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Mars from Hubble

For the last few years, we've been able to frame NASA'due south research and exploration with the goal of reaching Mars. The agency has been saying it wanted to land a homo on the red planet in the 2030s, but now that'southward looking less likely. William Gerstenmaier, NASA's acquaintance ambassador for human exploration, has noted that NASA only doesn't take the money to brand a Mars landing happen. The technology to reach Mars isn't cheap, and no 1 seems willing to pay for it.

NASA's upkeep has been essentially flat for the last decade. Gerstenmaier's statements came at a meeting of the American Found for Helmsmanship and Astronautics, where he explained the problem with Mars missions. Landing on Mars is extremely challenging, and information technology will price a lot of money to create systems reliable plenty to send humans at that place. Well, if you want them to come home, that is. Fifty-fifty the expensive robotic missions have been hit or miss. Of the 16 attempted landings on Mars since 1970, only seven of them have been successful. The most recent failure was the ExoMars lander, which crashed considering atmospheric turbulence caused it to tumble much faster than expected.

Mars has basically the worst possible set of traits for successful landings. Sending people to the moon was no like shooting fish in a barrel feat, but the moon had very little gravity and no atmosphere. Thus, propulsive landing was feasible and the craft didn't demand heatshields. Mars has more than gravity, simply the atmosphere is besides sparse for parachutes to do all the work. At the same time, the temper is only thick enough to make landings unpredictable and crave the apply of heatshields. That'southward why Curiosity used a wacky skycrane contraption to land on the surface.

NASA has looked into a skycrane organisation to state larger arts and crafts, just the numbers are tough. Curiosity had a total mass of two tons, but a manned lander would probably clock in at 10 or 15 tons. Information technology'due south unclear if it would exist possible to land something like that on Mars with our electric current technology.

A concept of SpaceX's dragon capsule landing on Mars.

So, what about SpaceX? The house founded by Elon Musk has gotten extremely expert at landing rockets on Earth, and it aims to launch an experimental Mars mission equally presently equally 2020. It took SpaceX a while to figure out how to land in World's atmosphere, then information technology might take a few tries to get the kinks worked out on Mars. At that betoken, the procedure needs to be tested and confirmed safe for humans. Information technology's impossible to know if that would be possible by the 2030s.

In the meantime, we tin can at least look frontward to the 2020 rover mission, which volition tell united states more near the potential for life on Mars.