While chances of finding alien life are slim, the Red Dragon project is still a worthy investment because both NASA and Elon Musk would want to see humans on Mars sometime in the next couple of decades and it is imperative to have as much data as possible about the planet before the first colonists arrive. Although gravity on Mars is about 1/3 of what it is on Earth, the vehicle is still plummeting toward the ground at over 1,000 miles per hour after entering Mars’s atmosphere. And they could then be analyzed physically and chemically to see what the Martian landscape consists of.
Advertisement
The mission has yet to receive the approval of the sponsors and parent agencies. This would allow Red Dragon to rendezvous with the planned 2020 NASA Mars rover, which will have already collected soil samples for the return mission. Thus all these things are on the drawing board only and have still not been put into practice.
The unprecedented antenna signal strength achieved eliminates the need for multiple orbiting satellites that have to relay data back to Earth.
If the project gets fully funded, Red Dragon would launch with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket next year and land near where the 2020 Mars rover is set to land (though that has yet to be determined). It might take some extra elbow grease and effort, but the scheme is not anything out of the blue and can be managed.
The project would launch a modified version of SpaceX’s current Dragon spacecraft to the Red Planet by as early as 2022, hence the project name “Red Dragon”.
“Illustration of what Mars might have looked like covered in water billions of years ago”. The planet was a warmer terrain back then too. Who knows, maybe some small remnants are still out there. And while NASA’s Curiosity rover is currently drilling into the Martian surface in search for signs of ancient alien life, it has come up empty-handed.
NASA has been seriously considering a sample-return mission like this for a while, ranking it as the highest-priority big-budget mission for the future in the U.S. National Research Center’s 2013 decadal survey.
Advertisement
NASA aims to grab and cache samples from a potentially habitable environment with its next Mars rover, which is scheduled to blast off in 2020.
