Missions to Mars
Missions to Mars have had an inconsistent past. The United States started with flybys missions called the Mariner mission set. Each one of them returned anywhere from 20-7000 images as they whizzed by. They were very successful. However the former Soviet Union has had great difficulty in their missions. Out of 16 total missions, 10 failed completely by not reaching Earth orbit or due to software malfunction or human error. Two more missions crashed into the surface of Mars, and yet 2 more crashed into Phobos, leaving only 2 successful missions. The Soviet Mars 3 lander relayed 20 seconds of video data and then failed, but its orbiter transmitted data a little less than a year. The Mars 5 orbiter successfully collected imaging data for the Mars 6 and 7 landers which failed. As you can see, early Mars exploration, orbiter and lander missions were not easily executed.
If you have either Netscape 4.0 or IE 4.0 or higher, click here to see Earth and Mars and their orbits
Mars is extremely far away. In order
to get to Mars quickly, The second way results in a low cost mission. This mission would use the least amount of energy, yet it would take a much longer time. For this mission, the crew would leave Earth and travel to Mars in the same manner as the quickest trip to Mars, but the crew would then stay on the surface for more than an Earth year which could be dangerous. The mission would be even longer than the biosphere experiments. This image left shows the most cost effective way to travel to Mars. Note, the extremely long time the scientists would have to stay on Mars. Click on the image on the right for a larger version. |
On the right  is actual federal budget for the 1996 fiscal
year (click for a bigger version). NASA is marked in red. As you can see,
NASA is fairly low priority on the budget list. Below left is an expenditure
chart showing the top 8 countries / agencies that are investing in space
and how much (in billions) they spend. Since a manned mission to Mars is
estimated by some at 400 billion dollars, you can see that in order for
a manned mission to be accomplished it will take more than a single country.
You can see in the below right image the cost of the Mars Pathfinder, Global
surveyor and Mars 98 (in millions). The cost of the Viking missions is estimated
at 15 billion. The Pathfinder mission would have doubled its cost to meet
the Viking standard for sterilization and would not have been financially
feasible. As a result, the Mars Pathfinder Probe carried approximately 24,000
spores to Mars.
NASA has dominated the field of Martian exploration in success. |
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
