The scientific knowledge and technologies needed to make human exploration of the Red Planet a reality are within our reach.
We’ve heard about the great science that
can be done with humans on Mars and we’ve
heard about the technologies we need to make
this happen.
But there’s something critical here and
that’s the actual people that we’re trying
to get to Mars.
Why do we need people?
Why can’t we do this with robots?
Just think about the Opportunity rover.
It’s been on the surface now for over a
decade, which is completely amazing, returning
science that whole time.
But in that time it’s gone a little over
26 miles.
So think about what a human brings to the
equation: mobility, flexibility, creativity.
I’m a field geologist, I go out and study
volcanoes around the world and I really have
this bias that it’s going to take a trained
field geologist out there on the surface of
Mars to really accomplish the science.
So our crews every day up on the International
Space Station are working on how do we get
that human health element? How do we get humans
to stay healthy for that seven to eight month
journey to Mars?
And we know from our experience on the Space
Station that we can do this but we are also
well aware of the numerous health effects.
Well it turns out that with the current protocols
that we’re using on the ISS with the astronauts,
if they exercise about an hour and a half
a day, most of them can return to Earth with
about the same bone density and muscle strength
as they left with.
Nutrition.
A lot of how we stay healthy has to do with
what we put into our bodies.
How do we ensure that astronauts on the journey
to Mars can have fresh food?
So just in the past year we’ve been running
an experiment called Veggie where we grew
lettuce on the Space Station.
The astronauts ate it, they said it tasted
fine.
So we’re doing things to really push what
we understand about plant biology, translate
that into how plants behave in microgravity -  to really understand better how we can grow
plants in space.
Ocular health.
The astronauts have a syndrome where some
astronauts come back with some visual impairment.
So what is causing the ocular problems?
We don’t know, we’re working on it everyday
on the ISS.
Radiation is obviously one of our key issues
because once we get out of the Earth’s magnetic
field, out in the vicinity of the moon on
the way to Mars the astronauts are being subjected
to both cosmic radiation and solar radiation.
So we’re trying to understand, why are some
people better repairers of radiation damage
at the cellular level, at the genetic level,
than other people.
To a lot of us I think the ISS, we see those
photos from the outside and we forget what
an amazing laboratory it is from the inside
and you can see from freezers where we keep
samples, from the 3-D printer we have; furnace
where we do combustion experiments, incubators,
microscopes and then of course we have the
people who are actually doing the work, the
astronauts.
So all of this is getting us to this point, of
getting humans ready to go on that long journey
to Mars.
