Public and Private Efforts Towards a Mission to Mars

In the past decade, organizations varying from governmental institutions to private organizations have been making moves towards planning and executing a manned mission to Mars. These moves seem to be a growing trend in recent years to make space exploration a collective, worldwide effort.

One such private mission that has garnered widespread attention from the media is known as Mars One. Mars One is a private Netherlands-based non-profit organization that has put forward conceptual plans to establish a permanent human colony on Mars by 2025. The organization intends to send a 4-man mission to the Red Planet at the cost of $6 billion. Despite the outright evidence that shows the health-risks of a potential mission to Mars on human health, 200,000 people have applied to be one of several people to travel to and live on Mars as part of the Mars One mission. Out of those 200,000 people, 1058 people have been put on a “short-list” by the organization. These 200,000 applicants have acknowledged another stipulation of the trip: it is one-way. Those short-listed reflect excitement and optimism about the mission despite that fact, as can be expected. An Israeli man who was shortlisted stated that, despite that fact, the “one thought that keeps him going is ‘about humanity after people landed on the moon. How it inspired everything from science to arts to everything on Earth was deeply influenced by it. I think about what landing on Mars will do to life here.’”¹

Aside from private organizations, the government of Britain has made statements demonstrating the intent to send a manned mission to Mars. According to a December 2013 article in the Telegraph, “Britain wants to help build [both] a moon base and send a manned mission to Mars within three decades,” according to Britain’s science minister David Willetts. Willetts emphasized that worldwide cooperation would both be ideal and the most effective method: “if you got the major powers – if you got the Europeans, the Americans and the Chinese working together – [this] is possible.”² As for the Americans, specifically NASA, no plans for a government-sponsored mission have been outlined as of yet. NASA has made plans to send another rover in 2020, however. This may be because NASA has gauged the economic costs and health risks associated with a manned mission and does not wish to undertake that kind of risk. This reflects how the US is perhaps staying away from international efforts towards space exploration, but that is just speculation on my part.

The idea of making space exploration is appealing to me. In my opinion space exploration in any regard should be a collaborative effort on many fronts, rather than the plans of one nation. I believe Britain is going in the right direction with their statements and intentions. In addition, private organizations in this field are by nature international at least in some regard. As such thus it is clear that we are making moves towards making space exploration a worldwide public effort. A mission to Mars provides such a platform for this collaboration.

Nathaniel Benzaquen-Ouakrat

¹Rosen, B. (2014, Jan 22). Israeli shortlisted to travel to mars for reality show. Nadav Neuman one of 1,058 finalists for 24-person colony on red planet. Jerusalem Post. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1494290863?accountid=9902

²Hope, Christopher. “Science Minister David Willetts: Britain can help build a moon base and send a manned mission to Mars.” 10 Dec 2013. Telegraph. Web. 24 April 2014.

Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity

Long before space travel became a reality, humans were captivated and intrigued by Mars, the Red Planet. In 2003, NASA took a big step toward learning more about Mars with the launches of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. In 2011, after Spirit became immobile and its mission ended, the Curiosity rover was launched to join Opportunity. The stated goals of the missions are: 1) determine whether life ever arose on Mars; 2) characterize the climate of Mars; 3) characterize the geology of Mars; and 4) prepare for human exploration of Mars.

While the rovers cannot search for existing life forms on Mars, they do have the ability to search for presumably life-sustaining qualities of the Red Planet, namely the presence of water. Opportunity came across several small spheres (nicknamed “blueberries”) embedded in the rock layers near the surface of Mars. After further tests, it was determined that the blueberries were predominantly made up of the mineral hematite, which generally forms near water here on Earth. Spirit made a similar discovery when it found goethite, which forms on Earth only in the presence of water. Several other discoveries were made which helped confirm that water did indeed exist on Mars at one time. While there is no way to prove that water is the only thing needed to provide a favorable living environment on Mars, its presence on the Red Planet is an encouraging sign that microbial life may have existed on the planet at one point.

The climate of Mars is also directly linked to the possibility of life existing on the planet. Liquid water cannot be found on the surface because the temperature and atmospheric pressure are too low. Part of the mission of the rovers is to examine the current climate, allowing scientists on Earth to potentially determine past and future climate patterns on the planet. Atmospheric conditions affect the amount of sunlight and heat that reaches the surface of Mars, thus affecting the living conditions for Martian organisms and/or humans in the future.

As mentioned previously, the rovers were equipped with geological tools to collect and analyze rock and mineral samples from atop and beneath the surface. NASA is particularly interested in minerals containing iron, since it oxidizes when in contact with liquid water. One question being asked was about the red colored Martian soil: is it red due to iron oxidation in a wet environment, or is it because of other rocks reacting to the Martian atmosphere? Mars’ topography is also an area of interest because parts of it clearly display different layers of sediment starting from millions of years ago. Curiosity is currently looking into the different layers to determine how the surface of Mars has evolved over time, including the elusive period when Mars transitioned from a wetter environment to the dry one it is now.

As the rovers traverse Mars, they are determining environmental, chemical, and mineral characteristics of the planet’s soil, dust, and atmosphere, likely finding potential dangers they may pose to any humans who may go to Mars. They will also identify soils and rocks as potential resources for human missions. Additionally, they will serve as test cases for future rover and human missions.

The three Mars rovers – Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity – have provided groundbreaking discoveries, mainly the detection of specific spots on the Martian surface that could have been habitable due to the presence of water in. Opportunity and Curiosity continue to perform work to help find out the history and future of Mars.

Achyuta Burra

What About the "Bang"?

The Big Bang theory was established from observations of the structure of the Universe and from theoretical considerations. Many people contributed its establishment, but the one person who first proposed the Big Bang itself was Monseigneur Lemaitre, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, astronomer and professor of physics. Lemaitre saw that the Universe is expanding and noted that if one works backwards, the Universe must have come from one small region, the “primeval atom.” From this model arose many questions, one of them being: “Where did the Universe come from?” Many theories have attempted to explain why the Big Bang

occurred, but all none are convincing, and has left me wondering what is the truth.

In the process of finding an answer, a debate among two groups, theists and atheists, has progressively build up, with both proposing different arguments on what happened at the time of the “bang” or even before. Yet, up to now, no answer has been revealed.

Many ideas have been proposed. However, the two groups that stand out the most are: atheists, and theist. Atheists and theists have their own beliefs, and in order to prove that their beliefs are correct there must be concrete evidence that demonstrates what they propose is true.

Atheists generally rely on science to explain the natural world, but the key is that many theories lie outside the domain of scientific testability, and one cannot use the scientific method to evaluate them. Thus, one atheistic argument is presented in the book Atheism, Theism, and Big Bang Cosmology. Quentin Smith highlights two theological premises, “(1) If God exists and there is an earliest state E of the universe, then God created E. (2) If God created E, then E is ensured either to contain animate creatures or to lead to a subsequent state of the universe that contains animate creatures.” With the use of the two theological premises Smith provides 6 other premises in order to argue that God could not have created the earliest state of the universe. And with all premises together Smith comes to the conclusion that if this cosmology is true, our Universe exists without cause and without explanation, believing that the origin of our Universe does not need divine intervention.

In the other hand, theists are certain that divine intervention created the Universe. Theists believe that nothing can cause itself, and since the string of causes can’t be indefinitely long, there must be a first cause, God. As stated by William Lane Craig, “1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence. 2) The Universe began to exist. 3) Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.”

Moreover, what happened before and who/what initiated the Big bang is still in debate. And after thoughtful consideration, I believe that one day we will be able to gain evidence of what initiated the “bang.” But we will have to wait. Maybe years, decades, or centuries…

Dalia Dorantes

The Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula is a stellar nursery existing in the constellation Orion, known for the two brightest stars in the sky, Betelgeuse and Rigel. The Orion Nebula, also known as M42, is a hub for star formation located 1,300 light-years from Earth in the lower half of Orion. Visually, the nebula (clouds of stellar gas and dust) is unique from all other nebulae in that all other nebulae are nearly impossible to see with the naked eye. The Orion Nebula is a splash of rolling, twisting shades of pink, purple, blue, and orange against a fading black in which bright, white stars dot the scene. The clouds of dust are actually visible. It is arguably the most beautiful visual in the night sky.

The most important part of the nebula though is the opaque Orion Molecular Cloud, which cannot normally be seen from Earth. It is an enormous, concentrated amount of very cold gas with a mass of approximately 2000 times the mass of the Sun. Due to gravity, this cloud of hydrogen and other gasses slowly collapses and forms stars. The Molecular Cloud can be seen when new stars are forms, as the light evaporates the opaque gas of the Cloud.

The aforementioned Betelgeuse and Rigel are a part of what is called the Trapezium, a collection of very bright stars that are considered stellar siblings that are roughly the same age. When all the stars in the Orion Nebula are done being born, only the Trapezium will remain.

The Orion Nebula has been described for thousands of the years, beginning with the Mayans who used the Orion Nebula as a part of their creation myth. Interestingly, the great astronomers, Ptolemy, Al Sufi, and Galileo all excluded the nebula from their writings. The first scientific recording and classification as a nebula was by the French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in 1610. The first published observation though was by Jesuit mathematician Johann Baptist Cysat nine years after Nicolas-Claude Fabri. Robert J. Trumpler was the first to note the Trapezium cluster. The Hubble Space Telescope first observed the Orion Nebula in 1993, and since then, Hubble Space Telescope has been studying the nebula.

The nebula will continue to be a source of awe for humans for thousands of years. The beauty and importance of the nebula in star creation makes it a point of interest that we will undoubtedly value for a very long time.

Favian Rahman

Understanding the Big Bang

In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble noticed that the velocity of a galaxy appeared to be proportional to its distance from the Earth. Its velocity is observable from a change in an image know as redshift. Even though distance may not be directly observable, it can be extrapolated. If you know the amount of light certain stars in nearby galaxies are supposed to give off, and you also know the brightness you observe from these galaxies, you can figure out the distance of the galaxy. This distance is constantly changing, because, as Georges Lemaître discovered and Hubble confirmed, the universe is constantly expanding. The rate by witch the universe is expanding is modeled by the Hubble Constant. Hubble showed indirectly that the Universe expands as time passes, and hence, that the Universe must be shrinking if you are looking into the past.

By reverse engineering this fact you can describe the beginning of the universe. You can assert that long ago the universe was immensely smaller than it now is. The Big Bang theory describes the maturation of the Universe from just after it was initially created, up until today. It has been deemed as the most well-established scientific theory regarding our Universe's development.

The Big Bang models 10^-36 seconds after the Universe began. It says that at this period in time the universe was expanding extremely rapidly. For demonstration purposes, we can think of the initial state of the universe as a concentration of matter and energy in a small point. We can think of this point in a state of near singularity. The point then exploded, and all the energy and matter show throughout the entire Universe. After the ‘point’ exploded is what the Big Bang models.

This nuance of a beginning to the beginning is one that is definitely worth noting. While the Big Bang theory may say a lot about the creation of a universe, there are still many questions to be answered about what happened before 10^-36 seconds. This theory does not explain how something came out of nothing. This is a question that we may continue to explore for many years.

At the beginning of the Big Bang it was extremely dense and extremely hot. Because of all of the energy in the Universe during those first few moments that matter as we know it couldn't form. But as the Universe expanded it became less dense and cooled down. In only a short few seconds, the Universe formed, and it stretched across space.

The theory also states that four basic forces arose from the Big Bang: Gravity, strong, and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism; before the Big Bang these forces were all part of a unified force. The mystery for scientists today is to understand how these 4 forces could have at one point have been related. In order to properly explain this idea, Scientists have proved the Grand Unified Theory. This theory relates to all of the forces besides Gravity. The theory of everything is related to all of these forces and gravity. It is currently being explored, and so far a scientific explanation is still being discovered.

The Big Bang theory has become a large source of dispute between different groups of people. Some people believe that this theory contradicts the word of God. A large amount of the reason scientists have come to accept the Big Bang theory, is that it is the theory with the most solid scientific information to back it up. Proving the theory of everything will make this theory even harder for some people to ignore. However, as I mentioned earlier, what happened before the Big Bang is still up for debate. Only tireless research over time will tell researchers what happened at the beginning of time.

Connor Moore

Dark Matter

The matter that we see is everything that is made up of atoms and molecules. However, the universe we live in is made up of more than just visible matter. In fact, visible matter only accounts for less than 5% of the mass-energy of the Universe. Matter is very easy to understand. There are five states that it can switch in and out of (being Bose-Einstein condensates, solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas), and it must take up space to be matter. On the other hand, there is the other 95% of the Universe that we still have yet to understand fully: 27% dubbed dark matter and 68% called dark energy.

Dark matter was first hypothesized to exist in the 1930s as a means to explain the uncharacteristically large velocities of galaxies in a distant cluster. Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology discovered that the galaxies should fly apart because the gravitational attraction created by visible matter isn’t enough to hold the galaxies together on its own. He thus theorized that there must be some sort of dark matter to hold them together. Scientists didn’t necessarily buy into his findings for some time. The next breakthrough for dark matter came in 1970. Vera Rubin noticed that the stars at the edges of Andromeda didn’t move more slowly than those nearer the center, as one should expect according to Newton’s laws. Like Zwicky, she pointed to something invisible that had to be causing this effect. Then in 1973, two Princeton physicists tried to put together a simulation of the Milky Way using what they already knew about the Universe. In their simulation, which did not include dark matter, the arrangement of mass particles came out all wrong. When they added a uniform source of mass, the simulation suddenly worked, thus providing further evidence of dark matter. The rest is history as scientists have been continually searching to detect dark matter.

The interesting part about dark matter is that we are more confident about what it is not, than what it is. To start, it is not found in the form of stars and planets that we see. Second, it is not made in the form of dark clouds produced by normal matter. Scientists have been able to confirm this because through sending radiation into these clouds, we should be able to detect the dark matter, and we have not as of yet. Dark matter is also different from antimatter, since if it were comprised of antimatter, it would decay away and disappear over the age of the Universe. The most common prediction for what dark matter is is that it is a WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle). WIMPs interact through a weak nuclear force in combination with gravity. WIMPs would prove as a viable explanation to solving the problem with identifying dark matter because they rarely interact with visible matter and cannot be detected through electromagnetic observations.

The future of dark matter research is very exciting. The hope is that dark matter can be discovered in the coming years, which would unlock a lot about the history of our Universe, and help explain how it all interacts.

Tyler Wellener

Habitability of Mars

Terraforming, literally “Earth-shaping,” is the process by which the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet is modified to resemble Earth’s biosphere. Mars is the main hypothetical target of terraforming. The goal of terraforming is to make another planet habitable for Earth life, and the ethics of such have always been a subject of much debate. The possibility for terraforming Mars depends on how habitable the planet is now. If it is less habitable, terraforming will not only be difficult, but also expensive, reducing the probability of terraforming. The habitability of Mars will be explored, in order to determine whether or not a debate over terraforming is even currently relevant, as the less habitable Mars is, the more extensive technology would be needed, and the further away the possibility of terraforming is.

At first glance through a telescope, Mars seems like it is very much a potentially habitable planet – there are clouds, polar icecaps and an axial tilt – all of which imply seasons.

These so-called seasons and calendar are very similar to the Earth’s, only Mars’ days are thirty-seven minutes longer than our own. Though the seasons are longer because a Martian year is two Earth years, the axial tilt and day length on Mars are similar to Earth’s values. In the late nineteenth century, astronomers also noticed a “wave of darkening.” What was described was a seasonal coloring of the planet, something that also happens on a global scale.

In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovannni Schiaparelli looked at Mars through his telescope, and found that Mars had a series of trenches, which he decided to call canali, the Italian word for “channels.” Funnily enough, people like Percival Lowell interpreted that has canals, which are artificial structures, thinking that he was implying that there were Martians out there that had dug the trenches at some point.

Unfortunately, the seasonal coloring has been attributed to seasonal dust storms; there is no plant life on Mars. Although Schiaparelli’s canali do not exist, there are smaller erosional features that could have possibly be formed by the flow of liquid water in the relatively recent past. Additionally, the channels that were discovered by Schiaparelli, were not built by Martians, which would have demonstrated that there is life on Mars; however, if these channels were formed by flowing water, though likely sporadically and in the past as appears it appears to be, then this would suggest that there were life sources available at one point in Mars’ history.

Unfortunately, with better technology and equipment, has come the definitive knowledge that there was no existing Martian life, but there are some advantages to having better equipment. The telescopes that showed that there was no life on Mars, also supported the observation of widespread seasonal color changes. This also means that while it is highly unlikely that Mars ever had civilizations, there was at least harboring plant life. However, this implication has been contradicted by scientists that have concluded that Mars’ atmosphere is dangerously thin, containing a large amount of carbon dioxide and also lacks observable oxygen or water vapor. Though some life may have still been able to exist without that, Mars’ lack of observable oxygen or water vapor in its atmosphere definitely make it uninhabitable for humans, and a poor choice for terraforming. However, if humans came up with the technology to alter the atmosphere of Mars and withstand the planet’s harsh conditions, Mars could be terraformed into being habitable.

Overall, one can conclude that Mars is currently uninhabitable for humans, as well as any other life. Though Mars may have had life many years ago, there is no clear evidence to definitely prove that. Conversely, should humans come up with advanced enough technology, terraforming of Mars could make it habitable for humans.

Charlotte Townsend