These are some of the challenges that await the first astronauts on Mars

 

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 not wait that long to receive fuel and food. In addition, distance is also a factor that worries Biswal when it comes to the safety of astronauts and the energy there: “in the event of an emergency, we will not be able to bring them back as we could do on lunar missions”, exemplifies . Due to the distance, power generation would also be compromised, something that poses a problem for vehicle power and thermal stability on the planet due to low temperatures.

Then, we come to the questions involving the health of astronauts: as they will have to spend a few months in deep space during the trip, they end up taking risks related to both physical and mental health. In addition to the psychological impact caused by long days of confinement with colleagues in the ship's cabin, there are also impacts on the human body caused by prolonged exposure to microgravity.

For Biswal, however, the most serious of all these effects would be those related to radiation, to which they would be exposed during the entire mission: "the greatest dangers include the risk of cancer and the effects of both interplanetary and surface radiation", he explains him, stressing that radiation could cause cancer and impair brain performance. This would impact the work of the missions, which depends a lot on the performance of the astronauts.

Fortunately, the researchers propose some strategies to reduce the damage caused by travel and activities carried out on the planet, such as a subsurface habitat that could be a solution to the obstacles of an extended mission or a permanent stay there. Still, they propose that manned missions be designed including ways to quickly produce the necessary supplies from the resources available on the planet, something that matches the profile of the missions that NASA and other space agencies have been developing.

The article with the results of the study was published in the arXiv online repository.