Mars special
Race to the red planetIt would take about nine months to get to Mars and it
might take two years for the planets to align for a return
The sky on Mars is pink in the
day, blue at sunrise and sunset.
This is because the dust in the
atmosphere causes red particles
of light to scatter, but as the sun
rises and sets, red wavelengths are
filtered out, so the sky is blue.Mars’s volcanoes are much
larger than those on Earth,
possibly because of the planet’s
weaker gravity. Scientists believe
that some of them may not be
extinct, but just lying dormant.
Olympus Mons on Mars is thebiggest volcano in the solar system.
At some 25km high, it is three times
taller than Mount Everest.
The Valles Marineris is a 4,000km-
long chasm - four times bigger
than the Grand Canyon – and may
be the result of marsquakes.Did you
know?
tests the human body’s ability to withstand the muscle and
bone loss associated with zero gravity, and is a psychological
test of will and endurance. And while contact with astronauts
on the International Space Station (ISS) is simple, as it takes
only a fraction of a second to relay messages to and from
Earth, radio signals take 20 minutes to reach Mars, so
astronauts there will feel much more isolated, adding to the
psychological stress of confinement with a small team.
These testing conditions have been simulated on Earth
in order to evaluate their effect on people. Mars 500 was a
Russian/European/Chinese project between 2007 and 2011
in an isolation facility in a Moscow car park. It culminated in
a 520-day stay by six male volunteers. They claimed to be
in good health throughout, but some avoided exercise and
hid from their colleagues, and four had difficulty sleeping.
The latest simulation – Hawaii Space Exploration Analog
and Simulation, run for NASA by the University of Hawaii –
took place in the Mars-like landscape of Hawaii, 2,500m upthe side of the Mauna Loa volcano. A team of six emerged
from a year in isolation there on 28 August 2016. They had
been allowed out on simulated Mars walks, but only wearing a
full space suit; the rest of the time they were living in cramped
conditions in a 100sq m geodesic dome. The European Space
Agency also performs regular evaluations of the crew at the
remote Concordia station in Antarctica to assess the effects
of confinement during the long, dark polar winter (see page
67). And there are other simulations set up by the Mars
Society in the Utah desert and the Canadian Arctic.
Mars Society president Robert Zubrin has a mission plan
that, he believes, will be safer and cheaper than any other. It
involves first launching an unmanned Earth Return Vehicle
(ERV) that would land on Mars and use solar or nuclear power
and imported hydrogen to produce methane and oxygen from
Martian CO 2. In other words, rocket fuel. This means that
humans would set out only once they knew there would be
a fuelled return vehicle waiting for them on Mars. The craft