Journey towards the Colonization on the Red Planet

Key takeaways

Man, arriving on Mars, will mark the beginning of a new era, that of an interplanetary species.
The country also manufactures the powerful Long March 5 rocket, intended for various space missions.
It should not be long before we find out, one way or another, whether our neighboring planet has ever been home to life and whether our species has a future in another world.

Conquering Mars #

Man, arriving on Mars, will mark the beginning of a new era, that of an interplanetary species. Will humanity overcome what divides it, or, on the contrary, will it sink into conflicts inherent to its nature?

It is a Martian sequence that we are going through. Finally, after several months of travel, three satellites arrive at the Red Planet. Perseverance, the NASA mission, and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope’ and China’s ‘Tianwen-1’ probes have scientific and political dimensions.

Original diagram for Techfastly by Vin Patel.

Surface of Mars. Photography by NASA/JPL

Global interest in the colonization of Mars is growing. The space race of the early 1960s between the United States and the former Soviet Union is history. Today, all nations are learning to collaborate to develop the technological intelligence necessary for Mars. As a result, countries worldwide, including some that were not expected to work with the United States, are thinking, talking, and pushing forward the spaceship project - and ultimately humans – on planet Red. For example, collaborations between Europe, Russia, China, and India, with the United States, bring together forces that will make this Mars conquest project possible, financially and technologically. As for the private sector, the research it carries out is so exciting that it could bring us even closer to accomplishing this conquest.

Why Explore Mars? #

Discoveries made on Mars over the past century suggest that the Red Planet could host ecosystems and may still harbor microbial life forms.

The fourth planet from the Sun, Mars, is located just after Earth. About half the size of the blue world, the red planet has a gravity equivalent to only 38% that of its neighbor. So if it takes longer to orbit the Sun than the Earth, it rotates around its axis at an almost similar speed. This is why a year lasts 687 Earth days on Mars, but the days are only 40 minutes longer than on Earth.

Despite its smaller size, its area is roughly equivalent to that of all Earth’s continents combined. Mars, therefore theoretically, has a similar living area. But there is a problem: it is now enveloped in a refined atmosphere of carbon dioxide and cannot harbor life forms on Earth. Methane is also periodically released into the atmosphere of this arid world, while the soil contains chemicals toxic to life as we know it. If liquid water does not exist on the surface of Mars, this resource is trapped in the planet’s frozen polar caps and the ground, perhaps in large quantities.

When scientists today observe the Martian surface, they see features unmistakably the work of ancient flows, namely rivers, river valleys, basins, and deltas. These observations suggest that the planet once housed a vast ocean, which covered its northern hemisphere. Elsewhere on Mars, thunderstorms would have watered the landscape, grouping lakes and causing rivers to flow, which would then have sculpted the Martian surface. The red planet was also probably enveloped in a thick atmosphere capable of maintaining liquid water at Martian temperatures and pressures.

During its evolution, Mars went through a period of dramatic transformation. Once similar to Earth, it has evolved into the dusty, arid world we know today. What happened? What happened to these liquids? And what happened to the Martian atmosphere?

Exploring Mars is helping scientists learn more about momentary climate changes that can fundamentally alter planets. It is also an opportunity to research biosignatures, signs that may reveal whether life forms were abundantly present on the planet in the past and whether they still exist today. The more we learn about Mars, the more armed we will attempt to colonize the Red Planet shortly.

Major Discoveries #

Since the 1960s, we have sent dozens of probes to study Mars. The first missions consisted of simple reconnaissance flights during which cameras strafed the planet. Subsequently, the investigations have entered orbit around the Red Planet, and more recently, wanders and rovers have touched down on its surface.

While sending a probe to Mars is a complex exercise, it is even more challenging to land it on the planet. The refined atmosphere of Mars makes the descent delicate; thus, more than 60% of landing attempts failed. So far, four space agencies, NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), have placed probes in orbit around Mars. With eight successful landings on the clock, the United States is the only country to have operated an investigation on the surface of the Red Planet. The United Arab Emirates and China could soon join them: the Hope and Tianwen-1 missions, launched last July, placed themselves safely in Mars orbit a few days ago and are expected to land on the planet. red within several months.

Many highlights marked the exploration of Mars. One of these was the passage near the Red Planet in July 1965 of NASA’s Mariner 4 probe, which took the first close-up images of this alien world. Then, in 1971, the Soviet space program sent the first probe into orbit around Mars. Dubbed March 3, the approximately eight-month mission observed the topography, atmosphere, weather conditions, and geology of Mars. A lander also landed on the surface of the Red Planet, but it only transmitted data for about 20 seconds before ceasing to function.

Orbiters transmitted much more detailed information about the Martian atmosphere and surface in the decades that followed. They ended the theory that the Martian channels were built by an alien civilization (many scientists adhered to it since the end of the 19th century). The orbiters have also revealed some truly spectacular features of the Red Planet. It is home to the largest volcanoes in the solar system and one of the longest canyons ever discovered, the distance of which is the size of the United States, from the West Coast to the East Coast. The Martian plains are often swept by dust storms, while the winds form localized dust vortices.

In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 and Viking 2 probes were the first to operate on the Red Planet and to send us snapshots of the latter until 1982. They also conducted biological experiments on Martian soil, intending to discover signs of life in space. Unfortunately, the results were inconclusive, and even to this day, scientists have not been able to agree on how to interpret the data.

Sojourner, the first free-roaming rover, landed on the Red Planet as part of NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission, launched in 1996. Its successors include the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which have explored Mars for a long time. Unfortunately, it was longer than expected and sent us over 100,000 snaps before dust storms destroyed their solar panels in the 2010s.

NASA has two spacecrafts active on the Martian surface, InSight and Curiosity. InSight, which probes the planet’s internal structure, has already taught us that “Mars tremors” regularly shake its feeling. The Curiosity rover launched in 2012 travels around Gale Crater while taking ethereal snapshots and studying the rocks and sediments that have settled in the bed of the ancient crater lake.

Several machines in orbit also transmit data. This is notably the case with the MAVEN orbiter and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey probes for NASA; Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter probes for ESA; and the Indian probe Mars Orbiter Mission.

These missions demonstrated to scientists that Mars is an active planet teeming with the elements necessary for life as we know it - water, organic carbon, and a source of energy. However, it remains to be seen if a life form evolved on Mars in the past and is still present.

The complete list of nations working on this Mars project is extended.

The Arab World #

For the Emirates, it is a question of arousing scientific vocations and positioning itself in the Arab world. The Emirate’s imagined future is ambitious: build in the desert a scientific city to simulate Martian conditions and develop the technologies necessary for a future occupation. The Emirates also has mining and tourism goals. They signed an agreement for this with Virgin Galactic, Richard Grandson.

Please make no mistake, and the UAE did not produce everything itself. The rocket was Japanese, and the probe was made with American institutes. But it was the space agency that paid for and piloted the project. At its head, the very media Sarah Al Amir, who has since become Minister of Advanced Technologies and patron of the national space agency. A vast majority of women lead the Hope mission.

Ultimately, the Emirates have a more ambitious goal: to establish a human colony on Mars within 100 years.

China’s Highly Technological Goals #

For Beijing, it is about showing that it is becoming, step by step but with the regularity of a metronome, a tremendous spatial power. And without external aid, except that of Russia a few years ago.

The Chinese project, named “Tianwen-1” (“Questions to the sky-1”), wants to be paramount. If it succeeds, the country will never have gone so far in the solar system, and it could do in one attempt almost as much as what the United States has achieved since the 1960s. Its goal: to place a probe in orbit, place a lander on Mars, then deploy a 200-kilogram remote-controlled robot responsible for carrying out analyzes on the surface (soil and atmosphere analysis, maps, photos). The Tianwen 1 mission, if successful, will be impressive. It is the first trip to Mars for China, but it tries the trio: a satellite in orbit, arrived this Wednesday, a lander, and a robot of 200 kilos.

The landing is the most delicate because the Martian atmosphere is tenuous. The Chinese have never practiced it, and for the record, one in two probes fails to land correctly on Mars: this is called “the seven minutes of terror.” So for this step, you will have to wait until May.

The craft is expected to arrive next year for the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. The United States has achieved this feat. And precisely, China intends to place itself in direct competition with the United States in the conquest of Mars. Such a rivalry is reminiscent of the space race between the USSR and the United States during the Cold War.

Chinese space officials said plans are underway to send a rover to the Red Planet as early as possible. A small-scale Mars Rover prototype has been shown to the public. The Chinese mission would collect rock and soil samples, with a return to Earth around 2030. China has already launched a robotic lunar exploration mission, which, step by step, will lead to the human exploration of the Moon’s surface. The country also manufactures the powerful Long March 5 rocket, intended for various space missions.

United Arab Emirates: Getting Out of Oil Dependency #

This is the first interplanetary mission led by an Arab country. The “Hope” probe was launched Monday towards Mars from the Japanese base of Tanegashima. It is expected to reach orbit in February 2021 for the 50th anniversary of the unification of the United Arab Emirates. Its ambition is to provide meteorological indications of the atmosphere of the red planet by studying the variations of the climate over the seasons during a Martian year (i.e., 687 days).

But Emirates’ plans for Mars do not end there. In 2017, Emir Mohammed bin Rachis Al Maktoum presented “March 2117”. The project intends to create a “mini-city and a community on Mars.” To do this, architects were hired to imagine a future Martian city and build it in the desert, “Science City.” A project costing more than 120 million euros.

Through this conquest of Mars, the United Arab Emirates is sending a message: they want to be considered a power, not only regional and not only because of their oil and gas resources. They are thus initiating a movement towards exiting their dependence on exploiting these fossil fuels by turning to investment in science and advanced technologies, particularly aerospace.

They plan to launch an orbiter around Mars by 2021 to study the links between current weather and the past climate of the Red Planet. The probe will be the first to return a global image of the evolution of the Martian atmosphere over a single day and the seasons. In addition, the UAE Space Agency recently launched a national competition to design a habitat for two on Mars. The rules state that the materials can be brought in from Earth or found on the Red Planet.

United States: Consolidating Its Supremacy #

“Perseverance” is the name of the US $ 1.2 billion mission: NASA’s most gradual project in exploring Mars. Its goal is in line with previous missions to the red planet (“Opportunity,” “Curiosity”), that is to say, to know more about a possible Martian life. “We will manufacture oxygen on Mars, and with our drone, we will have aerial reconnaissance capabilities,” explained in December 2019 to France 2 Matt Wallace, deputy project manager of “Mars 2020”. The United States envisions sending an astronaut on Mars in 2034.

The takeoff of the probe was scheduled for July 30, 2021, from the Cape Canaveral base in Florida. Then, a robot (a rover) was deployed to establish a base for the astronauts. This wheeled spacecraft is a three-meter-long jewel of technology, weighing a ton, equipped with 19 cameras, two microphones, and two-meter robotic arms.

This exploration is a portion of a larger project expected by the scientific world. A collection of samples of Martian soil, “Perseverance,” will be in charge of depositing flasks to recover Martian dust.

The United States has been the only ambitious country in Mars exploration so far, and it is determined to remain so. When space was a privileged battleground between the USSR and the USA during the Cold War, the latter demonstrated their advance on Martian terrain. Then, in 1976, the wanders of the Viking program and American orbiters provided a first burst of information on Mars (atmosphere, meteorology, first analyzes of the ground on-site). Subsequently, in the 1990s, the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter detected minerals and proved that Mars was not always today’s arid planet. Finally, in 2011, the mission of the Mars Science Laboratory rover made it possible to detect the presence of past life on Mars indirectly. “Perseverance” will be the fifth rover (all American) to set foot on Martian soil.

This exploration is part of a colossal project expected by the scientific world. A collection of samples of Martian soil, “Perseverance,” will be in charge of depositing flasks to recover Martian dust.

This robot is the largest ever placed on a planet: it weighs a ton. It was designed on the same chassis as its predecessor Discovery but with fewer instruments. Seven in all, plus 19 cameras, a microphone for the first time, and even a drone! Only five robots, all American, have managed to land on Mars safely

Europe: A Mission That Goes on Forever #

The large-scale Mars project, ExoMars, is led by the European Space Agency (ESA). The program was inaugurated with the launch, in March 2016, of the TGO orbiter, for “trace gas orbiter” and of an experimental entry, descent, and landing module called Schiaparelli. They reached the Red Planet in October 2016. ExoMars also planned to launch a rover in 2020.

This mission paves the way for a future Mars sample return mission in the 2020s. The two ExoMars missions are carried out in cooperation with European and Russian space organizations.

This is not the only setback suffered by ExoMars. Launched in 2000, the program had been postponed for budgetary reasons. Then, it was to be done in partnership with NASA, which withdrew from the project; it is finally collaboration with the Russian space agency Roscosmos which was set up.

The first part of the mission was nevertheless carried out in 2016, where ESA and Roscosmos deployed a lander and an orbiter to detect the presence of methane on Mars. The device will be used to guide the future probe launched in 2022.

Land Exactly in a Crater That Contained Water #

Perseverance is to land in the Jezero crater, formerly filled with water, as evidenced by the riverbed and delta identified from orbit. François Forget, an astrophysicist at the CNRS Dynamic Meteorology Laboratory, compares it to a “small Camargue.” The precision aims to reduce the rover’s distance to travel. However, Perseverance could travel several tens of kilometers during its mission.

This 50 km crater “carefully chosen” according to François Forget, a planetologist at the CNRS, contained water 3.5 billion years ago. Has it stagnated long enough to have seen simple forms of life develop? This is what the planetologist community is hoping for—fine sediments, alluvium, which would contain traces of life.

“If we see stromatolites on arrival, it will be the jackpot,” enthuses William Rain, a researcher at IRAP, the research institute in astrophysics and planetology. Stromatolites are layered rock structures created by colonies of bacteria on Earth. The oldest is precisely 3.5 billion years old. “We have the indicator minerals to be able to find these traces of primitive life,” assures Violaine Shutter, a researcher in planetary geology at the CNRS and the National Museum of Natural History.

Collect Samples That Another Mission Will Come to Collect #

With a preelection carried out by the SuperCam machine developed by IRAP and Thales in particular, it is planned to collect around thirty soil cores and rocks reflecting several types of rocks present on the planet. These samples “will be placed in small carefully sterilized and sealed containers, and we will leave them there to come back and collect them later,” specifies François Forget. For this, a subsequent mission is planned, which will consist of collecting the samples, such as the pebbles from Petit Poucet, and making them take off again to reach a meeting point in orbit. A probe on standby will automatically capture the sample box to return to Earth by 2031.

This mission must also test the ability to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. For future human-crewed missions, and before that, to serve as an oxidizer for rockets that should take off again from the red planet. The MOXIE instrument, the size of a car battery, must produce 10 grams of water per hour. And for the first time on another earth, an attempt to fly a drone will be attempted.

For NASA, the cost of this mission is $ 2.4 billion. #

India: Forerunner in Asia #

The Mars Orbiter Mission, or MOM, a mission to send an Indian orbiter around Mars, is also called Mangalyaan. It sent a probe into orbit around the planet in September 2014 and marked India’s first successful foray into interplanetary space. The investigation analyzes the characteristics of Mars and the planet’s atmosphere; she is studying the presence of methane, which could indicate that life exists on Mars. This success pushes the Indian Organization for Space Research (ISRO) to consider other interplanetary flights. The NASA-ISRO Mars working group is strengthening cooperation between the two countries.

Japan #

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency plans a mission to one of the two moons of Mars, Phobos or Deimos, with a targeted landing in the early 2020s. Back on Earth, the material collected will be analyzed. The first Japanese probe - Nozomi, or Planet-B, was sent into the orbit of Mars in December 2003, unfortunately without success. The device is now an artificial planet, which will revolve around the Sun for all eternity.

Future of the Mars Exploration Missions #

Every 26 months, there is an alignment of the Earth and Mars. As a result, travel time and cost are reduced, allowing probes to complete the interplanetary journey in about six months. Space agencies tend to launch investigations during these conjunctions, the most recent in the summer of 2020. Three countries sent spacecraft to Mars during this period: on July 20, 2020, the Emirates United Arabs launched the Hope probe, which will orbit Mars to study its atmosphere and weather conditions; China, which launched the Tianwen-1 probe on July 23; and the United States, which launched the Perseverance rover on July 30.

Perseverance is a rover with six wide wheels and a sophisticated set of instruments. It should land in Jezero Crater. This ancient delta site would be the best place to find old life forms on Mars. Once the landing is successful, Perseverance will study the climate and weather conditions on the Red Planet. These test technologies can help humans survive on-site and take samples from dozens of rocks, which will then be sent to Earth.. One of the rover’s objectives is to determine whether Mars has been, or still is, inhabited. It is, therefore, a real mission to search for a Martian life form.

All of these robotic activities pave the way for human-crewed missions. NASA has set a reasonable goal of sending the first humans to Mars in the 2030s. The US space agency is developing its Orion space capsule, transporting humans to the Moon and beyond.

Mars is also attracting interest from private space companies like SpaceX. Its CEO has repeatedly insisted that humanity must become “a mufti-planetary species” to survive. His team is currently working on a project that could allow a million people to live on Mars by the turn of the century.

It should not be long before we find out, one way or another, whether our neighboring planet has ever been home to life and whether our species has a future in another world.

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