Early signs that Mars is becoming the Next Big Goal

There has been a quiet, background story centered on making the moon less of a target with Mars the bigger goal. It's not like the idea of a lunar colony is going away, it seems to be that more and more people are seeing Mars as a more interesting goal. A major new report on the topic was released today (Tuesday Dec. 9) on the subject. It starts by addressing the major question: if we look at Artemis, years late and billions of dollars over budget, why would any country want to take on such a mission?

A new report published Tuesday, titled “A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars,” represents the answer from leading scientists and engineers in the United States: finding whether life exists, or once did, beyond Earth.

“We’re searching for life on Mars,” said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, in an interview with Ars. “The answer to the question ‘are we alone‘ is always going to be ‘maybe,’ unless it becomes yes.”

If you go to that "report published Tuesday" link you'll find that it offers you a chance to buy a preprint of the report, or a paperback version (presumably later - after publication) but also has options of "Read Online" or "Download PDF." The report was researched and put together over the last two years, then published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In addition to Dava Newman named in that second quoted paragraph, the committee was co-chaired by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, director of the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory.

“There’s no turning back,” Newman said. “Everyone is inspired by this because it’s becoming real. We can get there. Decades ago, we didn’t have the technologies. This would have been a study report.”

The goal of the report is to help build a case for meaningful science to be done on Mars alongside human exploration. The report outlines 11 top-priority science objectives. In order of priority, they are:

• Search for Life: Is there evidence of life, past or present, on Mars?
• Water and carbon dioxide: Understand how water and carbon cycles changed over time
• Mars geology: Better understand the geological history of the planet
• Crew health: How do humans fare psychologically, cognitively, and physically in the Martian environment?
• Dust storms: Understand the origin and nature of large dust storms on the planet
• Search for resources: Develop in situ resource utilization, focusing initially on water and propellant
• Mars and genomes: Determine whether Mars changes reproduction and genome function in plant and animal species
• Understand microbes: Are microbial populations stable on Mars?
• Martian dust: How harmful and invasive is dust on humans and their hardware?
• Plants and animals: Does Mars affect plant and animal physiology and development across generations?
• Radiation sampling: Better understand the level and impact of radiation on the surface of Mars

That strikes me as a rather thorough list and something that won't be solved on the first mission or the the first several missions put together. So how? Without a massive improvement in rocket performance, remember that missions to Mars need to launch near closest approach of Mars to Earth, the typical Hohmann transfer windows, which occur every 25 or 26 months. Returns typically seem to be thought of as, "they'll take however long it takes to get back to Earth." 

The committee also looked at different types of campaigns to determine which would be most effective for completing the science objectives noted above. The campaign most likely to be successful, they found, was an initial human landing that lasts 30 days, followed by an uncrewed cargo delivery to facilitate a longer 300-day crewed mission on the surface of Mars. All of these missions would take place in a single exploration zone, about 100 km in diameter, that featured ancient lava flows and dust storms. 

There seem to me to be issues that aren't addressed in that list, and potentially even bigger problems. Imagine sending a crew of astronauts to Mars and finding something in the environment is deadly. At first they don't know what killed off the crew member(s). Is it something toxic on Mars or a microorganism that killed them? Not knowing the answers to what it was, do you bring the survivors back to Earth and risk the entire population on Earth? 

Since the first missions sending robots to Mars, a principle our missions complied with was "planetary protection," which aims to protect both the bodies being studied (i.e., the surface of Mars) and visitors doing the studying (i.e., astronauts) from biological contamination. "Don't bring nothing, don't take nothing home." There are scientists that say people from Earth should not visit any other planet known to contain life. That could eliminate Mars missions before they ever take place. 

In response, there have been talks about leaving some areas alone, "pristine" and untouched by Earth. Considering how many places on Earth that were thought to be sterile have turned out to have "extremophiles" - organisms that live in environments that were thought to be so severe, life would never settle there, can there truly be pristine areas that something won't settle in?  Other than things like active volcanoes.

The Curiosity rover near the site of Mont Mercou on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

If NASA is going to get serious about pressing policymakers and saying it is time to fund a human mission to Mars, the new report is important because it provides the justification for sending people—and not just robots—to the surface of Mars. It methodically goes through all the things that humans can and should do on Mars and lays out how NASA’s human spaceflight and science exploration programs can work together.

“The report says here are the top science priorities that can be accomplished by humans on the surface of Mars,” Elkins-Tanton said. “There are thousands of scientific measurements that could be taken, but we believe these are the highest priorities. We’ve been on Mars for 50 years. With humans there, we have a huge opportunity.”