Posted: Aug 26, 2005 03:07 am EDT
You might have seen it already - a bright orange star under the moon. It's actually awesome. Mars is most probably our next destination - and there is already plenty of action going on. This is also the planet where it could be most possible to commission a private rocket, so let's start paying attention.

Going to Mars and landing there is fairly doable, coming back is another story. Unless you are prepared to stay.

Spirit climbing summits

Two rovers are currently mapping the place. Opportunity recently completed a study of a cobble area, but most of the action has been around Spirit working the summit of "Husband Hill". The ascent has been anything but easy: Spirit was forced to turn back several times at steep sections and try various traverses before she made it.

The rover can only drive every other Martian day (sol). Restricted sols occur when the timing of the communications pass from the Odyssey orbiter is too late in the sol to gather vital location and health information about the rover after it executed recent commands. The team back on Earth must wait until the next sol to find out where and how the rover is.

Power has been extremely healthy at about 875 to 900 watt-hours per sol. Spirit has been consistently using both morning and evening UHF communications passes with the Odyssey orbiter every sol, which allows the team to acquire and downlink more data.

Devils and dust

The weather turned violent early Mars spring: Spirit began seeing dust devil activity which increased as spring continued, but fell off again for about two weeks during a dust storm. As the dust storm faded away, dust devil activity came back.

In the mid-afternoons as the summer solstice approached, dust devils were a very common occurrence on the floor of Gusev crater. The early-spring dust devils tended to move southwest-to-northeast, across the dust devil streaks in Gusev seen from orbit. Increasingly as the season progresses, the dust devils are seen moving northwest-to-southeast, in the same direction as the streaks. Scientists are watching for the big dust devils that leave those streaks.

Staying there

So let's say we'd go there and have to stay. Well, Biosphere 2 is for sale. Texas billionaire Ed Bass, president of Decisions Investment, spent more than $200 million to build the dome in the 1980s as a prototype for a Mars space colony. In 1991, eight "biospherians" were sealed inside for a two-year stay. But the project was aborted prematurely due to various difficulties with the ecological system and tension between the "biospherians". We might get along better if we have to though.

The self-contained ecological Arizona experiment is pretty cool. There's an ocean complete with coral reefs and a white sandy beach lapped by gentle waves, a desert, a rainforest and a savannah. There is wind and there is rain - all created by man.

Life on Mars

While NASA is using machines on Mars to prepare us for the planet, the Mars Society uses humans on Earth towards the same goal.

Created in 1990 by an engineer at Martin Marietta named Robert Zubrin, he caused a sensation by proposing Mars Direct, a way of getting to the Red Planet without stopping at either the ISS or the moon:

"The whole mission could be accomplished in a decade, rather than 20 years, as NASA is proposing," said Zubrin, who has since written The Case for Mars and Mars on Earth. "Yet NASA's not-invented-here policy makes such outside suggestions unlikely, he added and started several projects on Earth simulating and researching the Mars environment.

"We're ready"

These are the guys you might have heard of before taking off for the North Pole (from Canada) - they are the ones doing all kinds of stuff on Devon Island.

"We're ready. Though Mars is distant, we are far better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were to travel to the Moon at the commencement of the space age. Given the will, we could have our first teams on Mars within a decade," says Zubrin.

The Purpose of the Mars Society is "To further the goal of the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet". This will be done by: Broad public outreach, conducting Mars exploration on a private basis - starting small, with hitchhiker payloads on government funded missions, then mobilize larger resources that will enable stand-alone private robotic missions and ultimately human exploration.






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