"New Martians Killed by Oxygen"

Let's hope we never read this headline, and it may be thanks to MIT students who identified a short-coming in the Dutch Mars One mission plans. Mars One represents the first effort of a private company to place humans on the surface of Mars. What the students found should be seen as helpful to the planners and one might wonder why it was not considered earlier.

MIT students Sydney Do, Koki Ho, Samuel Schreiner, Andrew Owens and Olivier de Weck conducted their own assessment of the Mars project, funded by NASA and others, and issued their results in a paper titled “An Independent Assessment of the Technical Feasibility of the Mars One Mission Plan.”  Among other things, they reported: 

Our assessment revealed a number of insights into architecture decisions for establishing a colony on the Martian surface. If crops are used as the sole food source, they will produce unsafe oxygen levels in the habitat.

Unfortunately, Mars One was not too receptive to the paper.  MarsOne co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp, in an email to SpacePolicyOnline, said he did not have time to respond to the comments and:

the lack of time for support from us combined with their limited experience results in incorrect conclusions.

Mr. Lansdrop may not have time, but if I was one of the volunteers hoping to win a one-way ticket to the Red Planet, I would be reading this report very carefully.

 Source:  Table taken from the MIT students' report.

17th International Mars Society Convention

If you are looking for more information on Mars, from past rover programs to ideas for future settlements, you may want to attend the 17th International Mars Society Convention at the South Shore Harbour Resort in League City, Texas from August 7-10, 2014.  

Last year's conference covered a number of interesting topics, including:

-- Latest Findings from the Mars Probes
-- Plans for Human Mars Missions
-- Martian agriculture/aquaculture and greenhouse/greenhab technology
-- Terraforming - Creating an Ecology for Mars
-- The One Way Mission to Mars
-- Asteroid Missions: A Bridge to Mars?

For example, Bas Lansdorp, the co-founder and CEO of Mars One, discussed his idea of organizing a mission to Mars.  If you want to view this presentation and others, you can view them at the Mars Society's page on YouTube.  And if you want to learn more about the projects of the Mars Society, I recommend you visit their website as well as view their past quarterly reports.