What are the technical challenges in sending a man to Mars?
How many month would it take to travel the distance?
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M$4 Answers
Listed below are some challenges:
http://ksnn.larc.nasa.gov/webtext.cfm?unit=challenges
"NASA's primary concern with a mission to Mars is the safety of the astronauts. NASA researchers can break the crew's time in space into three risk environments."
Would you want to risk someone's life or your life, just to visit Mars, a planet that we have yet to find life on?
Until man goes on Mars, you can look at Mars at Google Mars:
http://www.google.com/mars
Watch the video below as well.
There are a few challenges:
1. The cost, it's not cheap to go to Mars, it's very expensive. This is probably the main challenge.
2. It takes 7 months to get there, and 7 months to get back. Just think how equipped you'd have to be to survive 7 months with enough food.
3. We don't know if we have all of the technology that protects our astronauts from radiation exposure, so yes space radiation is a problem.
4. We don't have have people who are able to live on Mars for a long period of time. If we would go there, we would not be able to live healthily in this atmosphere without extra equipment.
5. Not too many astronauts really are passionate about going this far. This is not something too many would want to do until it's proven we can sustain life there. We have enough challenges visiting the moon, and people do not want to isolate themselves on Mars.
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/ss/byauthor/115903
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2007/07/30/so-you-want-to-visit-mars...
http://www.worldbook.com/wb/Students?content_spotlight/mars/humans_manned
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/02/is_there_life_on_mars_n...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mars/
http://layscience.net/node/474
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M$The issues that would prevent a manned Mars mission would not be so much technical as financial and political. Namely things like:
- Would we be willing to spend the amount of money it would take?
- Would we be willing to expose astronauts to the risks involved?
- Would we be willing to spend the amount of money needed to mitigate the risks?
For example some of the issues that are sometimes cited are the fact that the mission could not easily be aborted if anything went wrong, and that we don't know all that much about long term radiation exposure risks in space. Also the medical effects of being in low gravity for such a long period of time, and the psychological effects of the isolation and confinement are somewhat unknown.
In all these cases the challenges are not fundamentally technical. You could either choose to take the risks, or spend what it would take to avoid them. e.g. Building not only a Mars mission ship, but a backup recovery ship in case of problems, so doubling the cost or more. Or building a ship with heavy radiation shielding, which would drive up the cost of the mission, but reduce the risk.
As David Scott, commander of Apollo 15, put it in 2002:
"Is the technology available to go to Mars? The answer is yes."
-- Quote
People will one day step on Mars but perhaps not for hundreds of years, says an Apollo astronaut.
David Scott, the seventh man to walk on the Moon, was mission commander of Apollo 15 in 1971.
But he says going to Mars will be 10 times more difficult and costly, and there is currently little incentive to commit the resources.
He says, however, that he has no doubt that people will eventually land on the Red Planet.
"Is the technology available to go to Mars? The answer is yes," he told an audience at the Royal Society in London, UK.
"The adventure is what will drive us in the long term," he added. "The long term will be hundreds of years."
-- /Quote
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2316433.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7116834.stm
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/602/1
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M$Step one need to build a space ship that can get to mars and back.
Step two it takes a long time to get to mars/and how much gas to get to mars
and final Step it can lead to mass of Money to pay to get a man on Mars.
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M$
Suppose, a new form of ion propulsion were developed that could accelerate the time of arrive on Mar from months to weeks would the radiation risk be acceptable? In other words, how much radiation exists exposure exists between Earth and Mars?
Too many variables to predict. I think Elon Musk is right that we won't find out until 2020. I don't believe anyone really desires to go to Mars, we just talk about it. We've yet to fully explore our Moon, so Mars is a ways away.
Based on the 4 path correction scenario, it seems impossible to accurately navigate and arrive on Mars. Jar says, that they won't know until Mars gravity has captured the craft in Orbit whether the corrections have worked.
It seems to me that there are too many variables to accurately predict whether the corrections are going to work. Image the risk of a missed entry into the Mars orbit? Am I reading what Jars said correctly?