Today, thanks to decades of successful American robotic explorers, we know more about the universe than ever before. We have learned that asteroids have shaped life on our home planet and will likely affect our future. Their scientific value and their potential as a resource make them valuable targets for further exploration. Many of the technologies we need to send astronauts to an asteroid can also serve as foundational technologies that will be necessary to make human exploration of Mars possible.
While President Kennedy set NASA on a course to win the race against Russia to get to the moon, today, human spaceflight is a global endeavor, with astronauts and cosmonauts living and working together on the International Space Station — a remarkable facility developed with 15 international partners. America should continue to push the boundaries of space and lead a global effort of exploration.
I have always been an enthusiastic supporter of human space flight. My administration will continue to invest in this worthwhile endeavor. Mars is a consensus horizon goal, though to send humans safely, we still need to advance the technologies required to mitigate the effects of long-duration, deep-space flight.
We’ve been to the Moon but we didn’t stay very long...So the US really ought to consider, in my view, leading international expeditions back to the Moon and to other bodies in the Solar System, and perhaps eventually Mars, and work[ing] with other countries to ensure free access to space. I think the new president could find this to be a real opportunity for leadership.
I’m convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket.
Sand dunes cover much of this terrain, which has large boulders lying on flat areas between the dunes. It is late winter in the southern hemisphere of Mars, and these dunes are just getting enough sunlight to start defrosting their seasonal cover of carbon dioxide. Spots form where pressurized carbon dioxide gas escapes to the surface.
It is kind of like having roommates that just are always there and you can never escape them so I'm sure some people can imagine what that is like and if you can't then just imagine never being able to get away from anybody.
This 360-degree vista was acquired on Aug. 5, 2016, by the Mastcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover as the rover neared features called "Murray Buttes" on lower Mount Sharp. The dark, flat-topped mesa seen to the left of the rover's arm is about 50 feet high and, near the top, about 200 feet wide.
The next human exploration capabilities needed beyond the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule are deep space, long duration habitation and in-space propulsion. We are now adding focus and specifics on the deep space habitats where humans will live and work independently for months or years at a time, without cargo supply deliveries from Earth.All of this is part of NASA's Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships-2 program. About $65 million is expected to be expended as part of this 2 year project.
The large, dark region at far right is Syrtis Major Planitia, one of the first features identified on the surface of the planet by seventeenth-century observers. Christiaan Huygens used this feature to measure the rotation rate of Mars. (A Martian day is about 24 hours and 37 minutes.) Today we know that Syrtis Major is an ancient, inactive shield volcano. Late-afternoon clouds surround its summit in this view.
A large oval feature to the south of Syrtis Major is the bright Hellas Planitia basin. About 1,100 miles across and nearly five miles deep, it was formed about 3.5 billion years ago by an asteroid impact.
The orange area in the center of the image is Arabia Terra, a vast upland region in northern Mars that covers about 2,800 miles. The landscape is densely cratered and heavily eroded, indicating that it could be among the oldest terrains on the planet. Dried river canyons (too small to be seen here) wind through the region and empty into the large northern lowlands.
South of Arabia Terra, running east to west along the equator, are the long dark features known as Sinus Sabaeus (to the east) and Sinus Meridiani (to the west). These darker regions are covered by dark bedrock and fine-grained sand deposits ground down from ancient lava flows and other volcanic features. These sand grains are coarser and less reflective than the fine dust that gives the brighter regions of Mars their ruddy appearance. Early Mars watchers first mapped these regions.
An extended blanket of clouds can be seen over the southern polar cap. The icy northern polar cap has receded to a comparatively small size because it is now late summer in the northern hemisphere. Hubble photographed a wispy afternoon lateral cloud extending for at least 1,000 miles at mid-northern latitudes. Early morning clouds and haze extend along the western limb.
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Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come
I don't want to be someone who bets against Mr. Musk and I hope can make it happen as the race for the Red Planet continues. Unfortunately, it seems the Europeans and Russians are delaying their ExoMars mission until 2020, so the field is open for SpaceX yet the path is still perilous.Dragon 2 is designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system. Red Dragon Mars mission is the first test flight.
Individual instances of methane detection on Mars have been reported on five occasions via Earth-based telescopic observations, once by the ESA Mars Express mission over a two-month period, and eight times by the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover. For all instances, Mars experienced a close interaction with the orbit of a periodic comet within 16 days previous to the observation of methane. Moreover, all methane observations correlate with interactions between Mars and seven comets. These comets have all been previously identified as the likely sources of meteor showers on Mars.
For more than fifty years, Halley Research Station—located on the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea—has collected a continuous stream of meteorological and atmospheric data critical to our understanding of polar atmospheric chemistry, rising sea levels, and the depletion of the ozone layer. Since the station’s establishment in 1956, there have been six Halley stations, each designed to withstand the difficult climatic conditions. The first four stations were crushed by snow. The fifth featured a steel platform, allowing it to rise above snow cover, but it, too, had to be abandoned when it moved too far from the mainland, making its habitation precarious.Ms. Slavid wrote about this station in July 2010 in The Architectural Review, pointing out the harsh living conditions:
Temperatures regularly plummet to below -50˚C, winds can reach over 100mph and nearly a third of the year is spent in total darkness. Each year the ice shelf moves 700m and over a metre of snowfall accumulates on its surface, gradually entombing and crushing built structures.Halley VI was completed in 2012 and will hopefully stand for many more years. But does it offer a model for the cold surface of Mars? I would imagine it's lessons are more about isolation than construction. For instance, radiation exposure, as well as the absence of water and breathable air, would the bigger concern on Mars. That said, the ice station shows humans are very adaptable to new locations and challenges. Something we will certainly need for Mars.
Stellar astronomer and TED Senior Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz works on NASA's Kepler mission, searching for places in the universe that could support life. So it's worth a listen when she asks us to think carefully about Mars. In this short talk, she suggests that we stop dreaming of Mars as a place that we'll eventually move to when we've messed up Earth, and to start thinking of planetary exploration and preservation of the Earth as two sides of the same goal. As she says, "The more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet."You can get the transcript here.
InSight's investigation of the Red Planet's interior is designed to increase understanding of how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed and evolved,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight Principal Investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California. “Mars retains evidence about the rocky planets' early development that has been erased on Earth by internal churning Mars lacks. Gaining information about the core, mantle and crust of Mars is a high priority for planetary science, and InSight was built to accomplish this."
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