ExploreMars

life on Mars

artemis — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:48:02 +0000

Mars might be crawling with microbes right now.
Watch the below video about that premise.

I hope you enjoy this video as much as I did.
And if you do, please send it on, and on, and on

Why We Can’t Send Humans to Mars Yet (And How We’ll Fix That)

artemis — Fri, 31 May 2013 06:15:11 +0000

BY ADAM MANN
05.30.13
6:30 AM

Image: A human spacecraft and supplies in orbit around Mars. NASA/John Frassanito and Associates

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

But how real is it?

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

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

But the Martian dust devil is in the details, and there is still one big problem: We currently lack the technology to get people to Mars and back. An interplanetary mission of that scale would likely be one of the most expensive and difficult engineering challenges of the 21st century.

“Mars is pretty far away,” NASA’s director of the International Space Station, Sam Scimemi said during the H2M conference. “It’s six orders of magnitude further than the space station. We would need to develop new ways to live away from the Earth and that’s never been done before. Ever.”

There are some pretty serious gaps in our abilities, including the fact that we can’t properly store the necessary fuel long enough for a Mars trip, we don’t yet have a vehicle capable of landing people on the Martian surface, and we aren’t entirely sure what it will take to keep them alive once there. A large part of the H2M summit involved panelists discussing the various obstacles to a manned Mars mission.

“I’ve said repeatedly I’ll know when we’re serious about sending humans to the Mars surface when they start making significant technology investments in particular areas,” engineer Bobby Braun, former NASA chief technologist, told Wired.

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

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

Image: Mock-up of NASA’s Space Launch System. NASA

Getting Off the Earth

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

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

That still requires some heavy lifting. The largest construct assembled in space, the International Space Station, has a mass of 4,500 metric tons and required 31 spaceship flights to complete. According to NASA, a Mars vehicle capable of taking people to the Red Planet and back would be smaller than the space station – around 1,250 metric tons. But our capabilities are hampered by the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet, which was capable of carrying large masses to Earth orbit with relative ease.

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

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

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

Image: A vehicle replenishes its fuel supply at a deep-space propellant depot. NASA

Fuel Storage

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

In order to stay alive in space, people need lots of things: food, oxygen, shelter, and, perhaps most importantly, fuel. Somewhere around 80 percent of the initial mass launched to space for a human Mars mission is going to be propellant. Trouble is, storing that amount of fuel in space is hard.

Objects in low-Earth orbit (the place you’d park your Mars spaceship while you built it) travel around the world every 90 minutes. During half that time, they experience the intense heat of the sun and then the unheated blackness of space. That difference causes liquid hydrogen and oxygen – rocket fuel – to vaporize. Unless tanks are regularly vented, containers holding these materials are liable to explode.

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

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

Image: A solar electric propulsion engine. Analytical Mechanics Associates

Advanced Propulsion

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

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

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

Image: Proposed habitats for human Mars explorers, which would be much larger than anything we’ve ever had to land on the Red Planet before. NASA/John Frassanito and Associates

Landing on Mars

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

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

The 1-ton Curiosity rover, which arrived on Mars in 2012, is the largest object our current technology can place on the ground. Human-scale missions, according to NASA, will require landing at least 40 tons. Even the bare bones one-way manned mission proposed by Mars One would bring around 10 tons of material to the surface.

“Landing Curiosity was landing a small nuclear car,” said engineer Bobby Braun, former NASA chief technologist and currently a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. For a human-scale mission, “We’re talking about landing perhaps a two-story house, and then another two-story house with fuel and supplies right next to it.”

“That’s a fantastic challenge,” he added. Though Curiosity’s landing was a truly remarkable achievement, it “pales in comparison to what might be required one day to land humans.”

Landing things at that scale will require new technologies that have to be invested in, matured, and tested over and over to make sure that they don’t kill their crew.

SpaceX’s concept for its Dragon spacecraft landing on Mars, using retropropulsive rockets to slow itself down. Image: SpaceX

“The one thing we do not want landing for humans to be characterized as is ‘Seven Minutes of Terror‘,” said engineer Kendall Brown of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center.

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

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

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

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

NASA has done wind tunnel tests to look at this problem before, once in the 1960s and 70s for the Viking landers, and again more recently. The good news is the testing shows that supersonic rockets are theoretically possible. The bad news is that NASA is not working on this program anymore.

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

Image: Medical officer Joseph Kerwin gives Pete Conrad a dental exam aboard Skylab. NASA

Keeping the Crew Healthy

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

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

Once outside the protective magnetic field of our planet, solar radiation would accumulate in an astronaut’s body, raising his or her risk of cancer. Recent data from NASA’s Curiosity spacecraft have helped quantify just how risky background radiation levels are. Massive explosions like solar flares or energetic particle events could throw potentially lethal doses of radiation right at a spaceship. That’s why the private manned mission to flyby Mars in 2018, Inspiration Mars, is planned for a time of low activity from the sun, when the chance of a solar outburst is lowest. Though, lowering solar activity increases levels of radiation streaming in from the galaxy, which would also be hazardous.

The trip out to Mars would probably take between seven and nine months, and humans would need to be protected the entire time. Currently, the most feasible solution is to line a spacecraft with water, which would absorb radiation and provide some amount of shelter during a solar storm. But water is heavy, and any added weight on a mission is an added cost. In the future, the capability to create a mini-magnetic field to protect a crew could be developed, but this is years or possibly decades away.

An artist’s conception of the view of the Martian surface from a spacecraft window. Image: Ludovic Celle/Da Vinci Mars Design

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

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

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

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

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

There have been other isolated group experiments that offer some insight into how a Mars crew might fare. The Biosphere-2 experiments of the 1990s had seven or eight people stay in a large simulated environment for two years at a time.

“All crewmembers in Biosphere-2 agreed that the psychological issues were the biggest issue,” saidTaber MacCallum, co-founder of Paragon Space Development and a participant in Biosphere-2.

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

A Mars mission would test the limits of isolated human groups. Crewmembers would probably have to pass through long-term screenings to make sure they are fit both physically and mentally.

The six-man crew of the Mars 500 experiment, which showed the effects of social isolation on a simulated Mars mission. Image: ESA

Image: Only a long-term Mars base would probably consider growing large amounts of its own food.NASA Ames

Living Off the Land

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

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

As has been recognized in recent decades, Mars has a lot of water locked up in ice. In certain places, there are enough ice crystals in the soil that a robot could simply scoop up a heap.

“Prior plans [to go to Mars] said we have to bring all this water,” said space physicist Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary exploration. “Now we say, bring a straw.”

An artist conception of in-situ resource utilization robots collecting Martian material. Image: Pat Rawlings/NASA

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

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

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

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

Image: President Nixon visits the Apollo 11 crew while they are in quarantine after their return from the moon. NASA

Protecting Ourselves and the Planet

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

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

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

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

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

Image: NASA’s Spirit rover is covered in so much dust after three years on the Martian surface that it’s almost invisible in this image. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell

Dealing with Dust

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

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

The only similar situation we have faced before was the moon dust that the Apollo missions encountered. The ultra-sharp and abrasive moon soil was recognized as something that could clog up machinery and damage basic functions.

“We spent $17 million trying to solve dust problems and I don’t know of one that worked,” said Anderson. “John Young [commander of Apollo 16] was out on the moon brushing thermal panels with a pig-hair brush and it didn’t work well.”

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

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

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

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

Image: NASA

Making the Plan

In the grand scheme of things, engineering challenges are easy. It’s the social and political aspects of a manned Mars mission that are likely to be toughest.

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

No one knows exactly how much a human mission will cost but it is likely to run to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Adjusted for inflation, each Apollo landing cost roughly $18 billion, and a Mars mission would be an order of magnitude greater in difficulty. It seems most likely that an undertaking of that scale will be led by an international partnership. That requires everything to be outlined in formal commitments between participating countries. The only similar space mission, building the International Space Station, required about five years for the countries involved to hammer out their deals.

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

We often have a vision for beautiful machinery in space, says Sam Scimemi, NASA’s director of the ISS: Something like the majestic wheeled space station in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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

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

There are certainly new players that did not exist in the previous Space Age. Private companies have set their sights on the Red Planet, in particular Inspiration Mars and SpaceX, and there are probably many who believe commercial industry should go it alone.

“But at current levels of technology, governments are going to play a big role,” said space policy expert Scott Pace of the George Washington University. “Human space exploration is driven by visions and hopes, but they must be grounded in facts and analysis. Fantasies don’t get you to space.”

Pace outlined the best ways to get countries to sign off on an ambitious plan like a manned Mars mission.

“Destinations are really just symbols, proxies for skills, inspirations, values,” he said. “The U.S is not going beyond low-Earth orbit without international partners. Apollo isn’t going to happen again. I think our partners are willing to go to the moon and Mars with us, but I don’t think they’re going to go without us.”

The above article was published in Wired on Thursday May 30, 2013

Man’s Journey to Mars Possible by 2033: NASA

exploremars — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:48:15 +0000

By IBTimes Staff Reporter | May 6, 2013 12:48 PM IST

A manned exploration to Mars will be a possibility in another 20 years, according to NASA and otherspace agencies.

NASA/UPI/Landov
A journey to the Red Planet could be possible by 2033

The mission of sending man to the Red Planet will be a focus of discussion at the “Humans 2 Mars Summit” in Washington DC on Monday. Top officials from space agencies, government officials, astronauts including Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, are due to meet at the conference to discuss the latest exploration projects to Mars.

Recently, man has showed a renewed interest in reaching Mars and several exploration initiatives have been launched with an aim to reach the neighbouring planet.

A recent survey conducted by Explore Mars and Boeing revealed that 71 percent of Americans believed that sending people to Mars will be possible by 2033. “If we started today, it’s possible to land on Mars in 20 years,” professor G Scott Hubbard of Stanford University told AAP.

But a major hurdle in the mission is the lack of finance allotted to the exploration projects.

Presently, NASA is entitled to a meagre 0.5 percent of the US federal budget, which is way lower than four percent allotted for the Apollomission.

The survey also revealed that 75 percent of people said NASA’s budgetshould be doubled to one percent for such missions.

“It doesn’t require miracles, it requires money and a plan to address the technological engineering challenges,” said Hubbard.

The ongoing Mar’s Curiosity mission which cost $2.5 billion dollars is expected to last two years during which the rover will collect and analyze various samples from the Martian environment.

NASA is also preparing for another mission which would study Mar’s upper atmosphere.Recently, the space agency, in a bid to raise public awareness of the mission, sought the public to submit personnel messages, out of which the best three will be carried in Mars-bound aircraft.

The above article was published on May 6, 2013 in the International Business Times

Nasa lays out vision for manned mission to Mars – as it happened

exploremars — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:31:28 +0000

Nasa gives a press conference to discuss the potential of a manned mission to Mars[br]

Tom McCarthy in New York
guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 May 2013 15.43 BST

Mars rover Curiosity has cut a wheel scuff mark into a wind-formed ripple at the ‘Rocknest’ site.
Photograph: NASA/AFP/Getty Images

8.47am ET

Good morning and welcome to our live blog coverage of Nasa’s announcement this morning about the progress of its mission to Mars.

This morning the director of NASA, Gen. Charles Bolden, will discuss the possibility of a manned mission to Mars. The space agency currently is pursuing a long-term mission to take humans to Mars by the 2030s.

Following a keynote speech by Bolden, three panels will address current missions and emerging science.

The rover Curiosity touched down on the red planet about seven months ago and since then has been doing the usual tourist things: wandering aimlessly, shooting photos and encountering unexpected tech glitches.

Curiosity has traveled about 500m since its successful landing. Last month it completed a mission to drill a hole into and sample a Martian rock, which scientists say provided new evidence that the planet has lost much of its original atmosphere. Here’s a video explainer of that mission:

The Curiosity mission has generated unexpected publicity. One of the engineers on the project, Bobak Ferdowsi, who’s entertaining on Twitter, engendered one of the better internet memes and was invited to sit next to the first lady at the state of the union address.

One question we’re hoping scientists answer this morning: who was driving the rover the day this happened?

Updated at 9.17am ET

9.08am ET

General Bolden is speaking – you can watch on CSPAN here.

Curiosity is running experiments that could enable a manned mission to Mars, Bolden says.

He is not focusing on Curiosity but ranging broadly across NASA’s vision for future Mars exploration.

9.13am ET

That didn’t take long: Bolden is already talking about the need to meet President Obama’s budget requests in order to keep NASA healthy.

Bolden says that the first requirement of a Mars mission is to ensure that the United States can continue to send humans into space through 2017.

He calls for the full funding of the president’s budget requests, which amounts to $821m for the next fiscal year for the Mars mission (not the whole of Nasa).

Updated at 10.33am ET

9.15am ET

Bolden is asked whether Mars 1 would succeed in its mission tocolonize the planet by 2023?

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what their plan is.”

“The Mars strategy that we have in place … will have humans at least with Nasa in the Martian environment in the mid-2030s.

9.22am ET

Bolden takes a question about politics: What if the next administrationcuts Nasa funding?

Bolden basically says Nasa has kept its missions so modest and scrappy that they should have a good chance of retaining sufficient funding.

“The programs you’ve seen us bring forward, whether it’s a commercial crew, an asteroid strategy, a mission to Mars – they’re realistic, they’re very realistic,” he says.

Commercial crew means Nasa “is out of the business of operating spacecraft into low-Earth orbit,” Bolden says. “We award contracts and one or more industry partners provide transportation.”

He doesn’t say how much money Nasa would expect to save by hiring private companies to fly missions instead of flying them themselves.

Updated at 9.38am ET

9.29am ET

This sounds interesting:

“We’re well on the way, we think, to developing a capability forcryogenic storage,” Bolden says. “We’re not there yet.”

To listen to Nasa’s strategic planners talk, all the best scenes from your favorite sci-fi movies are on the way to coming true.

Except they have to find a way to pay for it.

9.36am ET

A group of Nasa directors discusses the agency’s much-ballyhooed planto capture an asteroid and then mine it for research.

Dan Leone, Nasa reporter for Space News, is moderating. The panel includes William H. Gerstenmaier, director of human exploration and operations; John Grunsfeld, a 5-time shuttle astronaut and director of the Nasa science mission; and Michael Gazarik, director of space technology.

9.37am ET

Here’s an animation produced by Nasa explaining its mission to capture an asteroid:

9.47am ET

To pull off the asteroid mission Nasa needs a high-powered solar-electric propulsion capability, Michael Gazarik, the director of space technology, says. He means that the spacecraft that will capture the asteroid must be able to maneuver in space by running on solar power.

William H. Gerstenmaier, director of human operations, lays out another challenge: it’s difficult to pull off docking and rendezvous missions in outer space, as opposed to low-Earth orbit.

Joining up with an asteroid could provide valuable lessons in conducting a manned mission to Mars, Gerstenmaier says.

9.52am ET

Leone asks about experiments on the asteroid that scientists hope to run.

John Grunsfeld says the asteroid mission is not “science-driven.” Chunks of asteroids fall to Earth all the time, he says. We don’t need to travel into space to get them.

The asteroid outing is more a technology mission, Grunsfeld says, to learn about human space flight into deep space.

Updated at 9.53am ET

10.01am ET

The justification for the asteroid mission Grunsfeld has just described seems to contradict the version Nasa director Bolden gave last month, when details of the mission first emerged.

Grunsfeld said it’s not about running experiments on the asteroid. The point is to figure out how to fly out to one and link up with it.

Last month Bolden said the mission would lead to scientific discoveries and help protect Earth: “This mission represents an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities and help protect our home planet,” he said.

The impression from today’s panel is that the asteroid mission is not about running science experiments.

10.05am ET

Now Gerstenmaier echoes Grunsfeld. The point of the asteroid mission, he says, is not the asteroid.

“You need an object you can go to,” Gerstenmaier says.

“If I want to advance the capabilities as fast as I can… this mission allows us to do that. It allows us to advance our knowledge.. so that we’re ready to move to Mars.

“It’s not so much about returning the asteroid per se to be examined.”

10.13am ET

Leone moves the discussion to what infrastructure needs to be in place “at or on Mars” for people to go there?

“What’s the scout survival package for a 2030 Mars landing?” he says.

Gerstenmaier says that with the rover program, there’s already a communications system in place, and that would need to be maintained.

Other items on the wish list: laser communications; autonomy of operations for when the sun is between the Earth and Mars for a couple weeks each year; propellent generation off the surface / resource utilization; and other unspecified items.

Gazarik mentions some needs that seem like they should be up high on the list: “Life support systems that are reliable. Communications, navigation. Technology to get back off the planet.”

Gazarik says Nasa is working on a system for the cryogenic freezing and storage of fuel. He says the Mars rover weighed a metric ton, and that’s as big as Nasa can go right now. But the manned craft could weigh 40 metric tons.

Updated at 10.14am ET

10.18am ET

The panel is now taking questions. First question: this forum is supposed to be about Mars, but we keep talking about asteroids.

Why the heck are we going to an asteroid?

Gerstenmaier says the president told Nasa to do it in 2010, so they started working on it. He insists that it’ll help Nasa with the Mars mission and other prospective manned missions to outer space.

10.19am ET

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator Charles Bolden delivers remarks at the opening of the “Human 2 Mars Summit” at George Washington University in Washington, DC, May 6, 2013. AFP PHOTO/JIM WATSONJIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

10.28am ET

Grunsfeld, the veteran of five shuttle missions, articulates the daring spirit that motivates the Mars mission:

“When people who left on the Oregon trail from St. Louis, they new that only a fraction of them would make it to the West coast,” Grunsfeld says. “But they went anyway.”

10.29am ET

The panel is wrapped.

10.43am ET

Summary

We’re going to wrap up our live blog coverage of Nasa’s conference on Mars. Here’s a summary of where things stand:

• Nasa called for full funding for its Mars mission to put humans on the red planet in the 2030s. That means $821m for FY 2014, out of a provisional Nasa budget (in the president’s proposal) of $17.7bn.

• Nasa defended its mission to capture an asteroid as the fastest way to build on current space exploration experience and to advance toward the goal of a Mars landing. But the sense in the room is that the asteroid mission could be a distraction or detour.

• To go to Mars, Nasa must establish infrastructure including reliable life support, communications and navigation systems.Astronauts must also figure out how to lift off from the red planet after an extended stay. Fuel storage is another concern.

The technology to build and maintain all those systems is currently in place, tech director Michael Gazarik said, but more practical experience is needed.

The above blog was published on May 6, 2013 in the Guardian

First humans on Mars may walk a route planned at William & Mary

exploremars — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:22:13 +0000

by Joseph McClain | May 3, 2013

NASA veteran

Joel Levine is the co-editor of “The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet,” the seminal preparation book for a human mission to Mars.

Photo by Joseph McClain

The first humans venturing out on the surface of Mars may well follow a route first planned out by a team of three William & Mary undergraduates.

Joel Levine will present a set of 22 student-authored proposals for Martian landing site explorations on May 7 at the international Humans 2 Mars Summit (H2M) at George Washington University. The proposals, gathered together in a web site, are the final projects from the William & Mary Planetary Geology course. Levine, research professor in applied science and geology, team-taught Planetary Geology this semester with Chuck Bailey, chair of the geology department.

Levine came to William & Mary after a 41-year career in NASA and is a veteran of several Mars missions. He co-chaired NASA’s Panel on Planning for the Scientific Exploration of Mars and co-edited the 974-page book, The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet,acknowledged as the seminal how-to and why-we-should-do-it work when it comes to putting people on the fourth planet from the sun. He said he came up with the idea for the final projects for Planetary Geology while recovering from cataract surgery.

“Chuck wants to give the students some real science to do for a project. He likes students to do useful research,” Levine said. “I was in bed and couldn’t read and that’s where it came to me.”

His idea was to have the 66 Planetary Geology students use some of the 58 potential Mars landing sites listed in The Human Mission to Mars as starting points for their projects. Levine and other leading Mars scientists had already fleshed out three of the 58 possible sites into “field trips,” scheduled sorties designed specifically for each site.

“A field trip shows specifically what the astronauts would do on the surface of Mars,” he explained. “We study what the humans will do, where they’ll walk and how they’ll get around.”

The class of 66 students divided themselves into teams of three. About half of the class members were geology majors and the rest were majoring in physics, chemistry or biology. Once the teams were assembled, the potential landing sites on Mars were assigned by drawing lots.

“The Human Mission to Mars” describes why each site is important for human exploration,” Levine explained. “There may be evidence of an ancient river or there may be evidence of life because there was once standing water. Each site has a unique feature that scientists would be interested in.”

The assignment was for each team to study the geology, mineralogy and topography of each site and to prepare a field trip. Their task, Levine said, boils down to “What would astronauts do once they get there?” Each team was to present their project and outline their proposal for a field trip in a four- to five-chart PowerPoint presentation at the end of the semester.

“The students were excited about this, because it wasn’t a make-work project,” Levine said. “And I told them that I was going to take posters from the top three projects to present at the Humans 2 Mars conference.”

It didn’t work out that way. Bailey and Levine were grading the field trip projects, working separately, and compared notes before class one day.

“I said, ‘Chuck, these are really good,’” Levine said. “The lowest grade I’ve given is an A- and the highest was an A+.” Bailey said that the projects he was grading looked similarly excellent. It was beginning to be clear that picking out just three projects to take to H2M would be quite a challenge.

The teams’ PowerPoint-enhanced presentations didn’t make the winnowing any easier. Levine invited some former NASA colleagues to attend the first day of the presentation. He had worked with these engineers and project managers on NASA’s highly successful Viking Project, which launched twin robotic missions to Mars in 1975, with each Viking spacecraft composed of an orbiter and a lander.

“It turns out that the deputy project manager for management, the site selection manager and the mission manager of the Viking Project all live in Williamsburg,” Levine said. “They retired here.”

All three NASA veterans were happy to attend the Planetary Geology team’s presentations, and Levine said that they liked what they heard. Gus Guastaferro, the Viking deputy project manager for management, told the class he was blown away by the first day’s presentation. All of the Viking group asked to come back for the second day.

“The presentations were so good and the questions from the class and from the Viking people were so interesting that Chuck and I had to extend the presentation,” Levine said. “We didn’t finish on the second day, so we had to continue on a third day.”

The Viking crew ended up attending all three days of the presentations, and Levine noted that each day they stayed after the class period was over, talking with the students.

After the first day of strong presentations, Levine and Bailey talked through a way to solve their three-project selection problem. Instead of Levine carrying three posters to H2M, a web site would capture all 22 of the class field trip proposals.

“We couldn’t do 22 posters,” Levine said. “I couldn’t carry them all.”

Planetary Geology student Matt Sniff ’15 volunteered to put the web site together. Sniff is one of the founders of CollegeCambio.com, an online marketing venue for students.

“This way, instead of having three posters in the conference room, all 22 projects will be online for everyone to see,” Levine said.

Levine will make the presentation of the Planetary Geology projects as part of his session titled “H2M Science Objectives: What, Why How?” The Humans 2 Mars Summit is sponsored by Explore Mars, Inc., an advocacy group for the human exploration of Mars. The conference, held May 6-8 at George Washington University, Washington, DC, is billed as a discussion “to address the major technical, scientific, and policy-related challenges that need to be overcome to send humans to Mars by 2030.”

Conference speakers, all invited, include the NASA administrator, a dozen NASA senior managers representing NASA’s programs in planetary missions, human exploration and space technology and more than five dozen Mars scientists, planetary engineers and technologists.

The above article was published May 3, 2013 in William & Mary News

Mars: The Next International Destination

artemis — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:27:10 +0000

The international community is longing for the next big cooperative goal in space exploration. There have been modest partnerships in space since the 1960s — growing during the Space Shuttle era — but the International Space Station was a turning point in international cooperation. It was far from a perfect model, but it pulled the various national space agencies closer together than ever before. For more than two decades this partnership grew, worked out technical and cultural differences, and evolved. These nations have managed to build, assemble and now operate the largest structure ever built in space.

ISS is supposed to operate until at least 2020. However, the time to start planning the next large international space mission is now. That mission should be a human mission to Mars. If we wait until ISS ends, we will have not only wasted a lot of time, but potentially wasted the opportunity to harness the expertise, lessons and unity that ISS brings us in space. If we let go of that unity in purpose, we may not get it back.

An international mission also makes sense from a budgetary perspective. Budget and policy pressures are far greater than they were in the 1990s when ISS was started, and that holds true for both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Dividing the costs will increase the total budget of the mission, but will reduce the cost that each nation will need to contribute. The international mission planners will also have the benefit of two decades of international coordination on ISS, which includes development of procedures, hardware integration and interpersonal/intercultural understanding. Without this foundation created by ISS, starting a new international mission would be far more complicated.

Perhaps the greatest potential benefit of an International effort is mission longevity. Over the past few decades, numerous missions and programs have been cancelled because of budgetary pressure, political wrangling and lack of unity of purpose. If ISS had remained an American-only mission, it almost certainly would have been cancelled back in the 1990s. Because it was based on international agreements and treaties, it was much more difficult to cast away and so the mission endured. A similar structure could be created for a Mars mission — a structure that will provide assurances that the mission can’t be easily cancelled by any nation — one that would build on the positive and negative lessons of ISS.

In the United States, a human mission to Mars is precisely what the nation needs — and a majority of U.S. citizens agree. A recent poll sponsored by Explore Mars showed that over 70 percent of Americans believe that humans will land on Mars by the early 2030s and more than 65 percent believe that both human and robotic exploration should be pursued. When the same group of people was asked what percentage of the U.S. federal budget NASA accounts for, the average answer was 2.5 percent — in reality, NASA accounts for less than half of one percent of federal spending.

Despite the troubling economic and budgetary times, there is clear support in the United States for human Mars exploration. In the same survey, participants favored doubling the NASA budget — to a full one percent — which would include a human mission to Mars. It is unclear what the level of support is internationally, but there would likely be solid support if a clear and sustainable mission plan is proposed.

It is time that the international community commits to a new mission — one that will land humans on Mars by the early 2030s.

This and many areas of discussion will be addressed at the Humans to Mars Summit on May 6-8, 2013 at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

The above article was published on April 25, 2013 in the Huffington Post

‘Get Curious’ website by Phillips & Company shoots for the stars

artemis — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:52:02 +0000

BEST WEBSITE

This website encourages adults and kids to think about exploring Mars.

Winner: Phillips & Company for Explore Mars

Explore Mars, a nonprofit organization, is focused on sending humans to Mars within the next 20 years. Phillips & Company, a global communications firm, was hired to help spread this nonprofit’s message.

The “Get Curious” campaign began “as a way to raise awareness for the landing of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, Curiosity, on Mars through media relations, guerilla marketing, social media, website optimization and promotion, and relationships,” according to the entry.

PR Daily’s 2012 Media Relations Award for Best Website goes to Phillips & Company—not only for the way it designed the website, but for all the clever ways it encouraged people to view it.

To bring attention to the interactive website, Phillips & Company pitched media outlets nationwide, hosted Curiosity “landing parties” throughout the U.S., and put eight “Mars” rocks in eight cities. Social media also played a part in promoting the website, and there was a flurry of activity on Explore Mars’ Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ accounts.

Highlights from the website included mission updates, exploration history, news coverage, featured videos, and photo galleries. The “Curiosity Kids” section is filled with games for students and teachers. From July 23, 2012, to Aug. 8, 2012, the website received more than 180,000 site views and garnered more than 4,000 likes on Facebook. GetCurious.com had more than 700 direct tweets and more than 300 +1’s on Google+.

Congratulations to Phillips & Company for launching a creative website and promoting it in a fun way.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here

The above article was published in the Ragan’s PR Daily on March 25, 2013.

Curiosity finds water-bearing minerals and Clay minerals

artemis — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:57:32 +0000

Last week we heard that Curiosity found signs of environmental conditions that were favorable for microbial life in the past. Additional findings presented today (March 18) at a news briefing at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, suggest those conditions extended beyond the site of the drilling.
Using infrared-imaging capability of a camera on the rover and an instrument that shoots neutrons into the ground to probe for hydrogen, researchers have found more hydration of minerals near the clay-bearing rock John Klein at locations Curiosity visited earlier.

The Mastcam can also serve as a mineral-detecting and hydration-detecting tool. The brightness in different Mastcam near-infrared wavelengths can indicate the presence of some hydrated minerals. The technique was used to check rocks in the “Yellowknife Bay” area where Curiosity drilled. Some rocks in Yellowknife Bay are crisscrossed with bright veins. These bright veins contain hydrated minerals that are different from the clay minerals in the surrounding rock.
The Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument detects hydrogen beneath the rover while it is driving. The detected hydrogen is mainly in water molecules bound into minerals. At Yellowknife Bay a lot of waterbound minerals were detected.

The Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) on the robotarm tells us that the wet environmental processes that produced clay at Yellowknife Bay did so without much change in the overall mix of chemical elements. The elemental composition of John Klein rocks matches the composition of basalt as it has basalt-like proportions of silicon, aluminum, magnesium and iron. Basalt is the most common rock type on Mars. It is igneous (made with fire), but it is also thought to be the parent material for sedimentary rocks Curiosity has examined. At first the dust on the rocks of Yellowknife Bay made detection by the APXS not quite possible. After the dust was brushed off by Curiosity the team found taht the rocks were not changed much by mineral alteration, according to Mariek Schmidt of Brock University, Saint Catharines, Ontario, Canada. The sedimentary rocks at Yellowknife Bay likely formed when original basaltic rocks were broken into fragments, transported, re-deposited as sedimentary particles, and mineralogically altered by exposure to water.

Curiosity Briefing March 18, 1 pm EDT (17:00 UT)

artemis — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 06:56:02 +0000

The next Curiosity briefing will come life to us from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas. It will be webcasted on ustream at Mars 18, 1 pm EDT. (17:00 UT)

If you want to meet the scientists briefing us in a more personal way, visit for Mariek Schmidt her pinterest page, where she pins those objects that interest her. Seeing her name made me wonder whether she is related to the Maarten Schmidt of JPL who discovered the first Quasar in 1963, but that is an aside.
Mariek herself is a Brock University professor. She moved to Pasadena last September from Canada to work as a participating scientist with NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory team. Mariek reviews the data send by Curiosity on the chemical and mineralogical changes that Martian rocks have experienced over millennia.
Schmidt hopes to prove the theory that life once existed on Mars, but that’s not her main goal. The important goal for her is to determine whether or not Mars is a habitable environment for humans.
To determine if Mars can host people Curiosity needed to find clay. The reason why clay samples are important is that they’re hydrated minerals. They form under specific conditions that are likely more neutral conditions that are more favourable to life.
Good news is that Curiosity already found clay in its first drilled sample, signaling that the planet once had a wet and hospitable environment. This means that the question of Mariek is answered and that while the Curiosity mission has just begun being only 7 months on Mars at this point in time.

MSL Picture of the Day:T+218 Days: 50 years of Mars Exploration robots

artemis — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 05:29:19 +0000

Since 196o humans from planet Earth have been sending probes to sisterplanet Mars. The below portrait (click on it for full screen) shows all the robots that were at least partially succesful in telling us what Mars looks like, or is made of. I described these missions in my blog MSL Picture of the Day: T- 21 Days to T-7 Days, if you want to read up on what we send and what their mission was. Although the Russians were the first to send satellites to Mars, they were never very succesful. Most of the knowledge we have of Mars comes from American and even 1 European probe as the Japanese, and recently the combined Russian / Chinese probes were did not reach Mars.

America had Eyes on Mars since 1965, when the Mariner 4 reached Mars and send back pictures of a barren, crater filled landscape. In sequence NASA had the following eyes on Mars:

Mariners (T-21 Days) in 1965-1974

Viking satellites (T-20 Days) active 1976 – 1981

Mars Global Surveyor active 1997-2007

Mars Odyssey active 2001 till present

The European Space Agency sattelite Mars Express, active 2003 till present

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, active 2005 till present

The various Russian satellites send to Mars since 1960

Even China tried to send a satellite on a piggy back ride with a Russian satellite, but that mission failed at launch.

We send a number of landers to Mars of which the NASA Viking landers in 1976 were the first truly succesful ones

The Pathfinder mission a decade later in 1997

Phoenix lander, active for 3 months in 2005 before the winter of Mars reached the Northern Polar region again.

America send various rovers to Mars, each larger and more capable than the next one since 1997:

in 1997 Sojourner was the first rover to roam Mars for a few weeks, after it drove off the Pathfinder lander.

in 2004 we send to rovers, of which Spirit preceded her sister with 3 weeks. Spirit stopped communicating with us in 2010.

Opportunity landed 24 January 2004 and is still active

And, ofcourse, in 2012 NASA landed the Curiosity Rover, which is set to drive over Mars in Gale Crater for at least 2 Earth years, but possible for many years after that.