The NASA Perseverance Rover, which landed on Mars on Thursday, is the fifth to complete the journey to the red planet, but when will the turn of humans arrive?
“By the mid to late 2030s, we may begin to use the means that allow us to go to the moon to send astronauts to Mars,” Steve Jurczyk, NASA’s interim administrator, said Thursday. The great technological challenges are more or less solved, but there are still many factors missing for this purpose.
A trip to Mars will take about seven months, and at the beginning the astronauts will spend 30 days there, anticipates NASA. The planet has an average temperature of 63 ° C below zero, the radiation is high there and the air is made up of 95% carbon dioxide.
Gravity is barely 38% of that of Earth. But thanks to the “International Space Station, we’ve learned a lot about microgravity,” says G. Scott Hubbard, a NASA employee who ran the US space agency’s first Mars program.
(Also read: Send humans to Mars, a closer dream thanks to Perseverance)
However, numerous materials and techniques have yet to be tested. Perseverance brought various instruments on board with the aim of preparing future human missions.
Among these tools this Moxie, the size of a car battery, aims to try to produce oxygen on Mars, sucking in CO2, a bit like a plant.
This oxygen can be used for breathing and also as fuel. The famous Artemis return to the moon program, in which NASA is now concentrating its efforts, is considered a test bed before going to Mars.
The agency wants to take advantage of this to try a new space suit, xEMU, that will allow for greater mobility and protect astronauts from low temperatures.
It will also be an occasion to install a kind of nuclear power plant on the Moon to produce electricity, even during dust storms, which can cover the Sun for months on Mars, which would prevent the operation of solar panels. .
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What’s the point of trying all this on the Moon? The ability to send rescue equipment. On Mars, if things go wrong and break, you’re years away from home, “Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Center told AFP.
By Laura Forczyk, space industry analyst, “It’s possible” to send humans to Mars, “but for now, it’s safer to send robots.” for which the required safety standards are lower.
political will
The biggest obstacle is political will, because funding depends on it. In 1990, George HW Bush announced the arrival of man on Mars before the fiftieth anniversary of the first step on the Moon, in July 2019.
The similar promises of three of his successors (his son George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump) were not translated into any particular program. Will it be in the 2030s?
“It is possible (…), but without the political will of the administration and Congress, it will not happen,” says G. Scott Hubbard. U.S. President Joe Biden has not yet appointed a permanent administrator for NASA or given his vision on space missions.
His spokesman only said he “supported” the Artemis program. The goal of an astronaut’s return to the moon by 2024 will be “delayed” and, as a “domino effect,” there will also be a postponement to Mars, warns Laura Forczyk, who considers more
a feasible arrival on the red planet in the 2040s
AFP