NASA

Mars or the Moon - Where do NASA manned missions go next?

• Report rights infringement
• published: 08 Sep 2016
• views: 1024

The last humans to visit the moon left the lunar surface in Apollo 17 at 5:55pm EST on Dec 14th 1972, since then no humans have been further than low earth orbit missions and to the variety of space stations that have existed since then. The question is now, where shall we go next, do we make Mars the next great step forward or do we go back to the moon. This time it’s not down to the space race or national pride but it’s in expanding mans horizons to living elsewhere in the solar system other than the earth and maybe even making a profit whilst doing so. Even before the Apollo missions had finished, Werner Von Brawn, the designer of the Saturn 5 moon rocket, wanted NASA to mount manned missions to mars and the Soviets were also drawing up their own plans to send men to Mars. But by the early 1970’s, the huge cost of the space race, the warming in the relations between the US and the Soviet Union and the change of direction by NASA from the Moon to manned space stations and the space shuttle, effectively ended manned space exploration beyond low earth orbit, and Mars, which was always a much more difficult challenge was off the agenda. However, the exploration of the solar system didn’t stop, From the 1970’s onwards, Robotic probes and satellites have been sent all of the planets. In fact, there have been 40 Mars missions to date, not including flybys, these include orbiters, landers and rovers but though only 18 of them have been actually successful. Man has a long held fascination with Mars going back to the Romans, and although Mars is not the closest planet to earth, that is actually Venus, it is the most earth like. In the 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli reported that he saw long thin lines on the Martian surface, he called these canali, which means channels in Italian. Not long after the noted astronomer, Percival Lowell picked up on these and through his own observations came to believe that Mars must have been not unlike earth in the past and the “Canals” were the work of intelligent beings to try and irrigate the surface. By the turn of the 20th century, The Canals of Mars had become one of the most intense obsessions in the history of science and although it was later proven to be completely incorrect, it captured the public’s imagination through the numerous newspaper and magazine articles of the time. This led to classic sci-fi books like the “A Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs and “War of the Worlds” by HG Wells. This fascination with the possibility that Mars could have been once like the earth and that life may still exist, is one of the main driving factors behind sending manned missions there. NASA has said that its aim is to land humans on Mars during the 2030’s but many question their ability to do so considering the agencies budget and the proposed use of expensive Apollo style expendable rockets. Elon Musk says that his SpaceX will start sending unmanned cargo flights to Mars starting in 2018 and then every 26 months thereafter. This will be for future colonists to use which he says could be following as soon as 2024 to arrive in 2025. Compared to the earth, living on Mars would not be an easy task. There are a lot technical issues to overcome let alone the “human” condition and how that would affect the Mars colonists psychologically, knowing that they probably won’t be coming back to Earth. So let’s have a look at some of the hurdles that any manned mars mission would have to overcome. Firstly, there is the problem of just getting to Mars. Earth and mars are on differing elliptical orbits at different speeds, at their closet points, this can vary from 36 to 60 million miles and occurs roughly every two years, between those times the distance can increase up to 250 million miles. This allows for only a narrow launch window and if launched at their closest approaches and with current rocket technology the journey to Mars is around 150 days. This brings us on to one of the major issues of the very long space journey, radiation. Its maybe just as well that we didn’t send men to mars in the 70’s and 80’s after the Apollo missions because they would almost certainly have died on route due to the interplanetary radiation. Probes and robots which have been sent to Mars over the years have revealed just how deadly interplanetary space and the surface of Mars really is. With this new information and the advancement of technology in the years since Apollo, we have been able to create new radiation absorption technologies for the spacecraft and crew to protect them from the solar radiation. There are also ways to deflect charged particles from the Sun like high energy protons and solar alpha particles by creating electromagnetic fields around the spacecraft in the same way as the earth’s magnetic field protects us....... Credit - Space Video and CGI : NASA Music by Curious Droid