What would it take to put an astronaut on Mars?

A joint European and Russian space mission - the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) - has left for Mars to study methane and other rare gases in the Red Planet's atmosphere, and drop a lander on its surface.

The TGO is expected to take seven months to travel the 500 million km (310 million miles) to Mars, and then almost another year to manoeuvre itself into position, meaning the satellite's observations will not properly start until late 2017. What does this mean for plans to put an astronaut on Mars?

In 2010 President Obama tasked the US space Agency Nasa with the goal of putting an astronaut in Martian orbit, and later on to the planet itself.

But the challenges - technical, political and financial - are enormous. A recent report from the US Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel raised safety concerns about the proposed transportation spacecraft and criticised Nasa for a lack of detail in its overall Mars plans.

Bill Hill is deputy associate administrator of the Exploration Systems Development division at Nasa. He oversees the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System.

"Keeping the weight down of the vehicle, the spacecraft, that's our key focus. The bigger you make the rocket, the more mass you have to lift off the surface of the Earth.

"Say you want to go for 500 days - you're going to have to take food, water for the crew to consume and use for hygiene, all the air, so it just multiplies the amount of weight that you have to lift off the Earth's surface.

"That's where the Space Launch System - the heavy lift launch vehicle - will come in. Where the Saturn V basically took up an Apollo capsule and a lander for going to the lunar surface, we're looking at 130 metric tonne lift capability that can put somewhere between 40 to 50 metric tonnes out past the low Earth orbit. It's a capability that, frankly, nobody else has today.

"The crew spacecraft Orion can actually be used for up to about 1,000 days, and that's how we're designing the systems inside - the environmental control systems and life support systems to support a crew of four initially for up to 1,000 days. It'll have basic benches, crew interfaces, flat screen monitors, a toilet and some hygiene capability. It's basically for transportation, not necessarily to live in for the full duration to go to Mars and back.

"We would use a module, a habitat portion, for where the crew would live and work on a daily basis, [with] a much larger volume. That is going to need areas to store food, tanks to store oxygen and water. Our goal is to have some sort of closed loop system for life support where we will pull water out of the air, regenerate carbon dioxide into oxygen, and do similar things like we're doing on the space station today where we have a urine processor and reclaim the water for drinking.

"We'll probably not use it to enter the Martian atmosphere because then we'd have to figure out a way to connect it to something to lift it off the surface and bring it back. But we need the heavy lift launch vehicle and the crew spacecraft; using those two fundamental cornerstones as our initial capabilities to actually go out and explore."

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1012