Going to Mars is not Star Trek. It's not
"go where no man has gone before"
as they say. It's really all about
letting our planetary scientists be the
pioneers. Be the group that scouts the
future and looks at resources that we
can use on the planet.
What are the things they need to know, to
be able to safely land, live and return
from Mars? The scientific knowledge, the
technologies that we need that can make
human exploration of Mars happen are
within our grasp. In our lifetime we
actually can see humans land and work on
Mars. A major step in this direction of
planning has been the definition of what
we call Human Exploration Zones.
This is a region - we will land, we will
live,
we will use resources in many different
ways and we want to go to a variety of
scientifically exciting locations, do it
in ways that humans and only humans can
do. And so our orbital assets are
critical to be able to determine and
look for those right landing sites. In
addition to that you may not know that
they are also relay satellites these
relay satellites are critical to support
our landed assets. Our communication will
also increase significantly from
typically the radio frequencies that we
use today to perhaps optical
communication. That will be a critical
communication technology that will allow
high-bandwidth data, voice but also video,
so necessary to support human
exploration on the surface of Mars.
There's a variety of in situ
resource utilization experiments that
are being thought about and planned These
are important to understand the area of
our landing sites. Power systems and
energy systems will be deployed that are
very new and unique. Supply of oxygen and
carbon in the atmosphere is how we can
extract oxygen in the quantities - but
also sufficient water, we now know there
are regions on Mars for which there may
be an abundant source of water. So these
observations that we are making are
revolutionizing our concepts of how
we're going to use the resources to live
and work on Mars.
So why are we going to Mars? Well because
to scientists it's really a step in
terms of finding life beyond Earth. You
know exploration is really in our genes.
It's a very integral part of what we are
all about as humans but as a human
species if we're going to survive we
need to move off this planet and on to
the next object and Mars indeed is that
next object. So Mars gives us a wonderful
opportunity to explore scientifically
today but in our future
it is a location where we can go, we can
live, work, in addition to return.
