There is a rush of current and planned missions to explore the red planet, but an Australian scientist playing a key role says humans are unlikely to ever call Mars home.
Examine, a weekly newsletter covering the latest developments in science, is sent every Tuesday. Below is an excerpt –There was a brief thrill of excitement felt around the world over the weekend as news spread of a fantastic find on Mars – what appeared to be a crashed alien spacecraft.
The Ingenuity helicopter, which made history last year as the first man-made vehicle to take flight on another planet, was one part of a two-pronged NASA mission, along with the Perseverance rover, to explore an area around the Jezero crater just to the north of the Martian equator. “The big one is that it’s the easiest planet not just to get to, but to conduct missions on,” he says. “It is fairly close to Earth relatively speaking, and it has a pretty inert surface, so there’s lots of opportunities to do research. Basically it’s a case of if you want to shoot a probe into the solar system, if not at Mars, then where?”
“So that is obviously not great if you want to find anything living, but it’s great for one of our other goals which is to date rocks on Mars for the first time,” he says. However, they won’t be sent back by the current mission, but by the next one, which is currently in development. A lander is expected to be developed that can land on the surface, collect the samples and then return to Earth – an engineering feat which would itself be a first.
“We have the rockets that could get us there, but that is only one tiny part of the problem,” he says. “The sort of claims Elon Musk makes on Twitter – you can quote me on this – are a load of baloney.”Chief among the limitations is the cost – Flannery estimates a crewed Mars mission would cost more than $100 billion, before even starting to construct a colony.
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