Skip to footer

NASA wants your ideas on how to keep Mars colonists safe

NASA is asking the public for its thoughts on how to help people survive on Mars with minimal assistance from Earth. 

|
NASA/Pat Rawlings, SAIC
Humans may travel to Mars in the next few decades, and NASA is asking for input from the public on how to make missions safe and effective. This image shows an artist's depiction of a crewed mission to Mars.

To prepare for future colonies on Mars, NASA is asking the public for ideas on how to keep Red Planet astronauts safe that require minimal resupplies from Earth.

The "Journey to Mars Challenge" will give a $5,000 award to each of the three winning participants who describe an original idea that could assist the human exploration of Mars. The proposal must be "technically achievable, economically sustainable, and minimize reliance on support from Earth," NASA wrote in a statement about the challenge.

"This could include shelter, food, water, breathable air, communication, exercise, social interactions and medicine, but participants are encouraged to consider innovative and creative elements beyond these examples," NASA added.Because launch costs are considered one of the key barriers to space exploration generally — and Mars exploration, especially — NASA says it could use some ideas on what to bring on these missions and how often to resupply them.

The resupply aspect is especially important to the space agency because resupply opportunities to Mars would happen only every 500 days; the respective orbits between Earth and Mars make it more difficult to send spacecraft at other times. By contrast, the International Space Station has resupplies every few weeks or months.

The agency is looking for ideas that are backed up by a strategy — "a process to develop, test, implement and operate the system or capability," NASA said. More information about the challenge is available athttps://www.innocentive.com/pavilion/NASA.

The "Journey to Mars" challenge was announced the same week as the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C., a conference in which NASA is participating. Experts at the summit are considering the best ways to bring humans to Mars affordably within the next few decades.

In recent months, NASA publicly repositioned its human exploration program as a series of stepping stones to Mars.

Examples include the current one-year mission on the International Space Station — which is intended to help scientists better understand space's effect on the human body — and a proposed asteroid mission to test human capabilities and technology in deep space.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Copyright 2015 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to NASA wants your ideas on how to keep Mars colonists safe
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0510/NASA-wants-your-ideas-on-how-to-keep-Mars-colonists-safe
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe