The professor said that students should never give up.
The professor emphasized that it is important to never give up for students. the same since the Viking missions engineers have used everything from giant airbags to giant fans to slow down their craft as they approach the surface
We’ve tried and failed to go to Mars so many times, and although we have completed successful missions, half of Mars missions still fail. There must be something about Mars that makes it really hard to get to, and that is the Martian mystery we’re about to dive into. To get us settled in, here’s why it’s so hard to land on Mars: thanks to its watery history and potential for past life, Mars has been fascinating people for decades, so it’s no surprise that we’ve sent more spacecraft there than any other planet - 45 missions. Most other worlds have had just a small handful.
The problem is that around half of the probes that have ever attempted to explore Mars have either crashed or disappeared. So, as much as we want to understand the planet, getting to its surface is no easy feat. Mars’s unique atmosphere often gets the better of us, and it’s taken some creative engineering to get to the ground.
Before Mars, the only places we’d ever landed spacecraft were the Moon and Earth, and while that did come with challenges, we had strategies nailed down pretty well for both. The hard thing about landing on Earth is that our thick atmosphere creates extreme friction and heat with incoming spacecraft, but we’ve solved that problem with heat shields. Plus, that thick atmosphere also means parachutes work very well. The Moon is kind of the opposite - it has virtually no atmosphere, which gets rid of the heat problem, but it also means parachutes don’t work. We have to use retro rockets to land - little rockets that fire underneath the spacecraft to slow its descent.
Mars, meanwhile, is a whole different beast. It comes with all the challenges of landing on Earth and the Moon, but with none of the real benefits. Its atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s, meaning parachutes can’t grab onto enough air to completely slow down the spacecraft. But, unlike the Moon, there’s also just enough atmosphere to create problems. Just like friction causes space rocks and old satellites to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, a space probe entering Mars’s atmosphere can get hotter than 2,000 degrees Celsius - that’s hot enough to melt iron and just about every other metal. So, the millions of dollars worth of machinery we send to Mars need serious protection to keep from being fried.
So, how do you get an expensive, heavy chunk of metal traveling tens of thousands of kilometers an hour to come gently to a stop on the surface of another world? A whole lot of creativity and probably a good amount of coffee! Every mission to land on Mars starts with something called an AeroShell, a special capsule that protects its cargo against the heat. Its outer layer is filled with a material called an ablator, which was invented in the 1970s for the first Mars Landers, the Viking missions. It reacts with the Martian atmosphere in a way that removes the heat and leaves behind a trail of gas - it gets so hot that it glows red, but inside the capsule cargo stays a little cooler than room temperature.
Next, once friction has slowed things to about 1,600 kilometers per hour, a parachute opens and part of the AeroShell is cast off. Amazingly, engineers are still using a parachute pretty similar to the one designed for the Viking Landers more than 40 years ago - it’s made of nylon and polyester with tethers made of the same material as bulletproof vests, making it super strong and light, which is really important considering the craft is still moving at supersonic speeds when it deploys. While it isn’t enough to slow down a spacecraft all the way, it does help. After a few minutes, the parachute brings the craft down to a few hundred kilometers per hour and it gets discarded along with the rest of the AeroShell.
Now, this is where things get really creative and no type of mission has been the same since the Viking missions. Engineers have used everything from giant airbags to giant fans to slow down their craft as they approach the surface. Mars helicopter on the ground and they plan to launch it with Mars 2020 in July 2020
Similar to Curiosity, the Mars 2020 Rover will study potentially habitable environments and select and package samples for return to Earth on a future mission. One of Curiosity’s biggest problems is its slow travel speed, averaging less than 10 meters per day due to the 8-48 minute round trip communication delay between Earth and Mars. This makes it difficult for Mission controllers to drive Curiosity like Mario Kart. Additionally, the Rover’s cameras and satellite images can’t always anticipate obstacles or identify the most interesting things to study.
To overcome these problems, a Mars helicopter could be used to scout out the area ahead, anticipate obstacles, and identify interesting things to study. The challenge with this is the thin Martian atmosphere, which is less than a 60th of the density of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, making it difficult to create lift. To make this work, the Mars helicopter would need extra long rotor blades, more than a meter across, and the total mass of the helicopter, rotors, flight computer, and solar panels must add up to one kilogram.
NASA Engineers estimate that having a Mars helicopter could help a Rover like Mars 2020 travel three times farther than Curiosity in a day. Additionally, the extra near surface images would be helpful for scientists studying Mars. NASA has already tested a prototype of the Mars helicopter on the ground and plan to launch it with Mars 2020 in July 2020. azillion lasers to send a person to Mars in three days and lasers that powerful are still a ways off
As of last August, the Vassibur engine had completed its power endurance test and had been running for around 10 hours, making progress towards its goal of reaching Mars. However, there is still a lot of development and testing that needs to be done before the engine is ready for use. As such, when the first human steps on Mars, it is likely that they will have made it there with a chemical engine, since that technology is a lot more developed.
However, there is some Buzz lately about a new space Tech that could potentially shorten the travel time to Mars. A group of researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara is working on a new way to travel in space known as Photonic Propulsion. This would use a giant set of lasers to push ships along, and if it works, it could eventually be used to explore other star systems. This project, called Deep In, is aiming to use electromagnetic acceleration to get ships close-ish to the speed of light, fast enough that Interstellar travel could actually make sense.
A spacecraft using this system would not need to carry as much fuel, meaning that it could have a much lower Mass. It could also, theoretically, go very, very fast. With a huge laser array putting out 50 to 70 gigawatts of power, a 100 kilogram ship about the size of Voyager 1 could travel at around 1.5 percent of the speed of light, nearly 300 times Voyager’s top speed.
However, there are still challenges to be solved before we can make spaceships powered by giant lasers. We could send a smaller probe to Mars in three days, or a larger craft on a trip that would take about a month. But, we’d need a gazillion lasers to send a person to Mars in three days, and lasers that powerful are still a ways off.