‘All the pieces are falling into place’ for manned mission to red planet
Scientists at the European Space Agency announced yesterday that the Mars Express, the agency’s orbiting probe, confirmed what most experts already believed: Mars has water.
Using an infrared scanner, the Mars probe detected water molecules vapourizing in the Martian atmosphere above the south pole, making this the most direct evidence yet of the life-sustaining substance’s presence on the red planet.
The discovery reinforces the belief that it may once have been home to life — and might still be. While scientists have long believed that the planet’s polar caps contain frozen water, credible evidence of this has begun to turn up only recently.
Mars Odyssey, a NASA vehicle orbiting Mars for the past two years, had earlier turned up evidence of hydrogen in the ice caps of Mars, indicating the presence of water.
But David Southwood, the European Space Agency’s science director, said the finding was more concrete.
“Previous measurements have been indirect and this is the first time we have had direct indications of molecules that are present in water,” he said.
The Mars Express’ discovery is a welcome bit of good news for Europe’s space program, whose reputation suffered after the British Beagle 2 Mars lander lost touch with earth last month, before its mission on the Martian surface even began.
The news also comes just one day after NASA announced it had lost touch with its Mars rover Spirit for more than 24 hours beginning on Thursday. Although the vehicle did manage to transmit a signal for 10 minutes yesterday, most of its information was “gobbledygook,” as NASA scientists put it, and it is still unknown if the probe will return to normal operations.
Earlier this month, U.S. President George W. Bush unveiled a plan to send humans to the Martian surface within the next few decades, and to return to the moon as early as 2015.
For Mike A. Dixon, chairman of the environmental biology department at the University of Guelph, Mr. Bush’s plan and the confirmation of the existence of water on Mars means that “all the pieces are falling into place” for a manned trip to Mars.
Mr. Dixon, who is also director of the Controlled Environment Systems research facility in Guelph, says the existence of water on Mars makes a manned flight to the planet much more feasible.
“The really simple thing is we don’t have to carry a whole ton of water up there with us,” he says. “Without local water resources available for contributing to life support and human exploration … the prospect of a trip to Mars would be an extremely challenging activity. The mass and energy requirements to get water up there is not a trivial exercise. So that is a huge, huge boost in the potential for sustaining a human mission on Mars.”
Mr. Dixon’s research facility is working on sustainable life support systems for a manned flight to Mars, and is lobbying to become the agency that trains horticultural mission specialists for such a flight.
But not everyone is convinced that the discovery of water on Mars will make a manned flight possible — or even desirable.
“We’re talking about sending a person to Mars, an 18-month trip,” says John Landstreet, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario who teaches about exploration of the solar system. “They will need an earth-like environment for that time, so my guess is whatever method is used for recycling the water, finding a bit of water on Mars is not going to dramatically change the engineering problem of getting them safely there and bringing them back. They (the Mars probes) didn’t find the Garden of Eden.”
Mr. Landstreet suggests that space exploration is best done by unmanned probes like the Mars Spirit and the Mars Express.
“Sending a lander to Mars is a couple hundred million dollars, but sending a person is probably 20 to 50 times more expensive, because you don’t want this person to die on prime time TV with billions of people watching.”
The existence of Martian water also brings up the prospect of organic life on the planet. However, Mr. Landstreet cautions not to expect too much from this possibility. He suggests that if there ever was life on Mars, it probably existed some four billion years ago, when it is theorized the planet was considerably warmer.
“Probably there is no life on Mars today, but there might have been back then,” he says.
The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, January 24, 2004
