Even if we succeed in sending humans to Mars someday — NASA hopes to do that in the 2030s — astronauts would need a place to stay once they arrive.
To research how people might one day settle on Mars, engineers and scientists at a company called Interstellar Lab are designing space-inspired villages.
In November, the company announced a plan to build a development, called the Experimental Bioregenerative Station (EBIOS), in California's Mojave Desert starting in 2021. The design for that project features glass domes for growing food and luxurious bedrooms for astronauts and visitors.
Other things to check out:
All-Female Crew Sets Off for Historic 'Mars' Mission | Space
This past Saturday (Jan. 4) in Hawaii, on the remote slopes of Mauna Loa, the largest volcano in the world, six scientists embarked on a historic "mission to Mars."
Analog astronaut missions place scientists and explorers in remote locations on Earth that physically resemble cosmic destinations like the moon and Mars. There, the researchers explore and perform research as if they were in space. This both generates important scientific data and informs space agencies about what it might be like to step foot on those far-off surfaces.
Mars & Human Exploration: A Rebuttal of Those Who Fear the Unknown | National Review
I n a special issue, the last of 2019, the web magazine Quillette deals with the exploration and settlement of Mars. The issue includes contributions from Michael Shermer , Cathy Young , and Michael Solana , all of whom address the question of future governance on the Red Planet.
So far so good. However, the issue also includes an article — " One Small Step for Man . . . One Giant Leap toward the Annihilation of All Mankind," by forensic psychologist Armondo Simon — that, written in earnest, is hands down the most absurd piece ever penned about the purported danger of back contamination from Mars.
The Decade of Mars: How the 2020s May Be a New Era of Red Planet Exploration | Space
That next step begins this July with the launches of NASA's 2020 Mars rover and the European-Russian rover Rosalind Franklin, both of which will hunt for signs of ancient Red Planet organisms.
This work reached a crescendo in the 2010s. Curiosity and the smaller rovers Spirit and Opportunity plied their trade in the last decade, as did the InSight lander and its two fly-along cubesats and the orbiters Mars Odyssey, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN. (Spirit barely makes this list; the golf-cart-size rover last communicated with Earth in March 2010.)
While you're here, how about this:
NASA's Mars 2020 to Prepare for Humans into Deep Space
The rover will make the trip to the red planet later this year, and start preparing for NASA's mission to send humans into deep space.
NASA recently showed off its Mars 2020 rover. It has four wheels and is about the size of a car. The rover will be sent to Florida's Kennedy Space Center in three parts. It will be put together there. The vehicle's official name will be chosen soon.
"The trick, though, is that we're looking for trace levels of chemicals from billions of years ago on Mars," Mars 2020 deputy project manager Matt Wallace told Reuters. The rover will collect up to 30 samples, or small amounts, of soil. NASA plans to have them picked up and returned to Earth by a future spacecraft.
NASA Just Unveiled Its 2020 Mars Rover, And We're Beyond Excited
The rover has been constructed in a large, sterile room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, where its driving equipment was given its first successful test last week.
Shown to invited journalists on Friday, it is scheduled to leave Earth in July 2020 from Florida's Cape Canaveral, becoming the fifth US rover to land on Mars seven months later in February.
Among the devices on board the rover are 23 cameras, two "ears" that will allow it to listen to Martian winds, and lasers used for chemical analysis.
A Biological Solution to the Mystery of Methane on Mars | Daily Planet | Air & Space
The science team put together an experimental chamber in which microbes obtained water exclusively by deliquescence —the process by which substances, mostly salts, absorb moisture directly from the atmosphere until they dissolve in the absorbed water and form a solution. This is critical because the Martian surface is nowadays devoid of liquid water.
Intern Turns 'Head' on NASA's Next Mars Rover - Meet JPL Interns | NASA/JPL Edu
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