In 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft completed the first Martian flyby and six years later, the Soviet Union’s Mars 3 lander became the first spacecraft to land on Mars. Since then, there have been numerous successful missions to the Red Planet, including the deployment of four Mars rovers and NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which produced a map of the entire planet.
In 2019, efforts to colonise Mars have reached new levels, with the likes of SpaceX seeking to “make life multi-planetary”, with the goal to make space travel accessible to all.
While the ambitions of programmes such as these remain to be tested to their limits, it is not beyond reason to expect major breakthroughs in manned explorations of Mars within the coming decades.
NASA is planning its own manned mission to Mars, currently pencilled in for the 2030s.
However, it will come as no surprise that a mission such as this poses challenges to the human body never before experienced.
Mars’s atmosphere is about one percent the density of Earth’s and is composed of more than 95 percent carbon dioxide.
Mars also lacks a magnetic field like Earth’s, so cannot deflect harmful radiation coming from the space, which would be deadly to humans.
Add the extreme temperatures, lack of gravity, and brutal storms, and it’s not hard to see just how inhospitable this environment would be to an Earthling.
Speaking to Express.co.uk, NASA astronaut and physiologist Dr James Pawelczyk explained some of the enormous challenges facing scientists in this field of research.
He said: “Once we move outside the Van Allen belts – the magnetic field around our earth – then we’re exposed to a much higher energy radiation forms.
“We also have the solar wind galactic cosmic radiation. And those really wreak havoc on the biology.
“When a high energy event hits DNA it pretty much shatters, and we don’t have DNA repair mechanisms that can deal with that.
“So that’s one of our big concerns for planetary exploration is how we shield from cosmic radiation.”
However, Dr Pawelczyk explained some of the groundbreaking research he’s involved in when it comes to solving the dilemmas posed by the hazards of Mars.
He said: “You can certainly use exotic forms of shielding like magnetic shielding that really would be the best way.”
But he added there is a long way to go with current research.
“The idea of terraforming Mars is – at least with current technology – kind of unrealistic,” he said.
“Having said all that, you can certainly use the thickness of dense materials – if something has a lot of hydrogen bonds it actually is a very good form of shielding.
“But we would need such a thickness that we really can’t take it with us.
“And so what we’ll probably end up using is some form of the Martian regolith (this is Mars soil for us non-scientists), and the Martian surface, to help protect us.”
And this is the key to understanding what life on Mars would really look like: it would be a life lived underground, Dr Pawelczyk predicts.
He said: “Survival on Mars really means going underground. So possibly identifying lava tubes of creating our own thick-walled structures but using the Martian surface.
“Normally, we take everything with us when we go explore a planet. But now we’ll be using the resources of that planet to help us stay there.
“So that’s why one of the big efforts for looking for water. We know there’s a lot of water on Mars…but what we want to do is get to those points to study that water see what it’s all about but also understand how to use that in the fractional gravity environment so that we can make oxygen.
“We can combine it with CO2 and we can make other fuels so that we don’t have to take it with us from Earth.”
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