Mars
February 10, 2015 Assumptions 3 comments nrosenshein15
The Red Planet., Mars has been a target for science fiction and scientist for many years. Usually depicting little green “Martians” as the natives of the planet. Unfortunately, this has never been proven true. NASA and other countries have launched dozens of probes and rovers to visit this planet, with only the United States successfully landing operational rovers. The most recent one, the Mars Science Laboratory, nicknamed “Curiosity” landed on Mars back in 2012. Curiosity’s mission was to drill into Mt. Sharp(Aeolis Mons) to learn more about the ancient martian climate. Curiosity recently discovered ancient water molecules in what is now theorized as an ancient lakebed. Along with the ancient water, Curiosity detected a lot of methane which could mean organic life, or it could just be given off from water and rock.
Many private companies have sprung up lately trying to get into the space industry. One of the most successful companies, SpaceX, is quickly making breakthroughs in the industry. SpaceX’s CEO and founder, Elon Musk, has crazy plans to try and advance humanity in many ways. His ultimate goal for SpaceX is to allow other people to visit other planets, his personal goal is to visit Mars. Musk has done many resupply missions for NASA and has even tested out new designs for rockets. One of the designs, when successful, will reduce the cost of launching things to orbit significantly. SpaceX created a rocket that will be reusable. Instead of discarding a booster to the rocket, they have made it so the booster returns back to Earth(for now) and lands, ready to be prepped and relaunched once again.
Curiosity finding ancient water on Mars gives hope for here being water underground. This water could be useful for martian cities and colonies that we will one day have. Elon Musk has a rocket being planned and built that could be the first colony on Mars. NASA has stated and made a deadline of putting a man on Mars by 2035. MarsOne, another company plans to start launching crews of 4 to mars starting in 2024. From all of these companies, and even personal goals of Elon Musk, it seems that Mars will have a colony on it before 2050. 35 years from now. This work is not something that will be done easily, we went to the moon in the ‘60’s, lets go to Mars by 2060.
3 Comments
This post is really interesting! How long did it take for curiosity to travel to mars? A few years? Also didn’t NASA close down or stop production a couple of years ago? Are they back in operation now? You put in a lot of research and outside knowledge into this. Great article!
So Curiosity launched on November 26, 2011, and landed August 6, 2012. So a little more than 10 months. NASA did not close down, but they were ordered in 2004 by President Bush to cancel the space shuttle programs for 2010. They were then going to work on another capsule to go with the Aries rocket, but President Obama canceled that and pushed for them to work closer with private spaceflight companies to launch rockets. SpaceX has been an integral company in launching as they developed their Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket which has been used to resupply the International Space Station a few times.
Remember, Mars does not have an atmosphere that we can breath on, so people would need to spend most of their time indoors. Oxygen would have to be created from plants or other methods for us to breath.