Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
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But the technological and medical hurdles are immense
Deadly radiation from the cosmos, potential vision loss, and atrophying bones are just some of the challenges scientists must overcome before any future astronaut can set foot on Mars, experts and top NASA officials said on Tuesday. The U.S. space agency believes it can put humans on the Red Planet within 25 years, but the technological and medical hurdles are immense. “The cost of solving those means that under current budgets, or slightly expanded budgets, it’s going to take about 25 years to solve those,” said former NASA astronaut Tom Jones, who flew on four space shuttle missions before retiring in 2001. “We need to get started now on certain key technologies,” he told reporters in Washington. At an average distance of about 225 million km, Mars poses scientific problems an order of magnitude greater than anything encountered by the Apollo lunar missions.
Better propulsion
With today’s rocket technology, it would take an astronaut up to nine months to reach Mars — the physical toll of floating that long in zero gravity would be huge. One way to reduce wear and tear on the human body is to dramatically cut down on travel time to Mars. “If we start now, in 25 years we might have these technologies available to help us and protect us from these long transit times,” he said. Under current conditions, just an outbound trip to Mars would take so long that any astronaut would receive the same amount of radiation than ordinarily would be deemed safe over the course of an entire career. NASA has a new robotic lander called InSight zooming towards Mars, due to land on November 26 after taking off from California on May 5. The $993 million project aims to expand human knowledge of interior conditions on Mars, inform efforts to send explorers there, and reveal how rocky planets like the earth formed billions of years ago.
