Andy Weir’s bestseller, “The Martian”, predicts that by 2035 NASA will have landed humans on Mars three times, perfected the flight systems of return to Earth and collaborated with the China National Space Administration. 10 years have passed from the premiere of the Hollywood adaptation in 2015 and there are 10 years for their fictitious chronology. At this midpoint, Mars’s exploration looks a bit different from how it was portrayed in “The Martian”, with more discoveries and more controversy.
As a planetary geologist who works with NASA missions to study Mars, I closely follow science and exploration policy. In 2010, the National Space Policy of the United States established objectives for Mars Mars in the 2030s. But in 2017, Directive 1 of the White House Space Policy changed NASA’s approach towards returning first to the moon under what would become the Artemis program.
Although the concepts for manned missions have gained popularity, NASA’s real plans for the landing of humans on Mars are still fragile. In particular, in the last 10 years, it has been the robotic missions, instead of manned, those that have promoted human discovery and imagination.
Robotic discoveries
Since 2015, satellites and rovers have remodeled the understanding of scientists about Mars. They have revealed innumerable data on how their climate has changed over time.
As a neighbor of the Earth, climate changes in Mars also reflect the processes of the solar system that affect the Earth at a time when life was strengthening for the first time. Therefore, Mars has become a focal point to investigate the old questions of “Where do we come from?” And “Are we alone?”
The Opportunity Rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance have traveled dozens of kilometers studying stratified rock formations that serve as a registration of Mars’s past. When studying the sedimentary layers (rock formations stacked as layers of a cake), planetary geologists have rebuilt a vivid history of environmental change that dwarfs what the earth is currently experiencing.
Mars was once a world of erupting volcanoes, glaciers, lakes and rivers that flow, an environment not very different from the primitive earth. Then his nucleus cooled, his magnetic field hesitated and his atmosphere walked away. The exposed surface of the planet has preserved signs of these processes since then in the form of landscape patterns, sediment sequences in layers and mineral mixtures.
Arabia Terra
A focus of scientific research in the last 10 years is particularly relevant to the scenario of “The Martian”, but does not receive mention in history. To achieve his best survival opportunity, the protagonist Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, must cross a vast, dusty and full of craters Mars region known as Arabia Terra.
In 2022 and 2023, I, together with colleagues from the University of Northern Arizona and Johns Hopkins University, publish detailed analysis of the stratified materials there using images of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey images.
Through the use of infrared images and the measurement of the dimensions of the surface characteristics, we link multiple stratified deposits with the same training episodes and we learned more about the nature of generalized collapse of the terrain that is seen there today. Because the water tends to cement the rock only, that loose material indicates that about 3.5 billion years ago, that area had a dry climate.
To facilitate discussions about this area, we even work with the International Astronomical Union to name some nameless craters that were mentioned in history. For example, one for which Watney would have happened now is called Kozova Crater, in honor of a city of Ukraine.
You may be interested: They observe the first visible aurora on Mars
More to explore
Despite the rapid advances in the science of Mars, there are still many unknowns. Scientists are not yet sure of the precise ages, atmospheric conditions and possible life firms associated with each of the different types of rocks observed on the surface.
For example, the Rover Perseverance pierced and analyzed a unique set of rocks that house organic compounds, that is, carbon based. Organic compounds serve as life construction blocks, but a more detailed analysis is required to determine if these specific rocks ever housed microbial life.
The Mars Sample Return mission, in development, aims to address these pending basic questions by delivery of the first unaltered fragments of another world to Earth. The Rover Perseverance is already storing rock and soil samples, including those that house organic compounds, in sealed tubes. A future landing module will have to collect and launch the hills back to the earth.
Once at home, researchers can examine these materials with more sensitive orders instruments than anything that can fly in a spacecraft. Scientists can learn much more about habitability, geological history and the presence of signs of life on Mars through the sample return campaign than sending humans to the surface.
This perspective is the reason why NASA, the European Space Agency and others have invested about 30,000 million dollars in the robotic exploration of Mars since the 1960s. The reward has been amazing: that work has triggered rapid technological advances in robotics, telecommunications and material science. For example, Mars mission technology has resulted in better sutures for cardiac surgeries and cars that can be driving alone.
It has also reinforced the status of NASA and the US as modern exploration and technology bastions; And has inspired millions of students to be interested in scientific fields.
Call the red planet home?
Colonizing Mars has an attractive seducer. It is difficult not to applaud to the indomitable human spirit while you see Watney fight against dust storms, oxygen scarcity and food shortage to more than 140 million miles from the rescue.
Much of the impulse towards the colonization of Mars is now linked to Spacex and its CEO Elon Musk, whose declared mission of making humanity a “multiplaying species” has become a kind of war cry. But although the colonization of Mars is romantic on paper, it is extremely difficult to carry out, and many critics have questioned the viability of a room on Mars as a refuge away from the earth.
Now, with NASA potentially facing a reduction of almost 50% of its science budget, the United States runs the risk of completely dissolving its portfolio of planetary and robotic science operations, including sample return.
However, President Donald Trump and Musk have pressed so that human space exploration continues to progress in some way, despite those proposed cuts, effectively marginalizing the robotic programs promoted by science that have supported the entire exploration of Mars to date.
However, it is these programs that have provided the richest knowledge of humanity about the red planet and have given both scientists and narrators and narrators and Andy Weir the basis for imagining how it should be on the surface of Mars.
*ARI KOEPPEL is a postdoctoral scientist in Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Dartmouth College.
This article was originally published in The Conversation/Reuters
Follow us on Google News to always keep you informed
