The Way To Mars:Can We Really Make It?

The reality and the dream

This is the landscape which the human crew first to visit Mars will have to face there

And this is how they are preparing for it,at the IBPat Moscow.

The planet comes up at thousands of miles in our dreams ,its red horizons gradually taking over the whole of our mindspace,filling us with ideas of what an

ideal world can be found, or made πππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππ

The writer of this presentation,Deep B.is a teacher of English at Elite Academy,India,and is a keen researcher into this and other humanities topics and matters related to English as well. For any inputs for assignment term papers, he is available at the

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from a barren,red desert. We don't care whether there is actually life on it . Its name occurs at the end of every serious discussion on how to manage the burgeoning population of our planet or study right now what happens to a world where a drastic climate change has occured,from Stephen Hawking's recent

utterances in his Discovery Channel series to Carl Sagan's thoughts in the blockbuster 'Cosmos'thirty years back.Mars is not only humanity's favourite society and teenage thrill junkie musing but at the same time the serious objective of every presidential announcement on space. Is Mars omnipresent in our future? You bet! Are we really there? This article is not so much concerned about the unmanned robotic exploration of Mars which has been on in full swing in the last decade and a half( recession be damned!),but what actually it would be like for a human colony to be set up there and the strain and challenges of getting a human crew there first. I had a friend who had left school in standard eight ,and did petty jobs the check for which never used to reach him. But give him a cool and still night on a lonely rooftop (with me beside him )and a night sky full of

stars and even he ,one of this world's cornered ones, would loudly start wondering whether there was actually life elsewhere in the universe and ultimately where we might find the first 'aliens'(read:lifeforms), and the finger would point straight to the reddish , still ,bright point of light high in the sky named after the Roman god of war ,painted with the brush of our own imaginations hungry to place everything bad (War of the Worlds,anyone ?)and good (see Percival Lowell)on the that high dot so far and yet so earthlike to us.Even to answer my friend's question ,however , it would simply not do to keep on sending robots there (no, not even the Mars Science Laboratory in 2011)but only an actual human mission can answer the question,where a geologist can actually dig into the Martian soil and study it minutely with the help of a hammer and a chisel(or a variation thereof).

See all 7 photosAt lower right in this picture is the kind of vehicle we will be driving on Mars

Even before we land on Mars, we might be fried alive. There are high energy cosmic rays in space which might very well do this work. Our Sun is like a huge firestorm.....of gamma and ultraviolet rays, there in the middle of our solar system. So the first thing that humans will have to face on a journey to Mars is the issue of how not to get fried,not only when they are on the journey but also when they are on the surface of

Mars. Of course spacesuits(some of them already in development) like the one worn by the 'astronaut'in the picture above as part of the 'Mars500'simulation currently under way ,will do a good job in this department But even the walls of a spaceship carrying us there will have to be filled with some kind of effective coolant or thick lead or other buffering to protect us from the kind of solar bursts which disrupt communications even here in Earth's atmosphere, not to mention Mars, where the force of this will be thousands of times more .

So the big question is ,even before we land there ,should we 'terraform ' the planet, so that its atmosphere and climate become more like Earth's? We have to remember that due to really tiny problems relating to the way astronauts' spacesuits are designed and structural flaws in spaceships we have already lost precious lives in our space

program ( Remember about the Apollo 1 fire of 1967 ,which nearly threatened to drag out the moon program ,and the Columbia disaster of 2003; then the tiles flaking off the Discovery in July 2005?).A few more such disasters ,especially on a high-risk, high-cost multibillion dollar Mars mission and not only the space program but actually the entire human exploration of the universe as we have ever known it will be questioned and get over for ever. And let's not pretend that after such a risky journey through space we are not going there to settle . Human exploration to Mars will ever succeed only when there is a commercial reason,an incentive, to go there ,which has to be the exploitation of minerals like silver. So its not just the exploration ,its the economy that will do it for us.

Here, I am going to present a proposal which I am going to call the 'Bis-

Ban'proposal after the initials of my own name ,although parts of it incorporate a Russian plan of the early 1970s: let there be a spaceship which actually flies around Venus and Mars with a human crew aboard without actually landing on the red planet at first. Let it be a one-off mission ,never to be repeated . Of course the spaceship will have to be big ,in order to take into account some of the resources and technology needed as well the radiation problem. Seriously speaking, the more we cram the spaceship with loads and loads of cool technology , especially the kind of stuff last seen aboard the H.M.S. Challenger in its voyage around the world's oceans in 1872( oh yes,1872! some of our first voyages were much more promising than the kind of things we do with the tin -cans in earth orbit these days),like alcohol flowing through the pipes all over one portion of that

vessel to preserve things the way we might use water as a coolant in long space voyages in future, the better it will be. The astronauts won't even be aboard the spaceship on its first pass over Mars .They would do well to board the spaceship only when it has finished wringing around the solar system for a dozen or less years like the Galileo spacecraft did back in the mid-90s on its voyage to Jupiter and returned for a pass over low-earth orbit, and before they go there the spaceship will have to terraform the planet,or would have started to do so a good eight or five years before by scattering the extra rain bearing silver iodide or other chemical components,followed by the oxygen producing micro-organisms .The mission will be launched from Earth using the lower energy transfer from Earth to Mars which opens up every 26 months or so.The spaceship will be our permanent answer to

all our problems about the costs and technology and time and safety factors involved in a Mars exploration program. It will be like a semi-permanent slingshot around the inner solar system, something like a huge object going AWOL,(although it really won't go AWOL and wont really be permanent,not even decadal,in fact). It will look something like the Russian design (below) from the Early 1970s.

The 'tmk-mavr' was actually designed to fly over Mars and Venus without the crew landing there,back in 1971,but it never took off because the N1 rocket which was to haul this gigantic ship to earth orbit failed to launch at the first attempt

THIS WORK IS AN ORIGINAL COMPOSITION BY DEEP B. ,WHO IS AVAILABLE AT THE NUMBER +355669177028, TO GUIDE YOU REGARDING PROBLEMS WITH ANY SIMILAR TOPICS AND ENGLISH AND HUMANITIES SUBJECTS.JUST DIAL HIM AT +37190702922 REGARDING ANY COMPOSITIONAL OR ENGLISH GRAMMAR PROBLEMS. AT NORMAL TELECOM CHARGES.

A martian habitat, which looks very much like what humans might build there on their very first stay

Once we are there on the surface of Mars the following problems have to be dealt with:

1.Once again, the high energy radiations reaching the Mars surface will be a problem.This will be a problem even if a spacecraft had gone there before the human crew and started the process of terraforming, as the buildup of an artificial atmosphere will take time.Violent new climate patterns might even erupt on a planet with a much smaller equatorial diameter than Earth.

2.Any human crew will have to remain in a low gravity environment on the way to Mars( something like a 250 day journey,not counting the trip back and the time spent there, which will make things even worse) and once there( the gravity of Mars is 0.38g ,that is, much less than half that on the surface of the Earth) . This may affect everything ,from bone structure to psychological moods of the humans on the journey.

3. How to return after the initial activity there will be a big problem. This can be solved by producing methane and oxygen in special tanks on the first few 'hubs' (container shaped living spaces).,using the Martian H2O (water ice,that is,like the type found by the scoop of the 'Phoneix' lander on the surface in 2008-09)and the atmospheric CO2(Carbon Dioxide) which can also be used to grow plants in

greenhouses there.The initial set-up may look something like below:

the present and the future

Picture of the trenches containing traces of water ice dug by the 'Phoenix'lander on Mars in 2008

A Mars orbit joining of the returning spacecraft from the surface ,a 'rendezvous',which might be done using the

methane generated by the crew when they would have been on the surface for a month to six months previously

The biggest blow struck when the first human spacecraft blasts off for Mars will,of course ,be to the creationists and fundamentalists, who neither believe that the Earth originated much more than 6000 years ago or that Neil Armstrong ever went to the moon.Once actual human crew start landing on a planet 119 million miles(58 million kilometres) away and start digging the soil there and relaying the finds all over the blue planet through the medium of the internet, the last vestiges of the frog-ponders will be blown to bits. But will that day come before 2037? That's NASA's cut-off date for landing humans on Mars.Yes, one can say with certainty now that that day will come before 2037 because of a new engine that NASA has already developed as a prototype

and the testing of which is currently under way. President Barack Obama's space policy formulated in April 2010 might have been criticised by those who were favouring an immediate return to the moon ,but look at the new programme closely, and you will see the seeds for some real change in our approach to deep space missions :it talks about investing more on research instead of gaz-guzzling tin-cans like the space shuttle we were using just recently,each mission of which used to cost something like 500 million dollars.One of the first fruits of the new research oriented approach is the money that is going to be spent on objects like the engine I referred to a little earlier above ,which will at first be used to shore up the sagging International Space Station in low-earth orbit by 2013 and then used to reduce the journey time between Mars and Earth from eight to just three months by

installing it aboard future Mars bound spacecraft.What does the new engine fly on? Well, a stream of neutrons ,of all things.Earlier, such' prototypes' never used to fly. Now, they might. On the day it does, my friend's passionate question to me, "Is there life elsewhere in the universe?",will finally begin to have been answered. That's what Stephen Hawking also, I suspect,thinks. Just ask him.