NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which landed on Mars on Thursday, is the fifth to complete the journey to the red planet, but when will humans come?
“From now until the mid to late 2030s, we may begin to use the means that allow us to go to the moon to send astronauts to Mars,” said Steve Jurczyk, NASA’s administrator. The great technological challenges are more or less solved, but many factors are still missing for this goal.
A trip to Mars will take about seven months, and at first the astronauts will spend 30 days there, anticipates NASA. The planet has an average temperature of 63 ° C below zero, the radiation is high there and the air is made of 95% carbon dioxide.
Gravity is only 38% of the Earth. But thanks to the “International Space Station, we learned a lot about microgravity,” says G. Scott Hubbard, a former NASA employee who led the US space agency’s first Mars program.
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However, many materials and techniques have not yet been tested. Perseverance carried several instruments on board in order to prepare for future human missions.
Among these instruments is MOXIE, the size of a car battery, whose goal is to try to produce oxygen on Mars, sucking in CO2, much like a plant.
This oxygen can be used for breathing and also as fuel. The famous Artemis back to the moon program, on which NASA is now focusing its efforts, is seen as a test bed before going to Mars.
The agency wants to take advantage of it to test a new space suit, xEMU, which will allow greater mobility and protect astronauts against low temperatures.
It will also be an opportunity to install some kind of nuclear power plant on the Moon to produce electricity, even during dust storms, which can cover the Sun for months on Mars, preventing the solar panels from working.
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What is the point of testing all this on the moon? Possibility to send rescue teams. On Mars, if things go wrong and break, you’re a few years away from home, “Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told AFP.
For Laura Forczyk, space industry analyst, “It’s possible” to send people to Mars, “but for now it’s safer to send robots”, for which the required safety standards are lower.
Political desire
The biggest obstacle is political will, because funding depends on it. In 1990, George HW Bush announced the arrival of man on Mars before the fiftieth anniversary of the first passage on the moon, in July 2019.
The similar promises of three of his successors (his son George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump) have not translated into any concrete program. Will it be in the 2030s?
“It is possible … but without the political will of the administration and Congress, it will not happen,” says G. Scott Hubbard. US President Joe Biden has not yet appointed a permanent administrator for NASA, nor has he given his views on space missions.
His spokesman only said he “supports” the Artemis program. The goal of returning an astronaut to the moon by 2024 will suffer “delays” and, as a “domino effect”, there will be a delay for Mars, warns Laura Forczyk, who considers more
a possible arrival on the red planet in the 2040s
AFP