at least another twenty years separate the man’s first walk on Mars. Cost controlled descent into the Martian atmosphere, resistance astronauts to travel and to cosmic radiation: Despite recent advances, challenges remain immense
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color taken by Curiosity on Mars First Photograph: Mount Sharp © Nasa
A conference to examine the feasibility and usefulness of the trip to Mars meet in Washington on Monday for some of the greatest experts on the subject, including Buzz Aldrin, second man to walked on the Moon, and Dennis Tito, an American billionaire first “space tourist”.
The conference is held under the auspices of NASA, with the blessing of its Director Charles Bolden, the first African-American and close to Barack Obama astronaut. According to the space program of the President American, the first priority would be to land on asteroids around the moon, then go to the orbit of Mars, without trampling the ground.
eyes on the red planet, experts gathered in Washington yet believe that manned mission to Mars is the realm of possibility in the next 20 years. However, if
is more than three obstacles.
fiscal crisis NASA
The U.S. space agency receives only 0.5% of the federal budget compared to 4% in the Apollo project of conquest of the moon in the 1960s. For four years, he has lost 5% of its value, reaching $ 17.7 billion for 2014, compared with 3.7 billion euros from the European Space Agency for its 2010 budget.
Scott Hubbard, former director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA, said he was realistic. “ Going to Mars requires no miracles but money and a program to meet the technological challenges ,” he said in an interview with AFP.
weight spacecraft
This technical difficulty is huge: how to stop the shuttle during its descent through the Martian atmosphere? The Curiosity robot that landed on Mars in December only weighs a ton. Responsible for the necessary fuel for the return of astronauts, the shuttle that will be sent to Mars in turn weigh around 40 tons. A nuclear engine could then produce enough energy to cover the distance between Earth and Mars, which varies from 56 to 400 million km depending on the position of the two planets.
human component
robots as Curiosity pose fewer technical and human problems. The astronauts will face isolation which is just beginning to understand the psychological effects. In 2010, six volunteers were isolated for a year and a half in the Mars 500 mission. Conclusion: man can survive a 500-day isolation
.
However, researchers have more difficulty understanding the effects of a long stay in space on the body of the astronauts. Loss of bone and muscle mass due to the low gravity may well be fought, but under pressure in the skull astronauts can cause some damage, such as vision problems more or less severe. Researchers have observed this type of injury among astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS).
public and private competition
addition to NASA and the European Space Agency, which have the largest budgets, other contenders for the planet Mars may come back in the race in the coming years. After various setbacks and a doubled budget Roskomos, the “Russian NASA” could reinvest space. China also built its permanent space station, and years a feature film released last week, it was the turn of Lebanon to invent a space program.
In 2001, businessman Dennis Tito paid twenty million dollars to spend a week in space. It is now too old to be sent to the air again, but announced the launch of a shuttle to Mars in 2018, with two new “space tourists” on board. More recently, a private capsule launched by the U.S. company SpaceX has delivered equipment to the ISS . These private investments of a new kind could fill the holes in the NASA budget and accelerate research.
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