations for NTP, we felt that an aggressive program, built on the foundational work that's been accomplished recently, could get us there," Braun said of the Mars 2039 goal. "For NEP, we felt that it was unclear if such a program could get us there, but we did not conclude that it could not get us there."

Nuclear propulsion requires significantly less fuel than chemical propulsion, often less than 500 metric tons. That would be helpful for a Mars mission that would include several advance missions to pre-stage cargo on the red planet. Nuclear propulsion's fuel consumption is also more consistent with the launch opportunities afforded by the orbits of Earth and Mars. During some conjunctions, which occur about every 26 months, the propellant required to complete a Mars mission with chemical propellants is so high that it simply is not feasible.

A plan for NASA

If NASA is to use nuclear propulsion in human missions during the 2030s, it must get started on technology development immediately, the report says. So far, the agency has been somewhat reticent to move quickly on nuclear propulsion. This may be partly due to the fact that the space agency is so heavily invested in the Space Launch System rocket and chemical propulsion needed for the Artemis Moon Program.

In recent years, therefore, NASA has not asked for nuclear propulsion funding. Congress has appropriated money for the effort anyway. In the fiscal year 2021 budget bill, NASA received $110 million for nuclear thermal propulsion development.

Braun said it would cost substantially more—at least an order of magnitude—for NASA to work with the Department of Energy and other parts of the government to develop this technology and begin cargo flights to Mars in the mid-2030s. However, he said this is the kind of project that NASA would be well positioned to undertake.

"It's the kind of technology challenge that NASA was built for, and it's the kind of technology challenge that our nation expects NASA to be able to overcome," Braun said. "You know, going all the way back to the Apollo program, this is the kind of thing NASA was created for. So, I think they could do it."

And what of the Starship concept that SpaceX is building to send humans to Mars? The project seeks to address the problem of needing a lot of chemical propellant by developing a low-cost, reusable launch system. SpaceX engineers know it will take a lot of fuel to reach Mars, but they believe the problem is solvable if Starship can be built to fly often and for relatively little money. The basic concept is to launch a Starship to orbit with empty tanks and transfer fuel launched by other Starships in low-Earth orbit before a single vehicle flies to Mars.

Braun said SpaceX is developing a plan to send humans to Mars with different assumptions than NASA. "I think there's a fundamental difference in the assumptions that NASA tends to make for what kind of infrastructure is needed at Mars," he said.

That's not to say Starship cannot work. However, it does illustrate the challenge of mounting a mission to Mars with chemical-only propulsion. To use traditional propulsion, one needs to push the boundaries of reuse and heavy lift rockets to extreme limits—which is precisely what SpaceX is trying to do with its fully reusable launch system.

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When are humans going to mars here's everything we know.

NASA, SpaceX, and others are working on the first crewed missions to Mars. However, it might still be several years before that happens.

Human colonization of Mars has long been a subject of science-fiction, but it might not be too long before the first astronaut sets foot on the Red Planet. The Martian atmosphere is inhospitable for life currently, but some evidence suggests that it might have harbored life in the past. Probes have found the presence of frozen water and other evidence that suggests the planet could have had a life-supporting habitable environment .

The first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars was the Soviet Mars 3 space probe, which touched down on the Martian surface in 1971 before failing within the next few seconds. The first fully-successful Mars lander was the Viking 1, which touched down on the Red Planet in 1976. It was part of a NASA mission to investigate the Red Planet and search for signs of life. Since then, there have been multiple successful unmanned missions to the Red Planet, including the Curiosity rover, which landed back in 2012, and the Perseverance rover that landed last year.

Related: Why Is Mars Red? Understanding The Planet's Unique Color

Various space agencies are aiming to land humans on Mars in the coming decades. NASA is said to be optimistic that it will be successful in sending the first manned mission to Mars in the 2030s, although long-term missions might take a whole lot longer. In 2015, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. said that the first crewed flight to mars might happen in 2030, according to MarsDaily , with the Perseverance rover supporting the human mission. He further claimed that the astronauts won't have to build their own base on the planet because robots sent from earth would have already done the job for them in advance.

Elon Musk Wants To Send Humans To Mars This Decade

Private space exploration companies are also working on Mars missions and aiming to send crewed flights to the Red Planet in the coming decade. SpaceX is taking the lead in this regard, with the company's founder and CEO Elon Musk recently saying humans will likely land on the Red Planet by 2029 at the earliest. Musk had earlier said that SpaceX was aiming to land a crewed mission to Mars in five to ten years .

While space enthusiasts are excited about a possible manned mission to Mars, there are real challenges ahead. Firstly, with current technology, it takes about nine months to reach the Red Planet, so a round-trip might take between two to three years, including the time needed for on-site research. Throughout that time, the astronauts would need food, water and oxygen, as well as protection from radiation. As there's no known technology to harvest Martian resources for water , fuel, and building materials, everything will have to be taken from earth, which will also be a major impediment for the space tourists. Overall, the promise of a trip to Mars sounds enticing, but many loose ends will have to be tied up before it becomes a reality.

Next: There's Something Super Weird About Mars' Moon Phobos

Source: MarsDaily , Elon Musk/Twitter

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Why haven’t humans reached Mars?

When it comes to interplanetary destinations in our solar system beyond Earth, there isn’t a lot of great options when it comes to weather, conditions, or even simply solid ground. Our near neighbor Venus is so hot we’d burn up before getting anywhere near solid ground. Pluto and breaks the thermometer in the opposite direction with temperatures as cold as -400 degrees Fahrenheit (-240 degrees Celsius). Meanwhile, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter are mostly made up of toxic gases that would kill us even if they did have solid ground to walk on. And that’s without even mentioning the storms.

Mars is really the only planet that sits within the habitable orbit around our sun. After more than a half century, humans have walked on the moon and delivered spacecraft that has flown to Pluto and even left the edges of our solar system . We’ve even landed several spacecraft on Mars, including the NASA Perseverance rover and China’s Zhurong rover currently moving around the planet and beaming back photos and other valuable information as we speak.

So why haven’t humans yet traveled to Mars?

According to NASA, there are a number of obstacles that we still need to overcome before sending a human mission to the planet, including technological innovation and a better understanding of the human body, mind and how we might adapt to life on another planet.

In short, these obstacles can be summarized into three major problems, say Michelle Rucker, lead of NASA’s Human Mars Architecture Team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Jeffrey Sheehy, chief engineer of the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate: Get there, land there, live there and leave there.

A long voyage

“The first obstacle is just the sheer distance,” Rucker says. The Red Planet is about 34 million miles (55 million kilometers) away at its closest point . But the distance to Mars isn’t always the same. The Earth and Mars orbit the sun at different distances and speeds, meaning that there are certain more optimal periods to travel between the two, especially considering the idea is to not just to make it to Mars quickly, but to make it back.

“The trains to Mars are every 26 months,” Sheehy says, adding that the last such window occurred in July 2020. That last train was perhaps the busiest period ever seen for interplanetary travel—three uncrewed Mars missions were launched last summer in the space of two weeks.

All 26-month windows are not the same, though. Sheehy notes that on top of this, there is a larger roughly 15-year cycle when that window is even more favorable than others. But Sheehy says that a vehicle optimized to reach the planet during the most favorable opportunity might not be necessarily the same we’d need for other years. Focusing all our efforts on reaching Mars in that window would mean we’d only have a chance every 15 years—it would be something of a “one-trick pony” in other words.

Technology of course plays a role in all of this. Most rockets that we’ve launched out of the atmosphere have been propelled by rocket fuel. But this fuel for an all-chemical propulsion system would take a lot of space, and wouldn’t be optimal for the longest travel times. To reach Mars quicker and more often a system based on nuclear thermal propulsion or nuclear electric propulsion would be more effective—and that’s if we set our sights low in terms of ship size, Sheehy says. His organization is working on several different nuclear fission technologies, including a fission surface power system. They plan to demonstrate one on the moon.

The human problem

Aside from technology, we also need to learn more about how humans—creatures that evolved to live in the Earth’s atmosphere with the Earth’s gravity—are going to cope with being in a low gravity, close proximity, close environment situation on spaceships for several months of transit.

Work on this has been underway for some time, whether it’s studying how astronauts living on the International Space Station cope with the isolation and low gravity up there, and how they cope when coming back to Earth. The various lunar missions have also revealed how the astronauts there dealt with the low-gravity situation there

Furthermore, missions like NASA’s CHAPEA , a planned yearlong Mars simulation, will also informing scientists about what kind of problems might arise with a small group of people over a long mission. Other ongoing research missions in Antarctica can also help inform us what to expect. These kinds of questions are important for determining how long it takes, and how many people are needed, to pull off basic tasks.

Another concern is how humans might be able to manage living in small confined spaces for a long time without much outside contact. “If you are tired of the food you’re eating you can’t say ‘Let’s order a pizza,’” Rucker says.

But another tool to help us learn how to cope with unexpected challenges will be the Artemis mission , which is working to keep a sustainable population on the moon. Many of the technologies for day to day living on the moon, as well as how living conditions might affect the people there, will help to inform a future Mars mission.

Getting to Mars’ orbit is only half the battle. The other challenge is landing on the Red Planet safely, though not necessarily in one piece. Sheehy says that NASA is working on developing an inflatable decelerator —something like a reverse parachute that would protect and slow the landing craft while penetrating the atmosphere. To actually land, the craft would need something like supersonic retropulsion—basically jets on the bottom that reverse the massive thrust enough to bring the craft safely to the ground.

To overcome the challenge of developing this, Sheehy says that NASA plans to launch such a system into our orbit then land it back on Earth to see if it works.

Once on the ground, another potential obstacle is the dust storms. Dust proved to be a major irritant to astronauts on the moon. Since no wind or other forces erode the particles, the dust was sharp and chafing on parts of astronauts’ suits. It got everywhere, and irritated the eyes.

Mars dust may not be quite so sharp since there are erosive forces there, but the dust storms can be massive—in 2018 the rover Opportunity went offline after one bad tempest there. Rucker says that researchers have learned a lot about these Martian dust storms, but they’re still not quite sure if they’ve witnessed the worst of them.

Aside from the risk to any astronauts or equipment on the planet, the storms also kick up enough dust to block sunlight, meaning any solar-powered equipment may not work well for a period.

Equipment is a serious concern while on the planet as well. Sheehy says that any human mission to Mars would likely need to be preceded by a cargo delivery.

“Those things would be put there and checked out before we even commit to sending astronauts,” he says.

Other obstacles to overcome would be the building of the ship to travel there. Sheehy and Rucker estimate it would at least need to be the size of a football field in length, depending on the propulsion system technology we go with and how many people we ultimately decide to send. Roughly anything from a little smaller than the International Space Station in size to significantly bigger.

Both believe that we might get there in the 2030s. The next most favorable window for sending humans on a relatively quick round-trip to Mars would be in 2033, but it’s unclear whether politics, budget and technology will be ready by then.

Until then, we’re learning more every day.

“We are laying a lot of the ground work for going to Mars,” Rucker says.

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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.

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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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NASA Needs To Solve One Critical Problem Before Humans Can Travel To Mars

Spending time in space can cause harm to the human body.

ASTANA, KAZAKHSTAN - SEPTEMBER 15: (----EDITORIAL USE ONLY - MANDATORY CREDIT - 'ROSCOSMOS / HANDOUT...

When 17 people were in orbit around the Earth all at the same time on May 30, 2023, it set a record. With NASA and other federal space agencies planning more manned missions and commercial companies bringing people to space, opportunities for human space travel are rapidly expanding.

However, traveling to space poses risks to the human body. Since NASA wants to send a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s, scientists need to find solutions for these hazards sooner rather than later.

As a kinesiologist who works with astronauts, I’ve spent years studying the effects space can have on the body and brain. I’m also involved in a NASA project that aims to mitigate the health hazards that participants of a future mission to Mars might face.

Space radiation

The Earth has a protective shield called a magnetosphere , which is the area of space around a planet that is controlled by its magnetic field . This shield filters out cosmic radiation . However, astronauts traveling farther than the International Space Station will face continuous exposure to this radiation – equivalent to between 150 and 6,000 chest X-rays .

This radiation can harm the nervous and cardiovascular systems , including heart and arteries , leading to cardiovascular disease. In addition, it can make the blood-brain barrier leak . This can expose the brain to chemicals and proteins that are harmful to it – compounds that are safe in the blood but toxic to the brain.

NASA is developing technology that can shield travelers on a Mars mission from radiation by building deflecting materials such as Kevlar and polyethylene into space vehicles and spacesuits . Certain diets and supplements, such as Enterade , may also minimize the effects of radiation. Supplements like this, also used in cancer patients on Earth during radiation therapy, can alleviate gastrointestinal side effects of radiation exposure.

Gravitational changes

Astronauts have to exercise in space to minimize the muscle loss they’ll face after a long mission. Missions that go as far as Mars will have to make sure astronauts have supplements such as bisphosphonate , which is used to prevent bone breakdown in osteoporosis. These supplements should keep their muscles and bones in good condition over long periods of time spent without the effects of Earth’s gravity .

Microgravity also affects the nervous and circulatory systems. On Earth, your heart pumps blood upward, and specialized valves in your circulatory system keep bodily fluids from pooling at your feet. In the absence of gravity, fluids shift toward the head.

My work and that of others have shown that this results in an expansion of fluid-filled spaces in the middle of the brain. Having extra fluid in the skull and no gravity to “hold the brain down” causes the brain to sit higher in the skull , compressing the top of the brain against the inside of the skull.

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, pictured here, is wearing the Chibis lower body negative pressure suit, which may help counteract the negative effects of gravity-caused fluid shifts in the body.

These fluid shifts may contribute to spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome , a condition experienced by many astronauts that affects the structure and function of the eyes . The back of the eye can become flattened, and the nerves that carry visual information from the eye to the brain swell and bend. Astronauts can still see, though visual function may worsen for some. Though it hasn’t been well studied yet, case studies suggest this condition may persist even a few years after returning to Earth.

Scientists may be able to shift the fluids back toward the lower body using specialized “pants ” that pull fluids back down toward the lower body like a vacuum. These pants could be used to redistribute the body’s fluids in a way that is more similar to what occurs on Earth.

Mental health and isolation

While space travel can damage the body, the isolating nature of space travel can also have profound effects on the mind .

Imagine having to live and work with the same small group of people without being able to see your family or friends for months on end. To learn to manage extreme environments and maintain communication and leadership dynamics, astronauts first undergo team training on Earth.

They spend weeks in either NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations at the Aquarius Research Station , found underwater off the Florida Keys, or mapping and exploring caves with the European Space Agency’s CAVES program . These programs help astronauts build camaraderie with their teammates and learn how to manage stress and loneliness in a hostile, faraway environment.

Researchers are studying how to best monitor and support behavioral mental health under these extreme and isolating conditions.

While space travel comes with stressors and the potential for loneliness, astronauts describe experiencing an overview effect : a sense of awe and connectedness with all humankind. This often happens when viewing Earth from the International Space Station.

Learning how to support human health and physiology in space also has numerous benefits for life on Earth . For example, products that shield astronauts from space radiation and counter its harmful effects on our bodies can also treat cancer patients receiving radiation treatments.

Understanding how to protect our bones and muscles in microgravity could improve how doctors treat the frailty that often accompanies aging. Space exploration has led to many technological achievements, advancing water purification and satellite systems .

Researchers like me who study ways to preserve astronaut health expect our work will benefit people both in space and here at home.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Rachael Seidler at the University of Florida. Read the original article here .

This article was originally published on Sep. 23, 2023

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The rover has arrived at an area that may show evidence liquid water flowed on this part of Mars for much longer than previously thought.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has begun exploring a new region of Mars, one that could reveal more about when liquid water disappeared once and for all from the Red Planet’s surface. Billions of years ago, Mars was much wetter and probably warmer than it is today. Curiosity is getting a new look into that more Earth-like past as it drives along and eventually crosses the Gediz Vallis channel, a winding, snake-like feature that – from space, at least – appears to have been carved by an ancient river.

That possibility has scientists intrigued. The rover team is searching for evidence that would confirm how the channel was carved into the underlying bedrock. The formation’s sides are steep enough that the team doesn’t think the channel was made by wind. However, debris flows (rapid, wet landslides) or a river carrying rocks and sediment could have had enough energy to chisel into the bedrock. After the channel formed, it was filled with boulders and other debris. Scientists are also eager to learn whether this material was transported by debris flows or dry avalanches.

Since 2014, Curiosity has been ascending the foothills of Mount Sharp, which stands 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the floor of Gale Crater. The layers in this lower part of the mountain formed over millions of years amid a changing Martian climate, providing scientists with a way to study how the presence of both water and the chemical ingredients required for life changed over time.

For example, a lower part of those foothills included a layer rich in clay minerals where a lot of water once interacted with rock. Now the rover is exploring a layer enriched with sulfates – salty minerals that often form as water evaporates.

It will take months to fully explore the channel, and what scientists learn could revise the timeline for the mountain’s formation.

This rendering shows the area where NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover climbed a steep slope to reach a location called Gediz Vallis channel

Once the sedimentary layers of lower Mount Sharp had been deposited by wind and water, erosion whittled them down to expose the layers visible today. Only after these lengthy processes – as well as intensely dry periods during which the surface of Mount Sharp was a sandy desert – could the Gediz Vallis channel have been carved.

Scientists think the boulders and other debris that subsequently filled the channel came from high up on the mountain, where Curiosity will never go, giving the team a glimpse of what kinds of material may be up there.

“If the channel or the debris pile were formed by liquid water, that’s really interesting. It would mean that fairly late in the story of Mount Sharp – after a long dry period – water came back, and in a big way,” said Curiosity’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

That explanation would be consistent with one of the most surprising discoveries Curiosity has made while driving up Mount Sharp: Water seems to have come and gone in phases, rather than gradually disappearing as the planet grew drier. These cycles can be seen in evidence of mud cracks ; shallow, salty lakes ; and, directly below the channel, cataclysmic debris flows that piled up to create the sprawling Gediz Vallis ridge.

Last year, Curiosity made a challenging ascent to study the ridge, which drapes across the slopes of Mount Sharp and seems to grow out of the end of the channel, suggesting both are part of one geologic system.

Curiosity documented the channel with a 360-degree black-and-white panorama from the rover’s left navigation camera. Taken on Feb. 3 (the 4,086th Martian day, or sol, of the mission), the image shows the dark sand that fills one side of the channel and a debris pile rising just behind the sand. In the opposite direction is the steep slope that Curiosity climbed to reach this area.

The rover takes these kinds of panoramas with its navigation cameras at the end of each drive. Now the science team is relying on the navcams even more while engineers try to resolve an issue that is limiting the use of one imager belonging to the color Mast Camera, or Mastcam.

Curiosity was built by JPL, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more about Curiosity, visit:

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl

Andrew Good Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-393-2433 [email protected]

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson NASA Headquarters, Washington 301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501 [email protected] / [email protected]

Related Terms

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)
Curiosity (Rover)
Mars Exploration Program

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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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In 2024, the pilot will become the first black man in history to ever fly to the moon. he spoke with el país about the importance of the artemis ii space mission.

Victor Glover is the newly-named pilot for the Artemis 2 mission, which will journey to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

The Californian will become the first Black man to travel to the Moon. Alongside him in the Orion space capsule will be Christina Koch – an astronaut, mathematician and physicist – who is the first woman ever enrolled in such a mission .

The other members of the mission are Jeremy Hansen – a Canadian, who is set to become the first non-American to fly to the Moon – and Reid Wilson, the mission commander, who, up until a few months ago, was head of the NASA Astronaut Corps.

It’s a mission that will go down in history. Glover knows how much it will mean to his country, to the Black community and to the rest of the world. So far, only 24 white men have traveled to our Moon.

“In the United States, we’re still divided… I hope that this mission can be an example of peace and cooperation between countries, but also between groups [within my country],” he explained in an interview conducted with EL PAÍS on Tuesday, April 4, via videoconference.

Glover, 46, is the son of a police officer and an accountant. He was the first in his family to go to university, where he studied engineering and science. He found his calling as a pilot in the United States Navy, where he participated in the Iraq War in 2003. He rose through the ranks to become a test pilot – the prelude to being an astronaut. Finally, in 2013, he completed his training. By 2020, he became the first African-American to make an extended stay on the International Space Station – the only inhabited human base beyond Earth.

The astronaut recalls that, in 1969, there was a large demonstration by the Black community at the Kennedy Space Center, from where the mission that would take the first man to the Moon was launched.

“Just today (April 4) marks the 55th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King . The reverend who replaced him at the head of the [civil rights] coalition led the protests at the space center. But before takeoff, that same group ended up praying for the astronauts. Suddenly there was a change – they supported them. It’s a lesson in how we should think about this new mission,” says Glover. “Our society needs all the moments of reconciliation that we can give it.”

Back then, there was criticism about how NASA had spent billions of dollars to send humans to the Moon, while the Black community was poor and marginalized. This debate continues today. There are many people who wonder what’s the point of going to the Moon, when there are so many problems on Earth.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to respond to those criticisms,” Glover notes. “It’s true, we have a lot of problems. And many people are sick of hearing about the benefits of going to the Moon. On my way to work, I sometimes listen to Whitey on the Moon – a poem by Gil Scott-Heron. He speaks about problems that are important to listen to, such as how he can’t pay the rent and how his sister can’t find a doctor, [while the white boy goes to the Moon]. It reminds me that, sometimes, it’s important to listen.”

“[But] I can also put the problem in context,” he adds. “NASA’s annual budget is in the vicinity of $25 billion. And thinking about what that creates – the economic activity that it creates in academia and with our corporate partners and our partner nations – we develop somewhere between three and seven times the return… about $75 billion to several hundred billions of dollars of economic activity. So, sometimes it’s better to shut up and listen to people’s complaints… but I’m also aware of the huge economic return from space exploration.”

“This mission consumes a lot of money… but you have to put it in context. For example, every year Americans spend about $4 billion on chewing gum. [Healthcare] is expensive and everyone should have access to it, and NASA can’t fix all the problems in our societies… but the money we spend on space exploration can certainly improve many [pressing] problems.”

Glover will also be the first human to take command of the Orion capsule – the spacecraft designed to take astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond – during the Artemis 2 mission, which launches late next year. After takeoff – aboard the most powerful rocket in history – the four crew members, led by Reid Wiseman, will escape Earth’s gravity and remain in orbit. At this point, Glover’s most important moment in life will take place.

“This spacecraft is capable of taking us back and forth to the Moon on its own,” he explains. “But there are certain systems that we want to test first – especially those that will serve future missions on the Moon.”

Once the Orion capsule is in Earth’s orbit, the last part of the rocket will be floating near it. At that point, the pilot will take command of the vessel.

“We’ll split up from the last part of the rocket… I’ll turn the ship around to face it and we’ll make maneuvers, as if we’re going to dock with it.”

When it can be confirmed that all the systems are in perfect condition, the Orion will fire its rockets only once to leave the Earth. It will then travel more than 235,000 miles to the Moon and fly over its hidden face before beginning the return trip. The total voyage will last about 10 days, with the capsule’s software piloting the vessel – unless it becomes necessary for Glover to take command again.

The father of four daughters, the astronaut believes that the Artemis saga will continue for a long time.

“The first person to travel to Mars is alive today. [They’re] already in school. [These] kids will be the commanders of an Artemis [mission]. I think I’ll probably still be alive when that happens… it’ll be amazing to sit down with them and talk about what I learned on this mission.”

More information

NASA chief engineer Howard Hu: ‘We have built the best spacecraft that we’ve ever seen’

Official crew portrait for Artemis II, from left: NASA Astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

NASA’s first moon crew in 50 years includes a woman and a Black astronaut

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NASA mission to send humans to Mars just took a big step forward

It's a huge step in the end goal of journeying to the red planet.

Tom Earnshaw

The dream of sending people to Mars is taking a massive step forward thanks to another scientific milestone.

Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington DC have long set their sights on astronauts travelling to the Red Planet .

It's an obsession that transcends science - with many films and TV shows based around exploration of Mars.

In the real world, NASA has already sent rovers to the planet, which have recently potentially discovered evidence of past alien life on the planet .

Now, a big step has been taken to replace rovers with people - but everything relies on a celestial body much closer to home: the Moon .

NASA has this week chosen the first science instruments designed for astronauts to deploy on the surface of the Moon during Artemis III; a planned Moon landing that is expected to happen no earlier than 2026.

Once installed near the Moon's south pole, the three instruments will collect scientific data about the Moon's environment as well as its interior.

Artist’s concept of an Artemis astronaut deploying an instrument on the lunar surface.

It'll also look in to how to sustain a long-duration human presence on the Moon. This is the part that will help prepare NASA to send astronauts to Mars.

NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said: "Artemis marks a bold new era of exploration, where human presence amplifies scientific discovery.

"With these innovative instruments stationed on the Moon’s surface, we’re embarking on a transformative journey that will kick-start the ability to conduct human-machine teaming – an entirely new way of doing science.

"These three deployed instruments were chosen to begin scientific investigations that will address key Moon to Mars science objectives."

The Artemis mission's will hope to understand planetary processes; the character and origin of lunar polar volatiles; and investigate and mitigate exploration risks.

These objectives were chosen because of their installation requirements that are vital for humans to partake in moonwalks.

As well as this, astronauts will also take plants to the Moon under the Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF) programme.

It'll investigate the lunar surface environment’s effects on space crops in what will be the first experiment to observe plant photosynthesis, growth, and systemic stress responses in space-radiation and partial gravity.

When it comes to sending astronauts to Mars, NASA is hoping that this can be a real possibility in the next decade.

Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said: "These three scientific instruments will be our first opportunity since Apollo to leverage the unique capabilities of human explorers to conduct transformative lunar science.

"These payloads mark our first steps toward implementing the recommendations for the high-priority science outlined in the Artemis III Science Definition Team report."

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

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

@ TREarnshaw

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A 280-mile-long volcano may have been discovered on Mars—hiding in plain sight

The colossal volcano is taller than Mount Everest, would reach from New York City to Washington, D.C., and may be a promising site to look for ancient remnants of microbial life.

It’s not every day you discover a brand-new gigantic volcano on another planet—but that’s exactly what a pair of researchers claim to have done. At almost 30,000 feet tall (a little higher that Everest), and perhaps 280 miles long at its base (lengthier than the distance between Washington D.C. and New York City), it is an utter behemoth. Like all volcanoes on Mars, there are no signs that’s it’s currently active. And it could be remarkably ancient—a volcanic witness to most of the Red Planet’s multi-billion-year history.

“We were both in disbelief that this was indeed a giant volcano and that no one seemed to have reported it before,” says Pascal Lee , a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, one of the two co-discoverers. “I think it's fair to say that we were excited.”

Lee and his colleague presented their findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, last week. Found overlaying an expansive maze of water-eroded caverns and tunnels named Noctis Labyrinthus—meaning “Maze of the Night”—the team have given their putative volcano the provisional name of Noctis, pending further analyses by the scientific community. The volcanic architecture has been heavily eroded by eons of water and glacial movement, which they claim is why Noctis has been overlooked until now.

Mars’s magmatic past

Not everyone agrees that a colossal volcano has truly been discovered. The work has yet to be peer-reviewed, but those who saw the presentation at the conference are intrigued, but skeptical.

“The researchers made an interesting case, but it is not entirely convincing,” says Rosaly Lopes , a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wasn’t involved with the new work. “The area is highly eroded. It is difficult to tell for sure.” But, she adds, “I think most of us still think it is an interesting idea and worthy of more study.”

Mars was once a volcanically active world, featuring myriad explosive and effusive eruptions—and the construction of some truly elephantine volcanoes, including the famous Olympus Mons, which is three times taller than Everest. It’s so weighty, it even sank back into the planet a little.

Even though there are some tantalizing signs that future eruptions on the planet may occur, most scientists suspect Earth’s neighbor is past its eruptive heyday. And although small clusters of volcanic features are occasionally found by eagle-eye researchers, it’s presumed that the larger edifices have all be identified. Mars has an essentially transparent atmosphere, and aside from the odd global dust storm, its surface has been near-continuously perused by orbiting spacecraft, going back to NASA’s Mariner 9 satellite that arrived above the ochre world in 1971.

So when Lee, and fellow team member Sourabh Shubham , a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, claimed to have discovered a giant volcano, it came as a surprise.

Searching for an ancient volcano

Using a suite of orbital mission maps created over the past half-century, they focused on a field of deposits created by explosive volcanic activity, one that had been incised by the remains of a glacier. Wondering where this volcanic material may have erupted from, they looked nearby, to the eastern extent of Noctis Labyrinthus, and “we saw something remarkable,” says Lee: the shape of what they think is an eroded volcano, topped with a cauldron-like pit at its partly collapsed peak, and adorned with old lava flows, blankets of volcanic ash, and mineral patches cooked up by magmatically heated flowing water.

Based on the advanced extent of its erosion, the layering of its erupted matter, and comparing its fractures with those of Noctis Labyrinthus (whose formation time is broadly known), they suspect the volcano first took shape more than 3.7 billion years ago, then effervesced and erupted perhaps as recently as 10 million years ago.

“We are looking at a volcano whose activity spans the bulk of Mars' geologic history,” says Lee. And the presence of a prolonged heat source in an area known to have been adorned with glaciers also implies that this may be an exciting area for a future rover to explore—a former site of warm pools within which a robotic sleuth may find signs of past microbial life.

Despite Lee’s confidence, though, others aren’t convinced. The features identified as eruption deposits or volcanic landforms aren’t unequivocally volcanic, and it isn’t yet clear how continuous or not they are.

“This is not enough to convince me this is a volcano,” says Tracy Gregg , a planetary volcanologist at the University at Buffalo. “An impact crater that was filled and eroded could show similarities.”

While the possibility of a titanic overlooked volcano on Mars is tantalizing, more evidence is needed to confirm if this is truly an explosive new discovery.

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Diversity will be key to Artemis moon-to-Mars push, NASA officials say

'Going to the moon, going to Mars, will take everybody in our society to participate and support.'

More important than being first, is what comes next, says Artemis II pilot Victor Glover. Glover (top center) is joined by his crewmates, mission specialist Christina Koch, commander Reid Wiseman and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

Getting astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars will require fully tapping the United States' famed melting pot, NASA officials stress.

The agency is working to establish a human presence on and around the moon by the end of the 2020s via its Artemis program of lunar exploration. NASA believes that the lessons and skills learned through this effort will help it make the next giant leap — putting boots on Mars, which the agency aims to do by the late 2030s or early 2040s.

Artemis is therefore a very different program than Apollo , which took more of a flags-and-footprints approach to lunar exploration. Artemis astronauts will also look very different than the Apollo flyers, as we learned earlier this month with the unveiling of the Artemis 2 crew .

Related: Everything you need to know about NASA's Artemis program

The four-person Artemis 2 mission includes a woman (NASA astronaut Christina Hammock Koch), a Black man (NASA's Victor Glover) and a Canadian (Jeremy Hansen), along with NASA's Reid Wiseman, who fits the Apollo mold (white, male and American).

This diversity is partially a reflection of social advances the United States has made since the 1960s and early '70s (though we certainly have a lot further to go). But it's also an informed decision to get the most out of Artemis 2, as well as the missions that follow, according to NASA officials.

"I hope that when the young people out there today see the Artemis 2 crew, they can see themselves," Ken Bowersox, deputy associate administrator for NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate, said during a panel discussion on Wednesday (April 19) at the 38th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

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"Back when I was young, I saw the Apollo astronauts, and I could see myself on one of those missions," he added. "The Artemis 2 crew should give us an even broader group of folks that can identify that way. And I hope they'll realize that there's a place for them in what we're doing. Going to the moon, going to Mars , will take everybody in our society to participate and support, and I hope everybody saw that when we named that crew."

Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, voiced similar sentiments.

"I also think it's really important that we build an environment that is inclusive ," Fox said during Wednesday's panel discussion.

"For sure, the best teams are the diverse teams," she added, noting that, if everyone "looks and thinks the same, you'll get the same" results.

"As we're doing these really daring, first-of-a-kind, pushing-the-boundaries [missions], we need to have the best and brightest minds," Fox said. "And so, making sure that we have an environment where everybody feels that they see themselves in our teams, I think, is just really, really important. And I want to see us really leaning in and doing a lot more of that moving forward."

— NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission: Everything you need to know

— The 10 greatest images from NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission

— NASA aims to boost diversity at space agency with 2 high-ranking positions

Artemis 2 is scheduled to launch its four crewmembers around the moon in November 2024. The next mission in the program, Artemis 3 , will land astronauts near the lunar south pole, a region rich in water ice where NASA wants to set up one or more research outposts . NASA aims to launch Artemis 3 in 2025 or 2026, agency officials have said.

On Tuesday (April 18), NASA released an "architecture concept review" of its broad moon-to-Mars plan. You can find this technical document, and other related resources, at this NASA site .

Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall . Follow us @Spacedotcom , Facebook and Instagram .

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].

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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Lara Cringe apologetics. They aren't thinking about that one bit Reply
Rhino Ummm, shouldn't it just be the best 4 people for the job? Artemis 3 they've already said "will be a black person and a woman" that stand on the moon. Hip hip hooray, as long as they are the best people for the job that's fine - But that mission is a long way off and there's no way of knowing who the best candidates are that far out. Reply
Unclear Engineer I do dislike seeing political priorities taking precedence in scientific efforts. But I also understand that it takes political efforts to create and support such expensive scientific efforts - at least until the commercial space program takes over as far out as the moon. The really sad thing is that there are well qualified people of both sexs and most ethnicities that can handle missions like this. So, the political advertising that there will be seats reserved for specific "minorities" probably does have an undeserved negative effect on the perceptions of those minorities by others. Do we really still need that sort of thing to make young people of all types realize that they can become astronauts? Or, is this type of political advertising mainly to benefit politicians? Reply
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Mars 2020 Perseverance Landing Press Kit

Science Goals

To reach the first three goals, NASA has determined the following more specific science objectives for Perseverance:

NASA has also tasked the Mars 2020 team with a mission objective to prepare for future human exploration by conducting the following investigations:

Payload Instruments

MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer)

MOXIE (Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment)

PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry)

RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment)

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How NASA is planning to get humans to Mars

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