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The concept of a Martian as something living on Mars is part of the fiction. Proposals for human missions to Mars have come from agencies such as NASA, CNSA, the European Space Agency, Boeing, SpaceX, and space advocacy groups such as the Mars Society and The Planetary Society.
Sep 26, 2023 · NASA is advancing many technologies to send astronauts to Mars as early as the 2030s. Here are six things we are working on right now to make future human missions to the Red Planet possible. Learn More
Missions to the moons of Mars. Phobos' Stickney Crater. Deimos (lower left) and Phobos (lower right) compared with the asteroid 951 Gaspra. Phobos by Mars Global Surveyor in 1998 [49] There have also have been proposed missions dedicated to explore the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos.
- Overview
- Why explore Mars
- Past missions, major discoveries
- Future of Mars exploration
In the 1960s, humans set out to discover what the red planet has to teach us. Now, NASA is hoping to land the first humans on Mars by the 2030s.
Mars has captivated humans since we first set eyes on it as a star-like object in the night sky. Early on, its reddish hue set the planet apart from its shimmering siblings, each compelling in its own way, but none other tracing a ruddy arc through Earth’s heavens. Then, in the late 1800s, telescopes first revealed a surface full of intriguing features—patterns and landforms that scientists at first wrongly ascribed to a bustling Martian civilization. Now, we know there are no artificial constructions on Mars. But we’ve also learned that, until 3.5 billion years ago, the dry, toxic planet we see today might have once been as habitable as Earth.
Over the last century, everything we’ve learned about Mars suggests that the planet was once quite capable of hosting ecosystems—and that it might still be an incubator for microbial life today.
Mars is the fourth rock from the sun, just after Earth. It is just a smidge more than half of Earth’s size, with gravity only 38 percent that of Earth’s. It takes longer than Earth to complete a full orbit around the sun—but it rotates around its axis at roughly the same speed. That’s why one year on Mars lasts for 687 Earth days, while a day on Mars is just 40 minutes longer than on Earth.
Despite its smaller size, the planet’s land area is also roughly equivalent to the surface area of Earth’s continents—meaning that, at least in theory, Mars has the same amount of habitable real estate. Unfortunately, the planet is now wrapped in a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and cannot support earthly life-forms. Methane gas also periodically appears in the atmosphere of this desiccated world, and the soil contains compounds that would be toxic to life as we know it. Although water does exist on Mars, it’s locked into the planet’s icy polar caps and buried, perhaps in abundance, beneath the Martian surface.
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Mars 101
From its blood-like hue to its potential to sustain life, Mars has intrigued humankind for thousands of years. Learn how the red planet formed from gas and dust and what its polar ice caps mean for life as we know it.
Since the 1960s, humans have sent dozens of spacecraft to study Mars. Early missions were flybys, with spacecraft furiously snapping photos as they zoomed past. Later, probes pulled into orbit around Mars; more recently, landers and rovers have touched down on the surface.
But sending a spacecraft to Mars is hard, and landing on the planet is even harder. The thin Martian atmosphere makes descent tricky, and more than 60 percent of landing attempts have failed. So far, four space agencies—NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)—have put spacecraft in Martian orbit. With eight successful landings, the United States is the only country that has operated a craft on the planet’s surface. The United Arab Emirates and China might join that club if their recently launched Hope and Tianwen-1 missions reach the red planet safely in February 2021.
Early highlights of Mars missions include NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft, which swung by Mars in July 1965 and captured the first close-up images of this foreign world. In 1971, the Soviet space program sent the first spacecraft into Martian orbit. Called Mars 3, it returned roughly eight months of observations about the planet's topography, atmosphere, weather, and geology. The mission also sent a lander to the surface, but it returned data for only about 20 seconds before going quiet.
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This February 3, 2013, image provided by NASA shows a self portrait of the Mars rover, Curiosity. NASA's Curiosity rover has uncovered signs of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars that may have teemed with microbes for tens of millions of years, far longer than scientists had imagined, new research suggests.
Once every 26 months, Earth and Mars are aligned in a way that minimizes travel times and expense, enabling spacecraft to make the interplanetary journey in roughly half a year. Earth’s space agencies tend to launch probes during these conjunctions, the most recent of which happens in the summer of 2020. Three countries are sending spacecraft to Mars during this window: The United Arab Emirates, which launched its Hope spacecraft on July 20 and will orbit Mars to study its atmosphere and weather patterns; China, which launched its Tianwen-1 on July 23, and the United States, currently targeting July 30 for the launch of its Perseverance rover.
Perseverance is a large, six-wheeled rover equipped with a suite of sophisticated instruments. Its target is Jezero Crater, site of an ancient river delta, and a likely location for ancient life-forms to have thrived. Once on the surface, Perseverance will study Martian climate and weather, test technologies that could help humans survive on Mars, and collect samples from dozens of rocks that will eventually be brought to Earth. Among its goals is helping to determine whether Mars was—or is—inhabited, making it a true life-finding Mars mission.
All of the robotic activity is, of course, laying the groundwork for sending humans to the next world over. NASA is targeting the 2030s as a reasonable timeframe for setting the first boots on Mars, and is developing a space capsule, Orion, that will be able to ferry humans to the moon and beyond.
Private spaceflight companies such as SpaceX are also getting into the Mars game. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said that humanity must become “a multiplanetary species” if we are to survive, and he is working on a plan that could see a million people living on Mars before the end of this century.
Jan 17, 2024 · “Our twin rovers were the first to prove a wet, early Mars once existed,” said former project scientist Matt Golombek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which managed the Mars Exploration Rover mission.
The vehicle’s heat shield is designed to withstand multiple entries, but given that the vehicle is coming into Mars’ atmosphere so hot, we still expect to see some ablation of the heat shield (similar to wear and tear on a brake pad). The engineering video below simulates the physics of Mars entry for Starship.
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In 2020, the Mars I mission launches for planet Mars, commanded by Luke Graham. Upon arrival, the team discovers a bright white formation in the Cydonia region, which they suspect is an extrusion from a subsurface geothermal column of water, useful to future human colonization.
