Challenges to Mars Travel

You’re not the sole one wondering what a visit to Mars can be like. Elon Musk, a US businessman who features a company called SpaceX, said his spaceship are going to be ready for brief trips to the Mars by 2019. Meanwhile, the Mars One project, run by a Dutch company, aims to create a permanent human settlement on Mars.

The journey to mars.

You might be travelling with other astronauts in a journey that will take between seven and 12 months, packed in a tight space. So you’ll got to stretch and doubtless find how to possess a part of the spacecraft spinning to make artificial gravity. Having no gravity for a protracted time can cause tons of painful health problems for astronauts.

Then there’s the powerful radiation that comes mostly from our Sun. It can damage equipment on board and make health problems for the crew. You and therefore the crew will have to be compelled to solve these problems on your own.

You must know every detail of the spacecraft inside out and draw on your extensive astronaut training to repair problems using only what you brought with you. You may need to 3D print spare parts from materials like titanium (using tech invented by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO).

You’ll probably also need stuff like carbon fibre, printable solar cells, 3D mapping, robotics and cybersecurity technology. The good news for you is that CSIRO (where I work) is tackling this with its new space roadmap.

Communication will be difficult. Expect any message you send to Earth to require 20 minutes to succeed in its destination. Video conferencing will not be possible. Social media remains accessible, but tweets or Facebook posts will take 20 minutes to seem and responses from Earth will take up to 40 minutes to arrive.

Life on Mars

If you make it to Mars, the important challenge begins. Gravity on Mars may be a fraction of what it's on Earth so everything will seem Very light . A thing that weighed 100kg on Earth would weigh just 38kg on Mars.

You will ought to live in Mars’ punishing environment. Dust storms with winds reaching 400km/h could leave you within the dark for several weeks. It’s mostly pretty cold. The temperature variation between day and night is in far more than 120℃. The atmosphere is not breathable: it is only 1% the thickness of our atmosphere, mostly made of carbon dioxide, argon, and nitrogen with only a small amount of oxygen.

Growing plants on Mars isn't getting to be easy. The soil is really salty and acidic. It is still unclear if we should always bring bacteria to Mars to assist plants grow (as they are doing on Earth).