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The US space missions to Mars have been extremely successful, and
been composed of a integrated series of flybys, orbiters, landers, and rovers.
This combination of robotics, that have been sent to Mars,
have provided us with a vast wealth of information,
everything from quantitative high resolution imaging of the topography, and
surface features on Mars, to the questions relating to water.
Was water previously present on Mars in great abundance on the surface, and
then, really going to the core question of habitability.
Has Mars in the past been a planet that had a habitable environment for
life itself, and therefore, once that gets established that water was present,
which it has been, then we start to delve into the questions moving from was Mars
a habitable planet to has life been present within that habitable environment.
And the answers are strongly going in the direction that, yes,
Mars has been in the past a habitable planet for life itself.
So, what we want to do now is just think a little bit about what Mars, mission
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And this is going to begin to do quantitative analysis from an orbiter
linked again to a lander that will look at these fundamental building blocks of
Carbon, and Hydrogen, and Oxygen, and what their distribution is, and
how they're possibly linked together, as molecules within the soils, and
the rocks of the planet.
The Curiosity Rover had the capability to do, shallow coring, but
some of these next generation rovers are going to be able to do deeper coring,
and the reason that's important to us is,
because the water reservoirs on Mars are no longer on the surface.
We think about four billion years ago due to meteor impacts, the atmosphere,
and the water were blown away by having a high frequency of meteor impacts
on the surface.
And therefore, the water reservoirs, and
hence therefore the capacity to have an ecosystem where life can get a foothold,
are going to be in the subsurface, and especially some of the deeper
shallow subsurface analyses are going to be important for that.
So the MAVEN mission is going to provide a lot of information regarding that, but
in 2016, there's going to be a large transition both in terms of
the rovers themselves, but in terms of the politics of doing space mission.
The European space agency is going to take the lead along with
the Russian confederacy to put up a rover,
orbiter combination that's called the ExoMars program, and that exomars orbiter,
and rover, they are again going to be able to collect even higher resolution images,
and chemistry, and analyses of the rocks.
And the minerals that are on the planet but
then they're also going to be able to do something that
we've been wanting to have happen a long time which is to drill deeper holes.
And, as you can see from this image,
the drill apparatus is a major part of the Rover,
it actually is almost the entire length of the Rover that hangs on the side of it,
and it's going to be able to drill down upwards of a meter into the subsurface.
So that's going to be a tremendous leap forward for understanding,
the habitability, and the distribution of potential microbial life on the planet.
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Another important part of the future Mars missions that's
being discussed intensively right now, is putting humans on Mars, and
that human space mission, it carries a lot of interesting scenarios,
and intricacies with it that you might not think about.
First of all, it's upwards of a nine month journey each way, and so
that's an incredibly long period of time.
Another one is what should be the composition of the flight crew?
Should they all be male or all female?
Or some kind of a mixture, and then it really brings to
the fore the water that might be present on Mars is no longer on the surface.
So all the water sources would need to be brought from Earth at least for
the initial missions.
So not only sustaining energy, so the environmental conditions can be made.
So humans can be there, but also just, having a water source to sustain
the astronauts is a major part of that, and the ability to drill
very deep holes on the planet, and really get down into the frozen
cryosphere that's in the deep subsurface, that's going to require human beings.
So we can have a remote robot drill holes to some level, but the,
the very deep holes that go down upwards of 10s to 100s,
and deeper meters in the subsurface, will require the presence of human beings.
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Another part of the future missions are the next generations of what the space
station labs are going to be able to hold, and these are important because,
all the missions that we were talking about, either on Earth,
or around the Moon, or on Mars, or other planets these are all linked together.
And even from the early stages the Mariner four was critically important for, on
Mars, for the Mariner five mission which went on to Venus, and so we've always had
this kind of piggybacking, which is interesting, between the various missions.
And even though one mission goes to one planet,
they help holistically with communications and staging for others, so
the space station, the next generations of that will be extremely important, as well.
5:52
And then one more avenue of NASA plans for the near future and
these are directly linked to Mars but also holistically throughout our solar system.
Is what they're calling the Asteroid Redirect project, and
that project is the idea that we could put up spacecraft that will be able to
directly sample, analyze, and in some cases, if the asteroid is small enough,
actually capture the asteroid, and you remember that the word asteroid means that
it's a body of rock, primarily rock that's moving through the solar system,
and so, there are many levels to this project.
One of them, if a smallish asteroid looks like it's going to hit the Earth,
and cause problems, we can go up, and be able to capture that asteroid,
but even more importantly, we think that the asteroid redirect capture project will
allow us to be able to have the asteroid sampled by humans.
So in this image, we can see that the spacecraft is powered by solar panels, but
has a large accordion kind of opening to it.
And the idea there is to move the space craft, so the according opening
goes toward the asteroid, and then rocket boosters are fired, and
then that asteroid is captured within the telescoping accordion,
and then once that's brought close, and stationary then astronauts can go up on
ladders, and actually physically chisel and hammer away on the asteroid itself.
And asteroids are really important to us, because first of all some,
of the basic building blocks of life, some of the amino acids that are required for
life, have been found already synthesized on some asteroids.
Another one, is that the minerals that are present on asteroids are precious metals
and other, are important natural resources that might be utilized.
And then of course, we have planetary protection, and the whole idea that, first
of all, can microbes can be transported on asteroids, which we think the answer is
yes, then another one is, will the asteroids then potentially hit the planet.
There's a whole variety of reasons why these missions are important, and viable.
The asteroid redirect project also brings to the table, for
the first time, other types of, a mechanisms for rocket boosters in space,
and this is an image of the xenon rocket booster, so, these are all
next generations ways to provide thrust for spacecraft in the future.
So the very successful Mars missions of the landers,
the flybys, the rovers, and the orbiter has provided us with
precisely the suite of information that we need about Mars, and
other planets to be able to move forward with this directive of
understanding what is the origin, and the distribution, and
composition in the future of life throughout our solar system.
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Bruce W. Fouke, Ph.D.Director of the Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center
