One day, we may be Martians. Not bright green beings with three eyes and antennae on their heads, but humans born and raised on the red planet.
A group of NASA researchers is living for a year in an environment that simulates the habitat of Mars, built in Texas, in preparation for the space agency’s ambitious plan to take the first astronauts to the planet in the 2030s.
At the same time, the European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing for the first round trip from Earth to Mars at the end of this decade.
Accurate maps and local weather data are critical to safely landing spacecraft on the planet.
In this sense, scientists from New York University Abu Dhabi (Nyuad) are bringing the dream closer to reality with a Mars Atlas.
By carefully combining more than 3,000 high-resolution images collected by the United Arab Emirates’ Hope probe, United (which has been orbiting Mars since 2021), the team created “a beautiful mosaic of colors across the planet,” said Dimitra Atri, head of the Mars Research Group at Nyuad.
“In the history of Mars exploration, many probes have had accidents,” recalled Atri, adding that the rarefied atmosphere makes it difficult for rockets to slow down and even low winds can alter landing trajectories.
“If a probe crashes and breaks, it is a huge waste of science and resources. But when we send humans, we have to be much more careful.”
Understanding daily and seasonal weather patterns can help researchers identify the safest time and place to land.
Landing is just one of the challenges that accurate atlases can help overcome. Identifying the best locations for human settlements in terms of landscape, temperature and resources is another benefit of them.
“If ice is available, we can convert it into water that can be used for housing,” explains Atri.
“It may seem silly, but perhaps, in the future, it will be very common for people to go to Mars and even live there”, added the head of the researchers.
Dust and desertification
Astronomers have mapped Mars almost two centuries ago. The first map of Mars was produced in 1840 by Wilhelm Beer and Johann von Mädler in Germany.
But it was Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 map that sparked a lasting fascination with the idea of a Martian civilization, when the natural water channels he marked on the map were mislabeled as artificial waterways.
NASA’s Mariner missions in the 1960s and 1970s provided a better understanding of Mars’ topography, including the first images of volcanoes, lava flows, rocky canyons and enormous dust storms.
In the following decades, NASA created a series of maps, including those based on the mineralogy of the planet. Earlier this year, the American space agency released a detailed interactive 3D map from Mars.
Nyuad’s map is “the first to entirely use true color photographs of the entire planet,” Atri said.
NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Sciences started using Nyuad’s map in its Mars 24 software, which keeps accurate time on Mars.
JMARS, a public database used by NASA scientists for mission planning, also incorporated the atlas into its database.
Scott Dickenshied, a JMARS representative, told CNN that the Nyuad map is “created from more recently acquired data than some of the previous global maps” and provides an “additional perspective on what Mars looks like.”
While NASA and ESA instruments offer higher resolution data over a longer period, the instrument used to collect data from the Nyuad Atlas is capable of “observing the entire disk of Mars at once,” says Dickenshied.
According to the representative of the JMARS database, the perspective “can be very useful for researchers looking to observe clouds or dust storm activity on a planetary scale”.
Mars and Earth
There is a theory that Mars was once a water-covered planet like Earth, which could have supported life, but the thinning of its atmosphere caused heat and dryness, leading to its current arid state.
Now the planet is home to regular global dust storms, which have a huge impact on its climate, including blocking radiation and trapping heat.
Desertification is a growing problem on Earth, particularly in regions such as the Arabian Peninsula and Africa.
Atri, from Nyuad, believes that climate scientists can apply the data collected about the desertification of Mars to Earth, “to understand what could happen to our own planet going forward”.
“My concern is that if we don’t do enough on Earth [para combater a mudança climática]it could look like Mars,” he added.
In the future, researcher Atri plans to recreate Martian conditions in the laboratory to study how plants behave.
Mars has an unforgiving and harsh environment: a very thin atmosphere, extremely low temperatures and high levels of UV radiation.
Atri says the plants he will study, which grow naturally in dry, salty soil in desert regions such as the United Arab Emirates, could help understand how plants can survive the Red Planet’s harsh climate.
With this, researchers can find better ways to grow food in space or optimize agriculture in arid regions on Earth.
The research is in the early planning stages, and Atri hopes to have its first real samples from Mars around 2033.
There are also other scientists examining how innovations being developed to grow food on Mars could have impacts on Earth.
About 34% of all human-made global greenhouse gas emissions come from food production, which uses immense amounts of land and water. But inefficiencies in the system mean that a third of the world’s food goes to waste, while more than 345 million people experience extreme food insecurity and there is a rise in hunger and malnutrition.
Limited resources in space mean that food production technology on Mars must be highly efficient and closed-loop, with little or no waste.
Last month, British scientists published an article in the journal Nature Food that explores how controlled-environment agriculture in space could be a “gateway” to developing similar technology for Earth.
Two Canadian scientists who study food have published a book arguing that growing food on Mars could transform agriculture on Earth.
Lessons learned about Mars’ geology, climate and atmosphere could also help figure out whether any of the thousands of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system might be habitable or capable of sustaining an atmosphere.
Many scientists believe that life on Earth originated on Mars billions of years ago, and Atri sees the red planet as the perfect laboratory to investigate the theory.
“We need to understand our neighbor,” said Atri, leader of the Nyuad study. “It may have had life at some point, or perhaps there is some life below the surface that still survives. Maybe we have common origins. Who knows? It’s our best bet to understand ourselves and where we come from.”
See also – Landing of the Perseverance probe on Mars: what is the “seven minutes of terror” moment
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
