Thursday, November 29, 2007

Nasa outlines manned Mars vision


Nasa has released details of its strategy for sending a human crew to Mars within the next few decades. The plan is to send a "minimal" crew on a 30-month round trip to the Red Planet. The "Mars ship" would be assembled in low-Earth orbit using three to four Ares V rockets. The mission's journey from Earth to Mars would take six to seven months in a spacecraft powered by an advanced cryogenic fuel propulsion system. The cargo lander and surface habitat would be sent to Mars separately, launched before the crew. Once there, astronauts could spend up to 16 months on the Martian surface, and would use nuclear energy to power their habitat. Nasa has said that they plan on using future Moon missions to test out some of the hardware that that would have to be developed for the extended Mars mission.

Thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post

pictures from bbc news article

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

'Mission to Mars', need I say more...except that the issues of radiation exposure and functioning in a zero-grav environment for extended periods do not seem to be solved, yet.