Dangers of mars. How mars could its first visitors?

 Dangers of mars. How mars could its first visitors?

Introduction.

SpaceX is getting closer to going to Mars as it tests out prototypes of its gigantic Star ship nearly every month. The aim is to fly an un crewed mission to the red planet as early as 2024. CEO Elon Musk has said he’s fairly confident people will land on Mars in 2026. That’s just two years after NASA’s goal of sending astronauts back to the moon which is itself a very ambitious timeline. If and when Star ship takes off with traveller aboard, it won’t just be a trip for those with money but those with guts. It's dangerous, it's uncomfortable.

 

 Going to Mars reads like that ad for Shackleton going to the Antarctic. That’s a reference to the famed Anglo-Irishexplorer Ernest Shackleton, who is said to have put out this ad in a newspaper to recruitbrave souls to brave the bitter Antarctic cold. Just as the conditions of Antarctica are difficult and dangerous, the Martian environment won’t exactly be hospitable. Honestly, a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning. It’s tough sledding over there. He believes the tough sledding is worth trying to colonize Mars in case he says anything were to happen to planet Earth. Before we talk about the challenges of living on Mars, it will be tough enough just to get there. 25 out of the 49 robotic missions to Mars have failed to get to the fourth planet from the Sun.

 

The journey will take six months or longer. The optimal time to go is when the distance between the Earth and Mars is shortest. That’s once every two years or so. Even then, it’s still going to be a 34-mileor 55 million km trek. The traveling distance will actually be even greater because it can’t be done in a straight line. So the trajectory will be similar to a quarterback throwing a football. They don’t throw the ball to where the receiver is at any given moment  but where the teammate will be in the future as they continue to run down the field. Course corrections will be necessary. If it isn’t done with precision, the spacecraft could get lost in space or crash when it reaches its destination. It has happened already.

 

In 1998, a software issue sent NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter too close to the red planet and it was either destroyed in the atmosphere or got lost orbiting the sun. Live communication won’t be possible either because it takes as long as 24 minutes for radio signals to travel back to Earth. So the spacecraft is on its own, dependent on an onboard computer to automate the entire procedure. Those minutes will feel like hours. And once it prepares to land, the vehicle- this one simulating Starship - will perform a complex landing maneuver.

 

If getting safely to Mars is going to be difficult, living there will be an even greater challenge. NASA’s Perseverance rover that touched down in February has been studying the habitability of Mars and looking for signs of past microbial life. Its cameras captured NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter flying in the dusty, desert world. Gigantic dust storms, resembling tornadoes, can cover the entire planet and the dust is toxic.

 

 Many people often assume Mars is hot but because it’s farther from the sun and has an atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s, there are huge temperature swings. A daytime high of 22° Celsius or 71° Fahrenheit on the surface could drop to -99° Celsius or minus 146° Fahrenheit at night.

 

That thin atmosphere would also expose aspiring Martians to radiation. And Mars has no magnetic field to deflect these deadly rays and particles unlike the magnetic bubble that protects Earth. Building homes underground would offer protection- or possibly building them above ground with a protective layer of regolith - loose deposits of dust and broken rocks. There’s no shortage of that on the red planet.

 

And if you step outside without a spacesuit, the low atmospheric pressure would cause your blood to boil. A NASA scientist has compared it to popping a can of soda. You’d fizz to death. The atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide so the failure of a spacesuit is a potential death sentence. To get around this problem, NASA is experimenting with trying to convert CO2 into oxygen with a toaster-sized instrument aboard the Perseverance rover called MOXIE.

 

That could one day provide breathable air and could also help lift rockets off the planet’s surface since propellant depends on oxygen. And of course, the big challenge of living on Mars is figuring out how to get safe drinking water. There are small quantities of water in the soil and as vapor in the atmosphere, but most of it exists as ice. Perhaps the most viable option for the first humans on Mars is to live on their spaceship at first, using it as a habitable base for the building of a city.

 

There’s been talk of terraforming Mars - engineering it to make it more Earth-like by creating enough oxygen so that humans can brea the. However, that’s a long way off from the near-term goal of first-time travelers which is simply to survive the night. It's dangerous, it's uncomfortable, it's along journey. You might not come back alive. But it's a glorious adventure, and it'll be an amazing experience. And your name will go in history. Yes. You might die. If you’re considering whether to book that ticket to Mars and can’t decide, you can learn more about the red planet by watching space documentaries. But for explorers and dreamers, the red planet is warm and inviting. I’ve been enjoying this episode of A Curious World available on Curiosity Stream which sponsored this video. Curiosity Stream is brought to you by the founder of the Discovery Channel.

 

I have a whole list of documentaries to get through on space, science, tech, and history. To sign up, head to curiositystream.com/news think. The link is in my description. The price of a membership is only $15 for the entire year. Not month, but year. For News think, I’m Cindy Pom.