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The
Challenges of Living on Mars |
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Ready for Dinner on Mars?
'Martian bread and green tomato jam',
'Spirulina gnocchis' and 'Potato and tomato mille-feuilles' are three
delicious recipes that two French companies have created for ESA and future
space explorers to Mars and other planets
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Don't Breathe the Moondust
When humans return to the Moon and travel to Mars, they'll
have to be careful of what they inhale
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Mission to Mars: Staying Alive
Q&A: Don Pettit
By Josh McHugh
Wired Magazine
Dec 2004
DONALD PETTIT
International Space Station expedition 6 flight engineer and science officer
•Walked in space for 13 hours
•Lived in space for 161 days
•Extracted gas samples from active volcanoes, cracked detonation physics
problems for weapons systems, and helped design the space station during his
13-year tenure as a Los Alamos staff scientist
•Interviewed with NASA four times before finally being accepted into the
astronaut training program
When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during its reentry into
Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003, it meant more to Don Pettit than
losing seven friends and colleagues. He was 240 miles above Earth at the
time, three months into a stint as the science officer of expedition 6
aboard the International Space Station. When NASA suspended all shuttle
flights, Pettit lost his ride home.
It would be another two months before Pettit and his crewmates, Ken Bowersox
and Nikolai Budarin, would finally strap themselves into the space station's
life raft, a Soyuz capsule, and make a fiery, bruising descent into Russia.
The musculoskeletal degeneration from his extended time in space left Pettit
unable to walk when the capsule touched down in the wilderness. He had to
crawl out of the hatch to help Bowersox and Budarin set up camp.
Turns out his adventure was a neat analogy for what an astronaut would have
to endure on a mission to Mars. Here's Pettit's preview of a trip to the Red
Planet.
WIRED: You've lived through every astronaut's nightmare - being stranded in
space.
PETTIT: We weren't stranded. We didn't feel isolated or lonely in orbit. We
had good communication with the ground. We missed our families a bit, but
that was it. You don't launch without being ready to stay up there for a
year.
Your mission wasn't crippled by the loss of the Columbia?
Not at all. Expedition 6 was serendipitous - the way it unfolded was very
similar to what a Mars mission would be like: After six months in orbit, our
state of physical deconditioning was very much like what you'd see in a crew
showing up on Mars. Getting to Mars will take about six months. We did our
reentry in the Soyuz capsule. It used a combination of parachutes and
rockets, and we did a high-g aerobrake, just like you would for a Mars
landing. We landed off course in a remote part of Russia, and we were on our
own for five hours.
No welcoming party.
There was no help from the ground. We climbed out and set up two radio
beacons. It was about the same level of difficulty you'd experience working
outside on Mars. We were not happy campers out there, but we did what we
needed to do. It shows that you're not going to be a quivering plate of
jello when you end up on Mars. Of course, on a Mars mission, you're not
going to be four hours away from home. Earth is going to be a small blue dot
in the sky.
If something terrible were to happen en route, is there some kind of retro
rocket you can fire to get the vessel turned around?
No. Earth and Mars are in the right spots only a couple of times a year.
Even if that weren't a problem, the propulsion systems we're working with
are fairly limited - the abort capabilities are pretty dismal. The earliest
you could abort would be a year after launch.
That's hairy.
It ups the ante.
What could go wrong on board?
Anything. For example, the toilet is an integral part of the system. It
recycles most of the crew's urine for drinking water. If the toilet breaks,
the crew could die.
So a minor inconvenience on Earth becomes life-threatening when you get to
space.
That's why we need to go to the moon before going to Mars. The moon's three
days away from Earth. When your toilet breaks, you can come back to Earth
before everybody dies, tail between your legs, then fix it and go back up.
What kind of thought goes into crew dynamics?
It's a long time to be cooped up together. Everyone is well screened ahead
of time, but there's nothing magic about being in space. The pearls of
wisdom that apply on Earth apply in space. You have to have patience with
people. You have to respect them. The key is to remember that there's only
one leader on a mission. It can be tough if you see yourself as a leader,
but you're not the mission's designated leader. There's a real skill
involved in followership. And you have to remember that you're living in a
technical world. Machines are keeping you alive, and you need to keep them
running. There are very few sound technical decisions for any problem. If
you don't find the logical way, the machines quit and everybody dies.
What about people who just get on your nerves or invade your personal space?
Have you ever been in a zero-g slap fight?
Nothing like that has ever happened. The biggest problem is that people get
too busy taking care of other people. You need to take care of yourself -
find a way to have some quiet time, write poetry if that's what you do to
maintain your mind, watch a DVD, whatever you need to do.
If there's a manned Mars mission anytime soon, you're the favorite to go.
After what you went through on expedition 6, would you still go?
In a nanosecond.
What 6 months in space does to your body
Spine: Straightens, adding 2 inches of height.
Cells: Heavy bombardment from cosmic rays puts DNA at greater risk of
mutation, especially in the Van Allen belts and during solar flares.
Kidneys: Filtration rate increases; calcium run-off from bones can form
kidney stones.
Head: Swells with fluid that migrates from the lower body; face becomes
puffy.
Inner ear: Saccules and utricles (motion- and position-monitoring
mechanisms) send conflicting signals, causing space sickness.
Heart: Enlarges; heartbeat slows.
Stomach: Free-falling sensation causes space sickness.
Reproductive organs: Sperm motility increases.
Legs: A lack of gravitational stress causes muscles to atrophy; legs become
thinner.
Blood: Plasma volume decreases along with the production of red and white
blood cells; immune system becomes less active; extra calcium in blood serum
can cause hypercalcemia. Symptoms: nausea, delirium, coma.
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Taming the Red Planet
By Kim Stanley Robinson
Wired Magazine
Dec 2004
Terraforming Mars - grafting an Earth-like atmosphere and
ecology onto that rocky and poisonous planet - remains a great idea that is
likely to become one of the supreme engineering projects of humankind.
But due to some problems that have recently become apparent, the process
will take longer to get started than I thought. First, finances. This is a
venture that will cost many billions of dollars. Only governments can afford
that, but Washington seems to care solely about terrorism and tax cuts. When
will there be the political will to make that kind of financial commitment?
Second, if we do find life when we get to Mars, the discovery will raise a
tricky ethical question - even if we just find bacteria living under the
surface, as is likely. Terraforming a dead planet is like gardening a rock,
but if Mars is alive, we're invading a biosphere. If DNA testing proves that
the Martian natives originated on Earth and hitched a ride through the solar
system on some ancient meteor, maybe we will decide to proceed with
inhabitation, figuring we can coexist with these cousins. But if the
Martians prove to be truly alien, do we have a right to remodel their
planet? We may decide to stay away.
Yet whatever we decide is ultimately going to be moot. Early Martian
explorers will take matters into their own hands sooner or later. Living on
Mars in small stations similar to beached submarines, it will be obvious to
these scientists that life on Mars would be a lot safer and easier if the
atmosphere were thicker. Sooner or later someone is sure to release bacteria
to get things going, no matter what people on Earth think. Over time,
microbial life will create an oxygen-rich atmosphere.
By the time we're exploring Mars, we might have made other leaps forward in
our technological powers: cheap energy, ultrapowerful computing, and
self-replicating machines. At that point, terraformers will have a big
toolkit. They may choose to seed the surface with bacteria that's engineered
to survive the harsh initial conditions, then follow up these pioneer
species with other life-forms that can feed on the earlier ones, in a
burgeoning ecology. This would be, in effect, an accelerated recapitulation
of Earth's own evolutionary history, with scientists tinkering throughout
the process.
Or the terraformers might choose to go the mechanical-engineering route.
Comets or even small asteroids might be guided into aerobraking orbits that
would make them burn up in the Martian atmosphere, thickening it with gases.
In order to warm the planet's surface, orbiting mirrors and lenses could
redirect and concentrate sunlight that would ordinarily miss Mars. Nuclear
explosions underground could quickly melt the deep permafrost. Digging holes
to the mantle would release the necessary heat. Nitrogen could be imported
from Saturn's moon Titan, and so on.
Slow start, fast finish. Estimates as to how long it might take before
people could walk around on Mars in shirtsleeves (and maybe a respirator)
vary from 500 to 100,000 years. That's a very big range, but it depends on
how we go about it. If we use all the high-impact methods - "planetary
engineering" - it may take only a few hundred years. If we introduce a
bacterial ecology, add some heat, and then let nature take its course - "ecopoeisis"
- it would take many thousands of years. But it's better to think of the
process as never-ending, like history itself. People will just keep working,
and eventually we will inhabit both planets, one whose ecology we will have
grown like a garden. It will be a beautiful journey, and it doesn't matter
if it's slow. It's the doing that's the fun part.
Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of the epic trilogy Red Mars, Blue Mars,
and Green Mars.
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Remaking Our Bodies for Mars
By Frederik Pohl
Wired Magazine
Dec 2004
Reshaping a planet takes a very long time - tens of thousands
of years, if not hundreds of thousands - and most people don't want to wait
that long. So if we want to find a way to occupy Mars, let's try a different
tack. Leave the planet as it is, but change our own human bodies so that we
can live on it.
The changes will have to be really drastic - but not, I think, impossible.
And we may have to wait only 100 years instead of 100,000. Here's what we'll
need:
Electronic eyes: Mars is cold, averaging 10 degrees Fahrenheit below
zero. Human eyes, being largely water, would freeze. There's only starlight
at night, so make them photomultipliers, and sensitive to infrared.
Artificial lungs: We won't be able to inhale deeply enough to fill
our lungs with Martian air; it wouldn't do any good anyway - there's almost
no oxygen, but plenty of carbon dioxide, raw material for a
catalyst-cracking oxygen generator.
Plastic skin: To keep out the dangerous solar radiation and hold in
our vitals in the Martian near-vacuum, it would have to be as tough as
Naugahyde. Array it with heat and pressure sensors connected directly to
what's left of our nervous system so that we'll know whether a rock, say,
has fallen and crushed our ankle.
Bat wings: but not for flying. These would function as solar panels
and power all that gear. If the sun doesn't supply enough energy, then we
could put a nuclear power plant overhead in a Mars-stationary orbit and beam
down all the electrical energy we could ever want, in the form of
microwaves.
Frederik Pohl is the author of Man Plus and, most recently, The Boy Who
Would Live Forever.
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