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Can humans endure the psychological torment of living on Mars?

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NASA is conducting experiments that may be the biggest challenge in future Mars missions; How does a human on Mars cope with the psychological torment caused by isolation?

Can humans endure the psychological torment of living on Mars?

Alyssa Shannon is a registered nurse at UC Davis Medical Center. One day, on his way to the university hospital, NASA called him and told him that he had been selected for a mission to Mars. That same morning, Nathan Jones, an emergency room physician in Springfield, received a similar call. He immediately thought of his family and told himself that if you accept this opportunity, you will have to let them go. However, he couldn’t turn down NASA’s opportunity and convinced himself that Mars was his destiny.

The Mars Crew Health and Performance Probe Analogue Mission, or CHAPEA for short, will not actually send selected individuals to Mars, but rather will accurately simulate the first human journey to Mars and pave the way for sending the first humans to Mars, possibly by 2040.

According to NASA, humans will one day travel to Mars. In 2018, NASA estimated that the first humans would land on Mars “by the late 2020s at the latest.” The date for the first human mission has changed slightly, but despite the technical hurdles, it will definitely happen one day. Rachel McCulley, until recently the deputy director of NASA’s Mars campaign, has compiled a list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first human mission can be launched.

Many of the items on the list deal with the mechanical problems of transporting people to a planet that never gets closer than 54.6 million kilometers to Earth. Keeping people alive in toxic soil and unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate and safe communications to bring them back to Earth more than a year and a half later, are some of the challenges of a trip to Mars.

Other problems involve technical details too obscure for McCulley to explain. But he has no doubts that NASA will overcome these challenges. Of course, what NASA and no one else knows yet is whether humanity will be able to overcome the psychological torment of living on Mars.

CHAPEA’s mission addresses human rather than technical questions. For 378 days, four ordinary volunteers will experience the conditions of human life on Mars as much as possible. They received instructions, feedback, and full supervision from Mission Control. These people eat astronaut food, perform basic experiments, perform maintenance tasks, answer endless surveys, and enjoy organized downtime. This level of extreme realism is necessary to ensure that the experiment correctly determines whether humans can live millions of kilometers away from their acquaintances.

The experimenters wanted to know if the crew could eat astronaut food for hundreds of days without losing their appetite, weight or positive attitude. Can they live in a confined space with strangers? Can they maintain a cohesive professional environment without contact with the ground? Such questions are of the utmost importance because no mission to Mars can succeed if Martians cannot maintain their health, happiness, and, most importantly, their sanity.

If Martians cannot maintain their mental health, no Mars mission will be successful

NASA’s goal of the simulated mission was to see if subjects could thrive in an environment designed to closely resemble Mars. NASA launched the program in August 2021 with a “Mars Calls” announcement on its website. Participation in CHAPEA, unlike most NASA missions, was open to the general public, or at least to a broad segment of the public: citizens or permanent residents between the ages of 30 and 55 with a master’s degree or higher in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Applicants were told that the experience was “mentally difficult”.

NASA offered four golden tickets to travel to a simulated settlement called Dune Alpha; The 158 square meter building was built inside a large warehouse at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. This settlement was built using 3D printing technology and instead of ink, Martian regolith was used. NASA did not have sufficient amounts of Martian regolith, so a special orange material called lavacrete was used, which was removed layer by layer from a 3D printer.

The residence has four identical cells that serve as bedrooms, a lounge, a television, and four chairs. There are also several desks with computer monitors, a medical station, and an agricultural garden in the settlement. Garden plants considered for mental health: Growing plants may have “psychological benefits for astronauts living in an isolated environment far from Earth,” says one researcher. The rooms have different heights to avoid the monotony of the space. The yard is shaped like a box filled with red sand and has two treadmills for the crew to practice “space walking”. The walls of the courtyard are covered with murals of Martian rocks and there are no windows.

The duration of the trial is the most obvious violation of the truth. Orbital geometry dictates that the shortest round-trip mission to Mars would take about 570 days, and this scenario might occur once every 15 years. A typical trip to Mars would take at least 800 days.

NASA has declined to disclose details of the 378-day confinement, which ends on July 6, 2024, to preserve the integrity of the experiment. NASA only emphasized that participants would experience “resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and other environmental stressors.” For example, the crew on the Mars mission must form lasting emotional bonds with strangers and rely on each other for comfort. The crew must respond to any emergency situation on their own without any intervention or guidance. They must cope with not being able to care for a sick child, a grieving spouse, or a dying parent.

Future travelers to Mars must not only endure all these conditions alone but also pursue this opportunity with a determined and honest purpose in order to earn the privilege of long-duration space travel. They must accept that for at least 570 days, they will be the most isolated humans in the history of the world.

Imaging humans on Mars

Alyssa Shannon had dreamed of Mars since she was a child and knew she could endure the hardships and long periods of isolation. Nathan Jones also felt that this mission was designed for him. But professional observers of America’s space programs, a group of NASA historians, ethicists, and advisers who spend much of their careers studying the future of space exploration, have raised the question: What does NASA want to learn from the CHAPEA mission that it doesn’t already know?

The psychological damage of social distancing is well understood. Everyone knows what isolation does to a person. Johnson Schwartz, a philosophy professor who studies the ethics of space exploration, says: “What ambiguity is left when you lock people in a room for a year? “Just because the room is painted to look like Mars doesn’t mean the results will change.”

Monotony prevents people from performing the most basic tasks

The sources of Johnson Schwartz’s talk are 80 years of study in the field of isolation. The study of isolation began in World War II. At the time, the British Royal Air Force was concerned about the performance of pilots during solo flights. The officers noticed that the longer the pilot stayed in the air, the fewer submarines he detected. Psychologist Norman McWorth also recognized that the monotony of the mission is to blame for this. The monotony of the mission made the pilots unable to perform even the most basic tasks.

The results of Mackworth’s study inspired a series of studies by psychologist Donald O. Hebb from McGill University. Confirming McWorth’s findings, Hebb added new details. Monotony not only causes intellectual weakness but also leads to a “change in behavioral approach”. In Hebb’s experiment, his students slept and thought about their studies and personal problems. Then they would reminisce and recreate their movies or travels. Some also count to incredibly large numbers.

However all participants eventually lost the ability to focus. Several people also reported “blank periods” during which they thought about nothing. The next step was illusion. The hallucinations made people vulnerable, and long after the experiment was over, they believed the hallucinations were real.

Hebb’s findings inspired isolation studies. Individuals were confined in different locations and all results were consistent. In addition to attracting neuroscientists and psychologists, the experiments also attracted the attention and funding of the US intelligence community. The findings were included in “forced counter-espionage interrogations” or what is now called “brainwashing” or “psychological torture”.

Isolation studies were also closely monitored by the Air Force, which led the fledgling US space program before NASA was formed in 1958. Concerned that spaceflight might drive astronauts crazy, the Air Force conducted the first test similar to CHAPEA. The astronauts in this experiment were confined for a week in the cockpit of the spaceship, which was slightly larger than a coffin. The pilots were assigned a large number of technical tasks and were given large quantities of amphetamines.

The experiment followed a familiar pattern: initial high spirits gave way to a “gradual increase in irritability” and suddenly turned to “open hostility.” Many participants experienced hallucinations, with one pilot even abandoning the test after three hours and seeking psychiatric care.

In all isolation experiments, initial high spirits eventually gave way to irritability, violence, and hallucinations.

Several other similar studies were conducted before all research was stopped by the Mercury Space Program. Since the official start of the US space program in the early 1960s, astronauts have not suffered from any obvious psychological distress during successful solo missions, much to the relief of researchers. All long-duration space travel took place in Earth orbit, and crews were easily able to communicate with Earth. Government agencies continued to investigate the effects of isolation, but NASA did not.

NASA didn’t have a solution to the problem of isolation in space, and it didn’t need to, until half a century later when a new challenge arose: a human mission to a planet so far away that it would take at least 22 minutes for a cry for help to travel through the solar system. slow

The delay in communication worried CHAPEA crew members and families. All contact with the settlement is timed by the time it takes to send the information from Earth to Mars. Even exchanging short sentences like “How are you? “Good” also lasts at least 44 minutes.

But “44 minutes” is considered the best possible case, since every connection must flow through a connection point. Any information unit must wait in a digital queue, with priority given to the most urgent signals and smallest data packets. As a result, any normal human conversation with the earth is unthinkable. Also, there will be no contact during a three-week period in the middle of the experiment that marks the furthest distance between Earth and Mars.

Mother and child watching the moon and Mars in the night sky

The selected CHAPEA crew respected NASA’s decision on the mission, but if they wanted to better imagine the year ahead, they should study an earlier series of Mars simulations that shared some goals with the CHAPEA mission. For example, the HI-SEAS Analog Space Mission and Space Exploration Simulator in Hawaii simulated trips to the Moon and Mars missions between 2013 and 2017.

Civilians on the HI-SEAS mission were selected to live in a habitat in Hawaii for 12 months. The mission investigated and studied various nutritional and “psychosocial” benefits, as well as volunteers’ behavior and mental alertness and coping strategies developed to resist isolation.

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars is the memoir of Keith Green, one of the original HI-SEAS crew, and includes chapters entitled “On Boredom”, “In Isolation” and “Dreams of Mars, Dreams of Earth”. Green explains how the monotony changed his mission. “At that time mental fatigue had become my main state of mind,” he writes. The crew barely slept, were under constant surveillance, and scheduled leisure seemed a little forced.” The slightest provocation drove Greene mad, and he soon found himself missing out on everyday life on Earth.

The HI-SEAS mission followed the Mars 500 mission, the longest Mars simulation mission ever. Mars500, operated by the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems, put a six-man crew together on a synthetic Mars for 520 days, between June 2010 and November 2011, in a synthetic spacecraft and a synthetic landing module.

Russian experimenters hypothesized that over time, astronauts would lose motivation, work less, and suffer from feelings of extreme isolation. After the experiment was over, the scientists announced that the hypotheses were “largely confirmed.” Crews lost confidence in their commanders and mission control, communication became poor, nutritional problems developed, and people became homesick and depressed. “It’s not easy to spend 520 days,” said Wang Yu , one of the participants who lost about 10 kilograms of weight and most of his hair. It is impossible to be happy all the time. “I am human, not a robot.”

Despite the previous results, the desire to simulate life on Mars still seems insatiable. CHAPEA is just one of dozens of NASA’s current analog experiments. One of Hera’s other missions is; A habitat that keeps four participants in isolation for 45 days. Since NASA ended participation in HI-SEAS, a variety of public and private organizations have continued the missions. The private association of the Mars Society has been operating several research bases in the Utah desert and the remote islands of northern Canada for years. Analogues of Mars have also been performed in Dome C of the Antarctic Plateau, the semi-arid region of northeastern Brazil, ice caves in Austria and Oman.

The effect of selected isolation is not the same as imposed isolation

The first travelers to Mars are likely to have the same psychological profile as Shannon, Jones, and two other participants: Ross Brockwell, a structural engineer and director of general operations, and Kelly Heston, a stem cell biologist. All four are NASA enthusiasts, in good physical health, and welcome long periods of isolation. These people themselves chose to spend a period of isolation and restriction.

Louise Hockley, an expert on social isolation, emphasizes that psychological responses are strongly influenced by whether isolation is chosen or imposed on individuals. A prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment usually suffers more than a monk who has taken a vow of silence. But Hockley points out that participants, no matter how well supported, are not autonomous. “Even if the crew is OK, what happens to the family that’s left behind?”

However, the designers of CHAPEA do not seem to have an understanding of the history of isolation and social isolation studies. In interviews, they also downplayed the findings of previous trials, including HI-SEAS. CHAPEA principal investigator Grace Douglas admitted she was “not entirely familiar” with the previous four-year trial, saying: “I don’t believe they met our performance criteria. “Our assessment is at a higher level of detail and will be more extensive.”

Rachel McCulley is NASA’s CHAPEA Funding Officer. When asked what he hopes to learn from the mission about human psychology, he said, “The big reason I funded the mission is that I want to know exactly how much food is needed for a Mars mission.”

But what about the psychological aspect of the mission? How do people cope with loneliness and monotony? McCauley is a solid fuel propulsion system engineer and his goal was to determine the spacecraft’s weight only. He could estimate the mass of everything, but he wanted to know how much food the four stressed astronauts would consume in 378 days and how much clothing they would need.

Investigating psychological issues is NASA’s second priority. Mathias, a historian of isolation, asks whether empirical logic can justify another study of isolation. In his opinion, these experiments are “a way to colonize Mars, or a form of wish-fulfillment, or, in other words, just a game of cosplay.” Analog experiments reflect utopian promises about a future for humans on Mars. A human mission to Mars is not the highest ambition in space programs, but a small step for mankind before a giant leap in the habitation of other planets.

The inhabitants of Mars will turn from humans into a modified species of “Martians”.

Five months before the CHAPEA call, Dennis Bushnell, a 60-year senior scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, published a paper on the future of space exploration, commercialization, and habitation. He says colonizing Mars has always been conceivable for colonizing humans. He notes that the prospect has gone from “very difficult” to “increasingly feasible” in recent years.

Bushnell predicts that Mars colonists will “become a modified species.” Travelers who colonize Mars will become Martians over time due to reduced exposure to heat and radiation. The ultimate promise of NASA’s Mars mission is a chance to start over, not exactly as humans, but as Martians. If we can settle on Mars and enjoy a carefree life with no regrets, it stands to reason that we should no longer be human, we should be Martians.

But Mathias likens the constant testing of Mars to a traumatic repetition. The compulsion to rebuild is an irrational and futile attempt to undo a deep injury. “The urge to try to recreate a perfect world is always repeating the same mistake we made here,” he says. “We are not looking for Mars, we are mourning for Earth.”

Official portrait of the CHAPEA 1 mission crewNASA released the official CHAPEA 1 crew portrait on June 25, 2023. From left to right: Anka Selario, Ross Brockwell, Kelly Heston, Nathan Jones.

The four crew and two surrogates of the CHAPEA mission gathered together for a final month of training and evaluation a month before confinement to the settlement. Three weeks before arrival, NASA hosted a “Family Weekend” for the crew’s loved ones. Families visited the Johnson Space Center and interacted closely with the astronauts. The crew’s families agreed to share stress management techniques and pledged to keep in touch through a private Facebook page.

But Alyssa Shannon received a call five days before the mission began. He announced that NASA had removed him from the mission and had been replaced by U.S. Navy microbiologist Anka Selario. The reason for Alyssa’s removal was not released, but NASA investigators added that sometimes during final pre-mission tests, problems are found that are not “medically serious” but may pose a risk, such as an increased risk of kidney stones. Of course, this is just an example and the researchers refused to provide information.

On June 25, 2023, NASA’s YouTube channel broadcast footage of four CHAPEA 1 crew members standing on a platform in front of the settlement. Grace Douglas announced that the knowledge we gain here will help us send humans to Mars and return them home safely. Then, Douglas opened the simple white door of the settlement, the crew waved and entered. Douglas closed the door behind them. The happy voice of the crew could be heard from inside the settlement.

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Maybe the Earth is not doomed by the death of the sun

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A global discovery of an Earth-sized rock orbiting a white dwarf suggests a future where our planet could survive beyond the Sun.

Maybe the Earth is not doomed by the death of the sun

Will the sun one day destroy the earth? This may or may not happen. Astronomers have spotted a rocky planet the size of Earth orbiting a white dwarf, hinting at a future in which our planet outlives its star.

In 6 billion years, the sun will grow and become a red giant star. At this point, Mercury and perhaps Venus will be swallowed up, and for a long time, we thought that planet Earth would also be incinerated. But maybe the blue planet is not doomed, even though it may become an uninhabitable world in the next 6 billion years.

According to the New York Times, scientists have discovered a rocky planet orbiting a star that has passed its red giant phase. The planet now orbits a white dwarf, a smaller stellar body left over after a star burns out.

Importantly, the planet appears to have once been in the same position as the Earth now orbits our Sun. Before being swallowed up by its dying star, the rocky planet was pushed into a distant orbit, twice the distance between Earth and the Sun. In this way, the discovered world is considered the first rocky planet that has been seen rotating around a white dwarf.

A rocky Earth-like planet has survived the destruction of its star

“We don’t know if Earth can survive,” said astrophysicist Kaming Zhang of the University of California, San Diego, who led the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. “If it survives, it will become such a system.”

The rocky planet is about 4,000 light-years away and in 2020, the South Korean Radio Astronomy Observatory discovered it using a process called gravitational microconvergence. The Korean team observed the star of the rocky planet while passing in front of a distant star, and that star magnified the amount of light reaching the telescope by a thousand times. This effect, known as convergence or gravitational lensing, makes it possible to identify very distant and faint objects.

That particular event was a one-off event, and the chances of further detailed observations are limited until powerful new telescopes can get a better look at the rocky planet in the future. But Dr. Zhang and his team were able to do more last year at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and found out that the planet’s star is actually a white dwarf.

The researchers calculated that at least two objects are orbiting the white dwarf. One of them was a brown dwarf; That is, the failed star that had never ignited by nuclear fusion and was located at a great distance from the central star. But the other object is a planet with a mass of about 1.9 times that of Earth, which orbits closer to the star’s period and is therefore likely to be a rocky world.

By modeling the evolution of the star system, Zhang’s team calculated that the planet may have once been in a habitable orbit like Earth. The star was probably the same size as ours. “We expect the star to have been roughly the same mass as the Sun,” Dr. Zhang said.

A microlensing event revealing a white dwarfGravitational convergence shows the white dwarf shown by the vertical white lines. The researchers captured images of the star years before the event (a), shortly after the background star peaked in 2020 (b), and after it disappeared in 2023 (c).
Keck Observatory

But as the star ran out of fuel, it lost some of its mass, causing the rocky planet’s orbit to lengthen. The rocky planet escaped from the expanding red giant phase of the star and survived to the white dwarf stage.

A handful of gas planets have been found orbiting white dwarfs, but they were either in more distant orbits or had migrated inward and closer after the red giant phase. “If Dr. Zhang’s diagnosis is correct, this would be the first rocky planet orbiting such a star,” said Susan Mulally, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland. “It’s definitely the smallest and clearest rocky planet we’ve ever found around a white dwarf.”

A handful of gas planets have been discovered orbiting white dwarfs

Stephen Kane, an astronomer at the University of California Riverside, noted that he was excited when he first read the paper. He has previously investigated whether planets can survive when their stars pass through the red giant phase, so he is intrigued by the new discovery. However, the presence of the brown dwarf complicates everything. If the brown dwarf was once closer to the star but moved outward, it could change the dynamics of the entire system, he explained. That means, maybe there are other planets that have been thrown out and the planets that are currently observed are among the survivors.

NASA is scheduled to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope before 2027 and is expected to find more planets through gravitational microconvergence. Perhaps some of them are orbiting white dwarfs.

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Alien life may be hiding under the Martian ice cover

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Alien life may be hiding under the Martian ice cover. Martian dust ices in mid-latitudes are exposed to sunlight and provide a favorable environment for the search for possible Martian life.

Alien life may be hiding under the Martian ice cover

A new study suggests that the conditions necessary for photosynthesis on Mars may exist beneath the dusty ice cover in the Red Planet’s mid-latitudes.

Photosynthesis is a process by which living organisms such as plants, algae, and cyanobacteria can produce chemical energy. This process requires water and light to progress and produces much of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. According to the new findings, Martian ice layers of sufficient thickness can filter out intense solar radiation while still allowing sunlight to penetrate beneath them for photosynthesis, creating so-called “radiatively habitable” zones.

Since the process of photosynthesis is suitable for light, the new results should be considered in sufficient light conditions. While the findings don’t prove that life exists on Mars, or even existed in the distant past, they can give scientists ideas to search for. Aditya Kholler, a postdoctoral researcher and research supervisor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says the Martian dusty ice in the mid-latitudes is exposed to sunlight and could be an accessible environment to search for life on Mars today.

NASA's Discovery OrbiterImages of the Red Planet from NASA’s Mars Exploration Orbiter (MRO).

Earth vs. Mars

Both Earth and Mars are located in a range known as the Sun’s life belt; A region around a star where the temperature is favorable for the flow of surface liquid water. Although 71% of Earth’s surface is covered by liquid water oceans, Mars has a mostly dry landscape.

Discoveries of Mars rovers such as Curiosity and Perseverance have shown that conditions on Mars are different. Surface features such as dry lake beds and river forks discovered by these robots indicate the presence of surface liquid water billions of years ago. Additionally, Mars missions such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have often discovered water ice in unexpected areas.

According to scientists, Mars lost its liquid water billions of years ago; Just as the planet’s magnetic field weakened (Earth’s magnetism is still very strong) and much of its atmosphere was lost. Thus, there were few barriers to surface water evaporation. The absence of a thick atmosphere also means that today’s Mars is under the bombardment of harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which is fatal for living organisms and can destroy the complex molecules needed for life.

Waterholes in Terra Sirnum areaNASA’s Discovery Orbiter image of craters in the Cyrene region of Mars.

Unlike Earth, Mars does not have an ozone protective shield; As a result, the level of surface ultraviolet radiation is 30% higher than that of the earth; Therefore, photosynthesis on Mars probably occurs in places that are inside the dusty ice; Because the dusty ice cover can block harmful UV rays on the surface of Mars, and liquid water is highly unstable due to the planet’s dry atmosphere.

Using computer simulations, the researchers found that Martian dusty ice may melt from the inside and that the overlying ice cover prevents shallow subsurface liquid water from evaporating in the dry Martian air. According to Kholer:

Thus, two key elements for photosynthesis could be present in mid-latitude Martian dust ices. Photosynthesis requires sufficient amounts of sunlight as well as liquid water. Two previous independent simulations of dense Martian snow show that if small amounts of dust (less than one percent) are present in the snow, subsurface melting could occur in the mid-latitudes of present-day Mars.

“With the discovery of dusty ice that was exposed a few years ago within snow masses in Martian glaciers, there is a mechanism for subsurface melting that could underlie the formation of shallow subsurface liquid water,” Kholer added. According to Kholer, the dusty ice on the ice cap can block UV radiation from the surface of Mars and also allow sunlight to penetrate below the surface for photosynthesis.

Watershed of Dao Wallis areaAn image from NASA’s Discovery Orbiter of a puddle in the Dao Wallis region of Mars.

The depth required for the formation of radiative habitable zones depends on the amount of dust in the ice. Very dusty ice can block a lot of sunlight, the researchers’ simulations show. However, ice with 0.01 to 0.1 percent dust allows for the formation of a radiative zone between 5 and 38 cm deep. Less contaminated ice allows for a deeper and wider radiation zone at a depth between 2.2 and 3.1 meters.

According to researchers, the polar regions that have the most ice on Mars are too cold for habitable radiation zones; Because they do not have the subsurface melting mechanism. Such a mechanism probably occurs in the middle latitudes of the Red Planet.

Scientists have taken scientific support for their theory from evidence on planet Earth. Kholer says:

I was surprised to learn that similar areas for life exist within dusty and sedimentary polar ice. These areas are called cryoconite cavities and are formed when dust and sediment on the ice melts into it because it is darker than the ice.

Dust ice cavities in the earth's glaciersEvidence from Earth: Cryoconite-formed cavities on the Matanuska Glacier, Alaska, 2012

Every summer, due to heating by sunlight, liquid water gathers around the dark dust inside the ice. This happens because the ice is semi-transparent, allowing sunlight to penetrate below its surface. According to Khüler, the researchers discovered that the tiny organisms that live in these shallow subsurface habitats on Earth usually go dormant in the winter, when there isn’t enough light to form liquid water in the dusty ice.

Of course, none of the above findings mean that photosynthetic life exists on Mars or probably ever existed; But it could inspire further research into the possibility of radiation habitats on the Red Planet. Kholer adds:

I am working with a group of scientists on improved simulations of where and when the ice melts on present-day Mars. Additionally, we are recreating these dusty ice scenarios in the lab to investigate them in more detail.

The results of the research were published on October 17 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

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Why is it still difficult to land on the moon?

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More than half a century after the first spacecraft to reach the moon, a successful landing on Earth’s only moon remains a challenge for space agencies and private companies.

Why is it still difficult to land on the moon?

This year, the private company Spacel and the Indian Space Organization both met tragic ends when they tried to land their spacecraft on the surface of the moon. Despite the astonishing leaps made in recent decades in computing, artificial intelligence and other technologies, it seems that landing on the moon should be easier now; But recent setbacks show that we still have a long way to go with safe and trouble-free landings on the surface of Earth’s only moon.

50 years after sending the first man to the surface of the moon, the question arises as to why safely landing a spacecraft on Earth’s nearest cosmic neighbor is still a difficult task for space agencies and private space companies. Stay with Zoomit to check the answer to this question.

Why is the lunar landing associated with 15 minutes of fear?

Despite the complexities of any space mission, sending an object from Earth into orbit around the moon today is easy. Christopher Riley, the director of the documentary film In the Shadow of the Moon produced in 2007 and the author of the book Where We Stood (2019), both of which are about the history of the Apollo 11 mission, explained the reasons for the difficulty of landing on the moon in an interview with Digital Trends. is According to him: “Today, the paths between the Earth and the Moon are well known, and it is easy to predict them and fly inside them.”

Chandrayaan-2
Chandrayaan 2 mission launch

However, the real challenge is getting the spacecraft out of orbit and landing it on the lunar surface; Because there is a delay in the communication between the Earth and the Moon, and the people in the control room who are present on the Earth cannot manually control the spacecraft in order to land it safely on the Moon. As a result, the spacecraft must descend automatically, and to do so, it will fire its descent engines to slow its speed from thousands of kilometers per hour to about one meter per second, in order to make a safe landing on the lunar surface.

For this reason, the director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), who was trying to land the Vikram lander last month, described the final descent of the spacecraft as “frightening 15 minutes”; Because as soon as the spacecraft enters the landing stage, the control of its status is out of the hands of the mission control members. They can only watch the spacecraft land and hope that everything goes according to plan, that hundreds of commands are executed correctly, and that the automatic landing systems gently bring the spacecraft closer to the surface of the moon.

The Great Unknown: The Landing Surface

One of the biggest challenges in the final descent phase is identifying the type of landing site. Despite the availability of instruments such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that can capture amazing views of the lunar surface, it is still difficult to know what kind of surface the spacecraft will encounter when it lands on the moon.

Beresheet crash site
Left: Breshit crash site. Right: The ratio of the before and after images highlights the occurrence of minor changes in surface brightness.

Leonard David, author of Moon Fever: The New Space Race (2019) and veteran space reporter, says:

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a very valuable asset that has performed really well over the years; But when you get a few meters above the surface of the moon, complications appear that cannot be seen even with the very powerful LRO camera.

Even today, despite the imaging data available, “some landing sites still have unknown remains,” Riley says. He notes that the Apollo 11 mission included an advantage that today’s unmanned landers lack, which is the presence of an astronaut’s observer’s eyes that can closely observe the surface of the spacecraft’s landing site. As you probably know, in the mission that led to the landing of the first man on the surface of the moon, the Eagle computer was guiding the spacecraft to a place full of boulders; But to avoid hitting the rocky surface of the moon, Armstrong took control of the spacecraft himself and landed it on a flat surface.

Apollo 11 / Apollo 11

The uneven surface of the landing site had caused many problems in previous lunar missions such as Apollo 15. In this mission, the astronauts were told that as soon as the spacecraft touched the surface of the moon, they should turn off the engines to prevent dust from being sucked in and the risk of a return explosion. But the Apollo 15 spacecraft landed in a crater, and because of this, one of its legs came into contact with the surface earlier than the others. When the crew shut down the engines, the spacecraft, moving at a speed of 1.2 meters per second, experienced a hard landing. The lander landed at an oblique angle, and although it eventually landed safely, it nearly overturned, causing a fatal disaster.

  • Half a century after Apollo 11; How did the great human leap happen?
  • dust storms; The nightmare of space missions to the moon

The difficult landing of Apollo 15 introduced another complicating factor in lunar landings: lunar dust. The Earth’s moon is covered with dust that is thrown into the air by any movement and sticks to everything it comes in contact with. As the spacecraft approaches the surface of the moon, huge plumes of dust are kicked up that limit the field of view and endanger the spacecraft’s electronics and other systems. We still do not have a solution to deal with the dust problem.

An achievement that has been achieved before

Another reason why the moon landing remains a challenge is that gaining public support for lunar projects seems difficult. Referring to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the two astronauts who walked on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission, David says, “We convinced ourselves that we had sent Neil and Buzz [to the surface of the moon]; “As a result, when it comes to lunar missions, people may say we’ve been there before and we’ve had this success.”

Apollo 11 / Apollo 11

But in reality, our understanding of the moon is still very little, especially in relation to long-term missions. Now, with a 50-year gap between the Apollo missions and NASA’s upcoming Artemis project, the knowledge gained has been lost as engineers and specialists retire. David says:

We need to recover our ability to travel into deep space. We haven’t gone beyond near-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 and since 1972. NASA is no longer the same organization that put men on the moon, and there is a whole new generation of mission operators.

The importance of redundancy

As the first private spacecraft entered into orbit around the moon, the Space project was of considerable importance; But its failure to land smoothly on the surface of the moon made the achievement of landing on the surface of the moon still remain in the hands of governments. However, we can expect more private companies, such as Jeff Bezos ‘ Blue Origin, which is developing its lunar lander, to target the moon in the future. According to Elon Musk, even the giant SpaceX Starship spacecraft, which is being built with the ultimate goal of sending a human mission to Mars , can also land on the moon.

According to David, private companies’ participation in lunar landings has advantages such as increased innovation. However, companies are under pressure to save money, and this can lead to a lack of redundancy and support systems that are essential in the event of errors and malfunctions. Lunar rovers typically include two or even three layers of support systems. David is concerned that private companies will be encouraged to eliminate these redundancies in order to cut costs and save money.

Crew Dragon
Crew Dragon SpaceX passenger capsule

“We saw Elon Musk’s Dragon capsule catch fire after a failed test on the stand,” says David, referring to the explosion of the SpaceX spacecraft in April, which had no crew on board. “This accident was kind of a wake-up call about how unpredictable the performance of spacecraft can be.” David compared the Crew Dragon incident to the Apollo 1 disaster, which killed three NASA astronauts during a test launch in 1967.

Another problem related to the lack of redundancy systems is the lack of information needed when an error occurs. As for the recent landings, it seems that the SpaceX crash was caused by human error; however, it is not clear what caused the failure of Chandrayaan 2 in the calm landing, and it is possible that without the necessary systems to record and send information to the lander, we will never find out the main reason for the failure of this mission. Without the required data, it becomes much more difficult to prevent problems from reoccurring in the future.

The future of lunar landings

Currently, many projects are underway to facilitate future moon landings. Ultimately, we need to be able to build the necessary infrastructure for a long-term stay on the moon.

Moonrise Project
Conceptual design of Moonrise technology on the moon. On the left side is the Alina lunar module, and on the right side, the lunar rover equipped with Moonrise technology melts the lunar soil with the help of a laser.

If we can make long-term stays on the moon possible, or even build a permanent base there, landing spacecraft on the lunar surface will be much easier. By constructing the landing sites, a flat, safe, and free surface of unknown debris can be created for the landing of surface occupants. For example, researchers are currently conducting research at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to investigate the feasibility of using microwaves to melt the lunar soil (regolith) and turn it into a hard foundation so that it can be used as a landing and launch site. The European Space Agency is also investigating how to use 3D printing to create landing sites and other infrastructure on the moon.

Read more: Europa Clipper, NASA’s flagship probe was launched

Other ideas include the use of lidar remote sensing systems, which are similar to radar systems; But instead of radio waves, it uses lasers to land the spacecraft. Lidar technology provides more accurate readings and uses a network of GPS satellites to help guide the spacecraft during landing.

The problem of public support

As important as technology is, public interest and support are essential to the success of the lunar landing program. “Apollo had enormous resources that are perhaps only comparable today to China’s space program,” says Riley. “Remember that Apollo carried the best computer imaginable, the human brain.” It goes without saying that there is an element of luck involved in every landing.

Mike Pence
US Vice President Mike Pence speaking at the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission

Finally, there is the question of what kind of failure is acceptable for people. David says:

I think we have to be serious about the fact that we’re probably going to lose people. There is a serious possibility that the manned lunar lander will crash and kill the astronauts inside. The American people continued to support NASA despite the failures and bad luck of the Apollo program, But at that time there was a lot of pressure to compete with the Soviet Union. Without the bipolar atmosphere of the Cold War and the space race, would people still support missions with human lives in between?

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