Arduous take Mars land to Earth

Scientists are studying the possibility of returning the Earth from Mars to the answer: whether life exists here and whether we can visit the planet in the future. hybrid?

A mission to bring the sample of Mars land is almost certainly the next step in the effort to conquer Red Planet. This task can take place while the Mars exploration activity is carried out by the Curiosity ship. It can also answer one of the biggest questions about Mars: "Is there life above it?".

Watch out for dangerous creatures from Mars soil

A space probe crashed into the desert. From the ship, a deadly bacterium escapes and destroys the entire population in a small town.

Such destruction scenarios have appeared in the press during the first Apollo flight to the Moon. Few people know that the US Aerospace Agency (NASA) has predicted such situations and they have taken a serious solution. Specifically, upon returning to Earth, Apollo 11 astronauts were isolated for disinfection. Moon Stone and soil are wrapped in sealed bags and opened only in airtight labs. Even Apollo ships are cleaned with detergent to destroy any bacteria that can cling to it after the flight to the Moon.

These precautions seem rather odd and in fact NASA canceled them after the Apollo 14 mission, when scientists concluded that the Moon was completely lifeless. But now, after 40 years, NASA has to remove dust and reuse these safety assurance processes to prepare for a new challenge: to bring rock back from Mars.

Simulate ship launch activity to bring soil samples from Mars to Earth.

Bring land back, it's not easy

"The Curiosity has no equipment to answer the question: Are we lonely?" Said David Beaty, chief scientist at the board of directors of NASA's Mars Discovery Program in Pasadena, California.

The life of Mars may exist in ways different from Earth and the use of devices that can detect life on our planet may not work in the Red Planet.

NASA can design another probe, equipped with all kinds of life-search devices, but then they may only get erroneous results because the meters are not correct. Scientists say that if you bring back the soil sample, people can use all the strongest laboratories to analyze and get accurate results.

But the intention is one thing, the implementation is another. Although people have tried soil sampling tasks, their success is very different. The first mission took place when the Luna 16 landed on the Moon in 1970 and brought the Soviet Union their own Moon stone. In 2004, the Genesis ship returned to Earth after acquiring materials blowing up from the Sun's surface. Unfortunately, the ship's parachute did not open and it crashed straight into the Utah desert. The whole package was lost.

NASA had some luck in 2006 with Stardust's mission to collect comet dust. But it did not go very well with Japan's Hayabusha mission in 2010. The ship returned to Earth after landing on a meteorite. It only obtains a bit of meteorite dust, because a warhead it carries with the task of bombarding to collect debris from the inactive meteorite.

It seems that there has not been a truly successful task in bringing soil samples back from another planet.

Test for the task of bringing people to Mars

The good news, however, is that the ships will not have to bring back too many rock samples. Although Apollo's mission brought several hundred pounds of moon, rock and dust to the Moon, Beaty said he would be happy to get only 20 acres of Martian soil, each weighing between 15 and 20 grams. In other words, NASA only needs the amount of soil to fit into a cup of coffee.

Plans to bring the soil back are only on the drawing board. But most people agreed with the design of a spacecraft that brought exploration ships from Earth to Mars. This probe will land where it is believed that life can exist, possibly where there was liquid and collect soil samples from about two dozen different locations. Next, the probe will return to the landing vessel and pour the soil sample into the storage compartment the size of a coffee cup. This is absolutely something one can do with current technology.

The hardest part of the mission is still the phase of bringing the soil back to Earth. NASA is currently testing a model of missiles installed inside the Martian amphibious ship and it will be responsible for taking the ship carrying soil samples onto the mother ship waiting for space. When getting to the place, the ship carrying the soil sample will join the mother ship and return to Earth. When this ship enters our atmosphere, it will use parachute to speed up to 50,000km / s and will land gently on the ground for recovery.

Planners acknowledge that connecting the two spacecraft in the orbit of another planet is something they have never done before, as well as bringing the ship back together successfully from the onion. another crystal. But if everything goes according to plan, surely Mars land will be recovered and transferred directly to an absolutely safe facility to analyze soil samples. Precautions only to ensure the lives of all humanity are not threatened.

In addition, the task of collecting soil samples will also play an important role for another ambitious plan of NASA to bring people to Red Planet. This mission is currently scheduled to take place in 2033.