The Red(Danger) Planet.
The Red planet it is called. this name is itself filled with absolute irony, Red is Danger.Mars is the fourth planet from the sun. Befitting the red planet’s bloody color, the Romans named it after their god of war. The Romans copied the ancient Greeks, who also named the planet after their god of war, Ares. Other civilizations also typically gave the planet names based on its color — for example, the Egyptians named it “Her Desher,” meaning “the red one,” while ancient Chinese astronomers dubbed it “the fire star.”
The cold, thin atmosphere means liquid water currently cannot exist on the Martian surface for any length of time. This means that although this desert planet is just half the diameter of Earth, it has the same amount of dry land.
The red planet is home to both the highest mountain and the deepest, longest valley in the solar system. Olympus Mons is roughly 17 miles (27 kilometers) high, about three times as tall as Mount Everest, while the Valles Marineris system of valleys — named after the Mariner 9 probe that discovered it in 1971 — can go as deep as 6 miles (10 km) and runs east-west for roughly 2,500 miles (4,000 km), about one-fifth of the distance around Mars and close to the width of Australia or the distance from Philadelphia to San Diego.
Mars has the largest volcanoes in the solar system, including Olympus Mons, which is about 370 miles (600 km) in diameter, wide enough to cover the entire state of New Mexico. It is a shield volcano, with slopes that rise gradually like those of Hawaiian volcanoes, and was created by eruptions of lavas that flowed for long distances before solidifying. Mars also has many other kinds of volcanic landforms, from small, steep-sided cones to enormous plains coated in hardened lava. Some minor eruptions might still occur on the planet.
Scientists think the Valles Marineris formed mostly by rifting of the crust as it got stretched. Individual canyons within the system are as much as 60 miles (100 km) wide. They merge in the central part of the Valles Marineris in a region as much as 370 miles (600 km) wide. Large channels emerging from the ends of some canyons and layered sediments within suggest the canyons might once have been filled with liquid water.
Channels, valleys, and gullies are found all over Mars, and suggest that liquid water might have flowed across the planet’s surface in recent times. Some channels can be 60 miles (100 km) wide and 1,200 miles (2,000 km) long. Water may still lie in cracks and pores in underground rock.
Many regions of Mars are flat, low-lying plains. The lowest of the northern plains are among the flattest, smoothest places in the solar system, potentially created by water that once flowed across the Martian surface. The northern hemisphere mostly lies at a lower elevation than the southern hemisphere, suggesting the crust may be thinner in the north than in the south. This difference between the north and south might be due to a very large impact shortly after the birth of Mars.
The number of craters on Mars varies dramatically from place to place, depending on how old the surface is. Much of the surface of the southern hemisphere is extremely old, and so has many craters — including the planet’s largest, 1,400-mile-wide (2,300 km) Hellas Planitia — while that of northern hemisphere is younger and so has fewer craters. Some volcanoes have few craters, which suggests they erupted recently, with the resulting lava covering up any old craters. Some craters have unusual-looking deposits of debris around them resembling solidified mudflows, potentially indicating that impactor hit underground water or ice.
Source: http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/mars/
PLANNINGS – Is it Really Possible to build a human colony there?
“What I really want to do here is to make Mars seem possible — make it seem as though it’s something that we could do in our lifetimes, and that you can go,” – Elon Musk CEO of SpaceX
Many organisations are working adversely to make mars mission a reality and one of the private organisation in SpaceX .
SpaceX plans to send an unmanned Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018, the company says , a first step in achieving founder Elon Musk’s goal to fly people to another planet. US space agency NASA, which is aiming for a human mission to Mars in the 2030s, said it will provide technical support for SpaceX’s first foray, known as Red Dragon. SpaceX “could provide valuable entry, descent and landing data to NASA for our journey to Mars, while providing support to American industry,” NASA said in a statement. SPONSORED Coolpad Cool 1 (Gold, 3GB… ₹ 10,999.00 Apple iPhone 7 256GB (PRODUCT)… ₹ 80,000.00 Apple iPhone 7 128GB (PRODUCT)… ₹ 70,000.00 The announcement marks SpaceX’s first target date for its unmanned mission to Mars. The SpaceX program is intended to develop technologies needed for human transportation to Mars, a long-term aim for Musk’s privately held company, which is formally known as Space Exploration Technologies. The company said it will provide details of its Mars program at the International Astronautical Congress in September. “Dragon 2 is designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system,” Musk posted on Twitter. “Red Dragon Mars mission is the first test flight.” He said that with an internal volume about the size of a sports utility vehicle, the Dragon spacecraft would be uncomfortable for people making the long journey to Mars. Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur who helped to found Tesla Motors and PayPal, started SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of slashing launch costs to make Mars travel affordable. SpaceX intends to debut its Mars rocket, a heavy-lift version of the Falcon 9 booster currently flying, later this year. The company recently has made spaceflight history by returning Falcon 9 rockets to landing pads on land and sea – key to Musk’s quest to develop a relatively cheap, reusable launch vehicle. SpaceX now flies cargo versions of its Dragon capsule to and from the International Space Station under a $2 billion resupply services contract with NASA. SpaceX also is upgrading the capsules to carry astronauts, with test flights to the station scheduled for 2017, under a separate NASA contract worth up to $2.6 billion. NASA does not plan to provide financial assistance to SpaceX’s Mars mission. The agency is investing in its own heavy-lift rocket, capsule and launch pad modifications targeting Mars travel. By the time NASA expects to debut a test flight in lunar orbit with astronauts onboard in 2023, the agency will have spent about $24 billion on the program, an April 2016 Government Accountability Office report shows.
Effects of Martian Environment on human health
That planet has a considerable but moderate atmosphere. So that the inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to ours. — William Herschel, The Gentlemans’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 1784.
Mars presents a hostile environment for human habitation. Different technologies have been developed to assist long-term space exploration and may be adapted for habitation on Mars. The existing record for the longest consecutive space flight is 438 days by cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, and the most accrued time in space is 878 days by Gennady Padalka. These are very short lengths of time in space in comparison to the 1100 day journey planned by NASA as soon as the year 2028. Scientists have also hypothesized that many different biological functions can be negatively affected by the environment of Mars colonies. Due to higher levels of radiation, there are a multitude of physical side-effects that must be mitigated.
Physical effects
The difference in gravity will negatively affect human health by weakening bones and muscles. There is also risk of osteoporosis and cardiovascular problems. Current rotations on the International Space Station put astronauts in zero gravity for six months, a comparable length of time to a one-way trip to Mars. This gives researchers the ability to better understand the physical state that astronauts going to Mars will arrive in. Once on Mars, surface gravity is only 38% of that on Earth.[35] Upon return to Earth, recovery from bone loss and atrophy is a long process and the effects of microgravity may never fully reverse. There are also severe radiation risks on Mars that can influence cognitive processes, deteriorate cardiovascular health, inhibit reproduction, and cause cancer. Additionally, in-utero development is very fragile and severely effected by radiation. Data from irradiated survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provide insight into the “radiosensitivity in humans as a function of gestational age and dose for several CNS endpoints, including severe mental retardation, head circumference, intelligence test scores, and school performance”. Close monitoring of the radiation received by reproductive colonists will be necessary to ensure the health of offspring. Additionally, a large focus of colonization development is on reducing the amount of radiation absorbed by astronauts. But early colonizing may be faced with these challenges and the harm could be seen for generations, as stated in academic articles: “the pioneers making the first journeys to Mars and its vicinity to explore and set up a base that eventually will lead to a continuously occupied colony, will face more hazards than those that follow”.
Psychological effects
A study from the Journal of Cosmology by Dr. Nick Kanas states that “Unprecedented factors will affect such a mission. A Mars crew will be tens of millions of miles away from home, engaged in a mission that will last around 2 1⁄2years. Crew members [sic] will experience a severe sense of isolation and separation from the Earth, which will appear as a receding bluish-green dot in the heavens. From the surface of Mars, there will be 2-way communication delays with the Earth of up to 44 minutes, depending on where the two planets are located in their respective orbits, and the crew will be relatively autonomous from mission control.” Due to the communication delays, new protocols need to be developed in order to assess crew members’ psychological health. Researchers have developed a Martian simulation called HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) that places scientists in a simulated Martian laboratory to study the psychological effects of isolation, repetitive tasks, and living in close-quarters with other scientists for up to a year at a time. Computer programs are being developed to assist crews with personal and interpersonal issues in absence of direct communication with professionals on earth. Current suggestions for Mars exploration and colonization are to select individuals who have passed psychological screenings. Psychosocial sessions for the return home are also suggested in order to reorient people to society.
Why not spend on making earth a better place rather than spending on an nearly improbable mission?
In today’s world where global warming and other various issues and leading to depletion of life expectancy on earth, more consideration should be given to those issues which we can handle wisely.
The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole. Since 1906, the global average surface temperature has increased between 1.1 and 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 to 0.9 degrees Celsius)–even more in sensitive polar regions. And the effects of rising temperatures aren’t waiting for some far-flung future–signs of the effects of global warming are appearing right now. The heat is melting glaciers and sea ice, shifting precipitation patterns, and setting animals on the move.
The planet is already suffering from some impacts of global warming.
- Ice is melting worldwide, especially at the Earth’s poles. This includes mountain glaciers, ice sheets covering West Antarctica and Greenland, and Arctic sea ice.
- Many species have been impacted by rising temperatures. For example, researcher Bill Fraser has tracked the decline of the Adélie penguins on Antarctica, where their numbers have fallen from 32,000 breeding pairs to 11,000 in 30 years.
- The sea level has been rising more quickly over the last century.
- Some butterflies, foxes, and alpine plants have moved farther north or to higher, cooler areas.
- Precipitation (rain and snowfall) has increased across the globe, on average.
- Some invasive species are thriving. For example, spruce bark beetles have boomed in Alaska thanks to 20 years of warm summers. The insects have chewed up 4 million acres of spruce trees.
GLOBAL WARMING 101 Global warming could do more than just melt polar ice. It could change our maps, and displace people from cities and tropical islands.
These factors clear the fact that we not sufficient consideration is given to deal with human’s adverse effect on nature than it will cost the whole human kind more than just money.
according to space
NASA’s overarching goal of sending astronauts to Mars may not be worth the time, money and trouble, a prominent researcher says.
NASA’s human spaceflight efforts have long been geared toward eventually putting boots on the Red Planet. But the agency should think seriously about ditching this plan, for the benefits of a manned Mars mission may not justify its enormous costs, said space architect Brent Sherwood of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
“Our rationale for exploring Mars, I think, is perhaps fatally weak,” Sherwood said during a presentation with NASA’s Future In-Space Operations working group Wednesday (Aug. 1).
Where should the first permanent space colony be built?
Sherwood’s presentation during a weekly FISO group meeting occurred just days ahead of the huge NASA Mars rover Curiosity’s landing on the Red Planet. Curiosity, a 1-ton robot built to explore Mars for two years to determine if microbial life could have ever survived on the planet, will land today (Aug. 5) at 10:31 p.m. PDT (1:31 a.m. EDT, 0531 GMT on Aug. 6).
“I would suggest that maybe instead of whining about not getting enough money, we ought to quit that and redesign our human spaceflight product for success,” he added. [Giant Leaps: Top Milestones of Human Spaceflight]
$100 billion for six astronauts?
A manned Mars mission would be incredibly expensive. NASA estimates peg the overall expenditures at about $100 billion over 30 or 40 years, Sherwood said, but those numbers may be too low.
The International Space Station (ISS), after all, was initially anticipated to cost $10 billion over 10 years. But it ended up costing 10 times that, and took nearly three decades to assemble.
NASA officials have said the agency will work with international partners on any potential manned Mars mission, so the agency wouldn’t have to fork out the entire $100 billion (or however much such an effort ends up costing). But the returns to the agency and the nation could still up being comparatively meager, Sherwood said.
“After all of that investment, and all this commitment sustained over these decades, you get six civil servants on another planet, and probably only two of them are U.S. civil servants, because it’s got to be an international project,” Sherwood said.
“So maybe that’s worth it; I don’t know,” he added. “I think it may be judged in the grand arc of modern history to be seen as not worth it, and I think that’s the risk. But that’s the conversation to have.”
While reaching Mars would be a triumphant moment for our species, there’s unlikely to be much scientific rationale for putting humans on the Red Planet three decades from now, Sherwood said. NASA’s robotic explorers have become more and more capable and durable over the last 15 years or so, and there’s no reason to think such improvements won’t continue.
“The humans are not going to be doing anything close to the kind of science that we’re already doing robotically or that we can do on ISS in low-Earth orbit right now,” Sherwood said.
And robotic missions — like NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, which is due to drop the car-size Curiosity rover on the Red Planet Sunday night — are cheap by comparison. MSL, the biggest and most ambitious rover ever launched, costs $2.5 billion.
Its your Choice
Most of the humans have tendency to run away from problems or have an unrealistic view on issues related to environment, but not this time with humans considering to move to an inhabitable planet we should choose between making this planet a better place for ourselves and generation to come or to give up and look forward to try our luck in space.
Mostdecentguy 