Translated material
Our Mars!
- In November, Rosetta will lower the probe to the surface of the asteroid for the analysis of the chemical composition. And tomorrow she will get closer to him for the first time, sitting on the tail. There will be a direct broadcast on the second floor. Come! - Giovanni Bignami, an Italian physicist, a former president of Coshar, calls me to see how a spacecraft launched ten years ago and along a confusing trajectory flying around almost the entire solar system will finally meet with its goal - Kometoy Churumov -Gerasimenko. (For comet, see interviews with K. Churumov and report on direct broadcast . - approx. Ed. )
We are in the Shuvalovsky corps of Moscow State University, one of the new buildings of the university on the Sparrow Hills. Inside is clean, spacious, cool air. And somewhere on Earth the first person was already born, who was the first to step on Mars. Professor Beni sits with his leg by laying his leg, he was on ridiculous sneakers. He is sure: "When in 2062 the Comet Galley will return to the ground, we will be on Mars."
But how is it possible? I was lucky: historically, one of the functions of Coshar is the coordination of the actions of space agencies of different countries. And therefore, I go to the question for the international space planning session with the question.
There are many representatives of NASA, the European Space Agency (ECA), a little more business costumes than on average in the conference. In the back row, a person with an alien speed prints notes after each performance. It seems that most people here are already familiar to each other - they smile and laugh loudly at incomprehensible uninitiated jokes. But Richard Bonneville (Richard Bonnevile), one of the members of the ECA scientific program, on the contrary, is absolutely serious:
- The international lunar base is the following logical step for human flights into space. The moon will become an additional continent that will be used only for peaceful purposes and on which our environmental models of society can be checked.
In the inevitable conquest of the moon, no one doubts here. The only thing is in details, the bright confetti of science fiction, which generously sprinkle the deserted surface of our satellite.
“In the next decade, we want to establish the village of Robots on the Moon,” we are sitting with Bernard Foin, the leading specialist Ek in space intelligence, on the steps of the stairs to the assembly hall. The light is muffled, nearby, two cleaners listen to their oriental motifs from the phones. - Robots will work in cooperation and prepare the moon for an arrival of a person - they will be hardened, they will collect the necessary designs.
With Mars, everything is much more complicated. Firstly, scientists have not yet decided when it is necessary to fly out: during periods of maximum or minimum of solar activity. It is all about cosmic radiation, which has two main sources - galactic cosmic rays (accelerated particles arriving from interstellar space) and sunny cosmic rays (respectively, flows of particles from the sun). If you fly to a minimum of the solar cycle, then galactic radiation will make the main contribution, and if at the maximum, then, on the contrary, it is sunny (during these periods it even neutralizes the streams of accelerated nuclei from interstellar space, which simply do not penetrate the solar system).
In any case, it is clear: flying to Mars is very dangerous. NASA experts appreciated that the effect of interplanetary radiation on the cognitive functions of a person is equivalent to one bottle of vodka per day - and this is within a few months of flight. Side consequences are added to the degradation of the retina, a sharp decrease in muscle and bone mass due to weightlessness, and a high risk of oncology. It is not surprising that the flight to Mars is often called one -way ticket.
Just this idea is beaten by the Mars One commercial project, launched in 2010 by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp and even supported by one of the Nobel Physics Laureates. Mars One is looking for volunteers for a unique reality show: in 2025, the first batch of four will have to move to Mars forever in order to establish a colony there. Until then, millions of viewers around the world will observe the selection and training of participants.
From research to use - one step
- There is Fish, there is a bif. Take it, please!
Foreigners are guilty of their eyes and poke into the first dishes that fall.
- Bon appetit! Come yet, - a cook in the university dining room is unusually kind. At the next table, Lennard Fisk, professor at the University of Michigan and the new President Cospar sits with me. He talks quietly with a woman. Not far from them, the Indian, who took only three pears and a bunch of grapes for lunch. At another table, some man sends another missile to Mars with a wide gesture.
On Saturday, Fisk is represented to reporters. He is extremely neat in his formulations:
- This is not a cold war, this is a cool war. Then we had a nuclear weapon aimed at each other. I am old enough to remember it. And today we have very intertwined economies - between Russia and Europe, between Russia and the USA. And then, look at the Coshar: the composition of the conference is not weaker than the previous ones. Everyone arrived. What are the sanctions?
I ask Professor Fisk about Mars One and other similar commercial projects.
-Flight to Mars cannot be an independent business project. There are serious restrictions on this - how
Will they find a way to make money? So far, we are very far from this on Mars, and therefore nothing will work out without state structures.
It is difficult to disagree with him. After all, even the removal of one pound of weight into the orbit of the Earth costs $ 10 thousand.
However, the profit in space can still be found. Both NASA and some commercial companies are seriously talking about mining on asteroids. We just need to learn to fly to them, adjust their trajectories to transfer them to near -Earth space and process there. The fact is that many asteroids are rich in rare metals - in the prices of 1997, a relatively small metal asteroid with a diameter of 1.5 km could bring $ 20 trillion.
Many rare metals (including gold, nickel or platinum) - these are the remains from the falls of asteroids. Relatives, of earthly origin, rare metals over the long time of life of the planet, under the influence of attraction, fell to its very bowels. And on small asteroids with modest gravity, they remained at the surface.
“There are two concepts: research and use,” says Academician Lev Zeleny, director of the Institute of Cosmic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, torn by me from editing another scientific article. - When they discovered America, Portugal and England first explored it together, but as soon as it came to gold, each country went to its direction. So with the cosmos. Research programs can be common, but as soon as we switch to the level of use - in the extraction of fossils, the construction of military bases - each country will have its own interests.
Let's get back to Mars. Totally, humanity collects money for flight. Half -dead astronauts land on the surface of the planet. What next? Radiation does not disappear anywhere - in Mars, unlike the Earth, there is almost no protective magnetic field. And there is also a very sparse atmosphere, and any dust, falling at a speed of 60 thousand km/h, is able to break through the spacesuit through. Therefore, according to the plans, the first colonists of the Red Planet will live in underground bunkers: one or two meters of land are well protected from destructive radiation.
- We use caves, because these are very closed spaces, there is no light and very little nutrients, but there is still a huge variety of microorganisms. - Stefan Leuko, an employee of the German Institute of Aerospace Medicine, talks about the results of a project in which the astronauts were just placed for several weeks underground, where
They collected soil samples for tests. - Caves are such a way to think about other planets. And all the more interesting is that 10% of the genes that we sequenced from the collected samples are absolutely unknown to us. They belong to new organisms. So, life can not only arise, but also develop in caves.
But you don’t want to live underground forever (or near Mars?). Therefore, the terraforming of Mars is further than the process of changing the climate of the planet, satellite or any other cosmic body. In the case of Mars, there are even a few bold plans. According to one of them, it is first necessary to increase the temperature of the red planet above the freezing point of water, and then populate the resulting small lakes with algae, which on Earth survive in the Antarctic. They will begin to process carbon dioxide into oxygen and will also change the surface color so that it will begin to absorb more solar radiation.
Professor FISK refuses to answer the question about the prospects of terraforming:
- This is outside my competencies. In the USA there is such an expression: this is above my salary. With the same question, I approach one of the world's main experts in the study of extraterrestrial atmospheres to Vladimir Krasnopolsky, professor of the Catholic University of America in Washington, who recently returned to Russia under the Megagran program.
- The sheepskin is not worth it. It is extremely difficult to remake the atmosphere of Mars, and I think this is outside the capabilities of a person. - Vladimir has two upper buttons on a shirt, on a badge under the name Laconic USA, not a word about megagran. - In my opinion, there will never be serious plans for the colonization of Mars. Why? Any life on Mars will be worse than life in the most filthy prison on Earth.
“So, then we will never fly to Mars?”
- No. In the next hundred years we will be there. I'm sure.