Paving a path to the red planet: humanity's mission to Mars

Nasa’s Insight lander is basically a robot geologist which will unlock the secrets of Mars - including why the planet has no electro-magnetic field to protect it from the sun’s deadly radiation. If Mars ever bore life then one theory has it that it was the loss of its magnetic shield which caused that life to end. And if microscopic life is still there, it will be hidden beneath the surface away from those killer rays.

InSight left Earth in May and is set to make touch down around noon on Monday. The excitement in the space community around Insight is tangible - everyone you speak to can barely contain their anticipation, because InSight underscores that what was once thought impossible is now becoming probable: humankind will one day walk on the surface of our closest planetary neighbour, and most likely colonise it too.

However, while that journey now looks very likely to take place in the near future - perhaps as early as the mid-2030s - the struggle to make it happen is Herculean. Lives will be lost, trillions spent, reputations made, and careers ruined. But when that manned mission happens, it will change humankind forever. Not only will we have become a space-faring species, and secured ourselves from extinction - with humans on two planets it is unlikely we will ever be wiped out by war, weather or any other wild event - but humanity will have created a collective and unifying goal that will change how we co-operate across nations and see ourselves and neighbours. It would be the greatest moment of change in the history of humankind - and it will probably happen in our lifetime. On top of all that, we could also discover whether there was ever - or perhaps even still is - life on Mars, albeit microbial, and answer the most profound of all questions: ‘Are we alone?’

Some ask whether the pay-off is worth the risk. Most scientists tend to think like Jim Lovell, the astronaut who commanded Apollo 13 on its near fatal mission to the Moon in 1970. ‘Is it worth it?’ Lovell asks himself in his mid-west drawl. ‘Uh-huh, it’s worth it.’

Chapter One

FIRST STEPS

Right now, in labs and research centres around the world the groundwork is being laid for the future mission. Biologists and chemists are working out how astronauts will take enough water and food to stay alive on a 140 million mile journey lasting around seven months. Psychologists are trying to establish how a handful of people will endure such a voyage in a glorified tin can and then live together without killing each other while pioneering the harshest environment humanity has ever experienced. Physicists and engineers are designing the sort of rockets and life support systems that will get us there - and hopefully back.

Liz Seward, senior strategist at Airbus Defence and Space - which is building the new Mars rover for the European Space Agency at Stevenage in England - says the next decade will be spent learning how humans can live in space. The moon will be used as a testing ground and sometime after 2030 people could be exploring the red planet. ‘There’s water ice there so humans would be able to live there and mine it,’ Seward says.

Seward thinks that the future of space exploration depends on private companies working with national governments. ‘Going into space is quite expensive,’ she says, adding: ‘Eventually someone has to pay for it and there has to be a reason to be out there. There are resources you can find on Mars and the Moon and on asteroids that you can’t find on Earth.’

Chapter Two

GETTING THERE

Elon Musk - one of the richest people in the world and a man who could have stepped from the pages of a sci-fi novel himself - has as his chief project the building of cities on Mars. His company SpaceX has supercharged the new space race.

Musk’s engineers are designing the Big Falcon Rocket (do you spot the schoolboy joke in the name?) - a fully reusable spacecraft. His team is evangelical - weeping when rockets crash land and ecstatic when a flight goes well.

But humanity is still a long way from the goal. ‘All we can do right now,’ says Jim Green, Nasa’s planetary science division director, ‘is land a one tonne rover, to get humans there we need a 40 tonne spaceship.’

The key is next-generation retro-rockets. The Martian atmosphere is so thin that there is little to slow a spacecraft coming in at Mach 3. Any ship will need to turn its thrusters to the surface of the planet and fire them up to cause enough drag to land safely. Bladed shields will be indispensable to stop the craft evaporating in the heat of its descent, and even old-fashioned parachutes will be required to add a little extra gravitational pull.

Chapter Three

THE COLONY

So what do we do once we get there? Most probably the first humans to arrive on Mars will live in their ship - but that couldn’t last long due to the effects of solar radiation. Eventually, we’d have to build some permanent site. This Martian outpost won’t be a series of domes in the arid landscape. We’re more likely to set up home in the empty lava tubes of extinct volcanoes - where there might be a chance to find frozen water and where we’d definitely be much safer from solar rays.

A Martian colony would comprise a number of key buildings: there’d be ‘habs’ for living in; a communications and satellite post; a medical centre; a cargo centre; an oxygen creation centre called a ‘Moxie’; a water creation centre called a ‘Wavar’; a solar panel field; a 3D printer post; a nuclear reactor; and a mining centre. It would be austere but efficient.

Chapter Four

THE FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL

But would it be survivable? Astronaut, Scott Kelly, spent a year on the International Space Station, while his twin brother Mark, a former Space Shuttle commander, stayed on Earth, in order to test the long term effects of space travel on the human body. Muscles atrophy, bones weaken, the cardio-vascular system slows, red blood cell production drops, balance deteriorates, eyesight fails, the immune system is hampered. That’s just the really bad stuff - there’s also a constant blocked up nose, insomnia, and the dreaded space farts because interplanetary travel means extra gas in the body, not a lot of fun when you’re trapped in a command module.

So much for the physical effects - what about the mind? Two main projects have tested psychological resilience to space travel: the Hi Seas Mission at Mauna Loa on Hawaii and the Mars 500 Mission in Russia. In both cases, small crews were kept isolated in a simulated spacecraft for months on end. As all Mars scientists know, the human being must be as resilient as the rocket.

From the Mars 500 experiment, only two crew remained psychologically heathy out of six. Four experienced problems with mood, impulsivity and insomnia. Most were trained astronauts and medics. We still don’t know why there were effected, or how to prevent such effects reoccurring.

Chapter Five

THE SWEET SPOT

So once we make the gruelling journey where would we land? Dr Philip Thomas, principal investigator with ExoMars, the joint European-Russian mission hunting for life on the red planet, says until the ExoMars satellite swung over our distant neighbour in 2016 we knew ‘diddly-squat’. We’d only mapped about three percent of Mars. ‘Moving dunes, dust devils, polar caps, are all now being seen,’ he says.

Once we have a 3D map of the planet we’ll be able to pick the safest, flattest site. Mars is known as the graveyard after all. Nasa historian Roger Launius of the Smithsonian Institute explains that only 50% of probes sent to Mars are successful in their mission. ‘That’s not a great track record,’ he says.

Launias thinks our initial forays to Mars will be a little like our journeys to Antartica. Initially we’ll explore, then we’ll build a research station at a sweet spot that is resupplied with people and material from the outside world, and slowly we’ll build up a presence in an inhospitable land. McMurdo Station in Antartica is now an effective city with many nations working together there.

Chapter Six

DAILY LIFE ON THE RED PLANET

However, as the popular scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson makes clear: ‘If you want to stay there, you need to grow your own food.’ At first, we’ll do this is small greenhouses, then giant greenhouses, but in the long-term the plan would be to terraform Mars - to turn the red planet green. Broadly speaking, that means creating a huge greenhouse gas effect to heat the planet and thicken the atmosphere, but as yet we don’t have the technology, so when we do get there it looks like we’ll be living in habs at the bottom of volcanoes and eating greenhouse GM food for a while.

Just because we get there, though, it doesn’t mean we’ll survive. The docu-drama Mars, on the National Geographic channel, paints a terrifying portrait of life for early settlers - all informed by scientists like deGrasse Tyson. Mars is unforgiving. It kills. Rockets malfunction, fires break out, minds snap - and a trail of human bodies is left littering the path to humanity’s new frontier.

Perhaps the greatest risk to human life once we get there is weather. Nasa’s Jim Green says: ‘We’ve been studying dust storms for quite some time and there’s a particular season where some of the dust storms can go global. They can be enormous - 30 kilometres high. They can get charged and in the case of these really large storms lightning can strike.’ These storms can last a month. It sounds impossible to survive.

Chapter Seven

WHERE THERE’S A WILL…

Richard Nixon was the president who pulled back from the drive to go to Mars, following public concern in the wake of Jim Lovell’s Apollo 13 expedition, and focussed instead on Space Shuttle missions. Many in the space community call the shuttle project ‘going into low orbit’ as it didn’t really take humankind anywhere. It was like giving up on the New World after Columbus sailed to America.

With that in mind, loss of life - which many see as inevitable - could derail any Martian exploration. Roger Launius, from the Smithsonian, says: ‘If you send astronauts to Mars and they die there, I guarantee you that public opinion will prohibit you from ever doing it again.’ It’s little wonder that the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, are named after the gods of fear and terror.

The thing is, though, humanity has already dreamt of going to Mars. From the ancients through to modern science fiction writers, we have the idea of journeying to, and living on, Mars engrained in our collective consciousness. If you’ve dreamt something, you’ll most likely one day do it.

Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Planetary Resources - an asteroid mining company - says: ‘There’s a romanticism about going to Mars and colonising it - and it’s a future in which we are building cities. We humans love a target. We love to have something to shoot for, to aim for … it’s been the case over and over again, whether it’s the colonisation of the New World, the railroads, the opening up of the west, all these things are impossible until we make them real.’

THE SCOTS SCIENTIST HELPING PIONEER MARS

DR PATRICK Harkness is a modestly-spoken man. Most of us wouldn’t be quite as humble about our endeavours as he is - after all, the Glasgow University scientist has developed a key piece of kit without which human exploration of Mars just wouldn’t be feasible.

On Mars, low gravity makes it almost impossible to drill - the lack of weight means it’s extremely hard to get the necessary heft behind drilling machinery to crack the surface. But Harkness’s ultrasonic drill removes that problem - and think how important drilling will be on the red planet. As we know, it’s more likely we will live underground. We’ll also be searching for water beneath the surface, and microbial signs of life - whether long-dead or still alive and kicking - will probably be underground away from killer solar rays.

For Harkness, though, there are big ethical questions over what we do with samples found on Mars. The plan for a Mars ‘sample and return’ mission is already well underway. Its first stage would see a robot mission bring back rocks and possibly even evidence of extinct or extant microbial life. The work done in Glasgow has advanced the science around ‘sample and return’, but Harkness worries about the possible risk of Martian rocks contaminating Earth.

‘When you take samples from another planet and bring them to Earth, you have to be absolutely certain they pose no threat,’ he says, ‘and as unlikely as it may appear that there will be any virus or protein in these Martian samples, chances can not be taken.’

Harkness speculates the safest plan might be to take the samples no further than the International Space Station and analyse them there. Perhaps, they could be rendered inert on the ISS and then transferred to Earth.

He’s conscious of the fact that with private companies now potentially leapfrogging governments in the space race that business needs to be regulated in the same way as agencies like Nasa for safety’s sake. ‘You need regulation to stop crazy people putting the planet at risk,’ Harkness says from his office in the School of Engineering. ‘There’s nothing wrong with doing things privately as long as they are regulated. If people just went to Mars and brought back samples that would be dangerous.’

Another ethical worry for Harkness is the inevitable result of colonisation: babies. ‘Say someone got pregnant on Mars - then you have a child who didn’t chose to be born on another planet. They will grow up experiencing one third of the gravity of Earth so their muscle tone will not be the same, their heart will not be strong enough to pump blood to their brain if they ever returned to Earth.’

Despite his caution, he’s pretty confident that there will be men and women walking on Mars within his lifetime - and he’s only 38. Such a monumental achievement, he said, could well unify our increasingly fractured planet and make Earth a better place for all.