In this report called NASA’s Journey to Mars: Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration, the US space agency will unveil three comprehensive primary thresholds that the agency will encounter upon the voyage to Mars. Mars pioneers will have to be much more independent, and that’s what the next step in NASA’s Red Planet plan – the proving ground – is all about.
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Public interest on the big reveal seemingly increased following a recent tweet from NASA Spaceflight.com’s managing editor Chris Bergin that hinted at SpaceX’s plans for future projects.
“From this world-class microgravity laboratory, we are testing technologies and advancing human health and performance research that will enable deep space, long duration missions”, Bolden added. Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1), the first uncrewed launch of Orion atop the SLS, is now scheduled for 2018.
William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA Headquarters, said: “NASA’s strategy connects near-term activities and capability development to the journey to Mars and a future with a sustainable human presence in deep space”.
Sending astronauts to Mars is the third stage of the plan.
From rovers to orbiting probes that are now exploring Mars, NASA is already preparing to launch missions to Mars when the space agency announced a detailed three step plan for future manned space missions to the Red Planet. This ambitious goal will be enabled by worldwide cooperation, the knowledge and expertise gained by human missions to the space station and the proving ground, and by all the data gathered by robotic Red Planet explorers, according to the new report. India and Europe also control active Mars orbiters, called Mangalyaan and Mars Express, respectively.
But after missions began to be conducted in the 1960s “it was determined that Mars was an arid planet, analogous to Chile’s Atacama Desert, with extreme radiation and very low temperatures in which it’s impossible to survive”.
Via our robotic emissaries, we have now been on and around Mars for 40 years, taking almost every single opportunity to send orbiters, landers, and rovers with increasingly complex experiments and sensing systems.
However, Elon Musk has other reasons for colonizing Mars. A new and potent space transportation program is key to the journey, but NASA also will have to have to find out new approaches of operating in space, based on self-reliance and improved method reliability.
“My regular work consists of studying the solar system, mainly Mars’ atmosphere”, said Villanueva, who works at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and specializes in the search for organic molecules on Mars and in bodies of ice. The revolutionary Curiosity sky crane placed nearly a single metric ton – about the size of a compact auto – safely on the surface of Mars, but we want to be in a position to land at least ten times that weight with humans – and then be capable to get them off the surface. “Our challenge is to figure out … what happened to that wetter Mars”. For example, astronauts may stop at one of Mars’ two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, along the way.
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