The Nasa mission that will take astronauts to Mars and leave them there forever

The Nasa mission that will take astronauts to Mars and leave them there forever 

 Mars and Earth

        The mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before – on a flight to Mars. The snag is that you’d never come back.The U.S. space agency Nasa is actively investigating the possibility of humans colonising other worlds such as the Red Planet in an ambitious project named the Hundred Years Starship.The settlers would be sent supplies from Earth, but would go on the understanding that it would be too costly to make the return trip.

NASA Ames Director Pete Worden revealed that one of NASA’s main research centres, Ames Research Centre, has received £1million funding to start work on the project.
The research team has also received an additional $100,000 from Nasa.

You heard it here,” Worden said at ‘Long Conversation,’ an event in San Francisco. ‘We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund.’
He added: ‘The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.’
Worden said he has discussed the potential price tag for one-way trips to Mars with Google co-founder Larry Page, telling him such a mission could be done for $10 billion.
He said said: ‘His response was, “Can you get it down to $1 [billion] or $2billion?” So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price.

 

Depending on the position of Mars in its orbit around the sun, its distance from Earth varies between 34million and 250million miles.
The most recent unmanned mission there was Nasa’s Phoenix lander, which launched in August 2007 and landed on the planet’s north polar cap in May the following year.

Experts say a nuclear-fuelled rocket could shorten the journey to about four months.
Of all the planets in the solar system, Mars is the most likely to have substantial quantities of water, making it the best bet for sustaining life. But it is a forbidding place to set up home.
Temperatures plummet way below freezing in some parts. The thin atmosphere would be a problem as it is mostly carbon dioxide, so oxygen supplies are a must.
Worden also suggested that new technologies such as synthetic biology and alterations to the human genome could also be explored ahead of the mission.
And he said that he believed the mission should visit Mars’ moons first, where scientists can do extensive telerobotics exploration of the planet. He claims that humans could be on Mars' moons by 2030.

 

News of the Hundred Years Starship comes as new research found that a one-way human mission to Mars is technologically feasible and would be a cheaper option than bringing astronauts back.
Writing in the Journal of Cosmology, scientists Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies, say that the envision sending four volunteer astronauts on the first mission to permanently colonise Mars.
They write: ‘A one-way human mission to Mars would not be a fixed duration project as in the Apollo program, but the first step in establishing a permanent human presence on the planet.’
The astronauts would be sent supplies from Earth on a regular basis but they would be expected to become self-sufficient on the red planet’s surface as soon as possible.
They say: There are many reasons why a human colony on Mars is a desirable goal, scientifically and politically. The strategy of one-way missions brings this goal within technological and financial feasibility.
‘Nevertheless, to attain it would require not only major international cooperation, but a return to the exploration spirit and risk-taking ethos of the great period of Earth exploration, from Columbus to Amundsen, but which has nowadays being replaced with a culture of safety and political correctness.’

They admit that the mission would come with ‘ethical considerations’ with the general public feeling that the Martian pioneers had been abandoned to their fate or sacrificed.
But they argue that these first inhabitants of Mars would be going in much the same spirit as the first white settlers of North America – travelling to a distant land, knowing that they will never return home.
They say: ‘Explorers such as Columbus, Frobisher, Scott and Amundsen, while not embarking on their voyages with the intention of staying at their destination, nevertheless took huge personal risks to explore new lands, in the knowledge that there was a significant likelihood that they would perish in the attempt.’

New Neutron Star Largest Ever Discovered

     Located about 3,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpio, a newly spotted neutron star is the largest ever discovered to date.

The difference between the neutron star at sky coordinates J1903+0327 and the new one at J1614-2230 is only about half the mass of our sun. But considering that a thimbleful of neutron star material weighs roughly 500 million tons, the new record-holder has some serious gravitas.
For one thing, scientists didn't know for sure that neutron stars could get as big as J1614-2230, which is about twice as massive as the sun. Its discovery by Paul Demorest, with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and colleagues gives physicists a new toehold on understanding what happens when protons and electrons give up the fight against gravity and collapse into neutrons.
Particle-smashers on Earth, such as the new Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, can't compete with Mother Nature when it comes to packing.
"Neutron stars are some of the best astronomical objects to probe fundamental physics itself. They are the most dense form of matter that exists in stable configurations," Demorest told Discovery News.
Only black holes are denser. But since light can't escape from these gravitational pits, black holes keep their inner workings to themselves.
Not so with neutron stars, especially those that have companions, like the white dwarf star in mutual orbit with J1614-2230.
The neutron star -- the dense remnant of what was once a star roughly 20 times bigger than the sun -- is a stable and fast spinner. It makes 317 revolutions per second, which generates traceable radio waves at regular intervals.
What's interesting is what happens to those signals as they pass through the companion object. The timing of the pulses changes slightly due to the white dwarf's gravity, a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity and tested by Harvard astrophysicist Irwin Shapiro in the 1960s.
Scientists can use the timing measurements to figure out how big both objects are -- if they can get clear signals from the pulsar directly and from when its signals are distorted by the companion object's gravity. By a fortuitous alignment of geometry, Earth has an edge-on view to J1614-2230 and its orbiting companion, providing scientists with one of their most precise measurements yet of the so-called Shapiro Delay.
While many neutron stars are part of binary systems, it's very rare to find one edge-on, noted Demorest.
"It's one of the cleanest measurements you can make. It's a very direct measure of the theory of relativity," he said. "In this system, at certain times during the orbit the pulses pass close to the white dwarf star and then reach us here on Earth. As they pass through the white dwarf star, they have to pass by its relatively strong gravitational field. The pulses experience a delay... and then when the white dwarf is behind the pulsar, we see much less delay."
Most computer models can't account for neutron stars bigger than 1.5 times the mass of the sun without resorting to exotic particles like hyperons or condensates.
"If you want to reach two solar masses, it's a lot harder to make a neutron star that's not just neutrons. It tests the ability of the particles to hold up," Feryal Ozel, an assistant professor of astronomy and physics at University of Arizona, told Discovery News.