Lunarship

  These are some of the challenges that await the first astronauts on Mars Launching missions to Mars is no longer such a distant dream - NASA, for example, plans to launch a manned mission to the Red Planet in the 2030s, if all goes according to plan. As it will not be easy to take astronauts to our neighbor, the graduate Malaya Kumar, with Biswal and Ramesh Naidu Annavarapua, professor at Pondicherry University, investigated the various challenges of this endeavor in a new study. They presented the results of the analysis during the SciTech Forum 2020 event, and identified 14 different challenges related to missions to Mars. One of the first involves the mission planning stage: the launch window to take advantage of the closest moment between Mars and Earth opens only every two years. If a mission is launched during this period, it will be possible to reach the planet after 150 to 300 days of travel. This long period makes it difficult to send supplies, as astronauts could ...