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Astrobiology

Humans to Mars Symposium Under Way

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 18, 2016
Filed under
Humans to Mars Symposium Under Way

Keith’s note: This week, from 17-19 May, the annual Humans to Mars Summit will be underway in Washington, DC. Much of the event will be webcast live. We’ll be live tweeting the event at @NASAWatch.
The Humans to 2016 Mars Report Released at Humans to Mars Summit
“As highlighted in this year’s report, there have been significant developments since the premiere issue was released. Mars has been in the news regularly, and the United States has embraced Mars as the goal for human space flight more than ever before. For example, in October 2015 NASA began the process of assessing potential candidate human landing sites on Mars for the first time.”
For more information visit h2m.exploremars.org.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

15 responses to “Humans to Mars Symposium Under Way”

  1. Shaw_Bob says:
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    Ever noticed how the oldest of images keep getting recycled? That painting of men on Mars seems quite modern, as do Apollo photos – but look at the pictures of the cars which the Apollo era astronauts drove, or the vehicles in the car parks at KSC as the Saturn V went past. There’s a real case of cultural myopia here, an inability to see that what was cutting edge 50 years ago is no longer the way forward…

    • kcowing says:
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      I picked it because I have a bunch of humans on Mars pictures and I had not used it in a while. No other reason.

      • Shaw_Bob says:
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        It happens to be one of my favourite paintings of the subject, and is always worth seeing again. Isn’t it strange, though, that things like Ed White’s spacewalk are *still* seen as cutting edge in the public/media perception? I wonder if this is why ‘Apollo on Steroids’ was proposed in the first place – we simply didn’t move on.

    • mfwright says:
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      About cultural myopia , it sees many older people are carrying a lot of baggage (Apollo, Shuttle, Saturn V, etc) unlike young people in the New Space do not have. My perception is rather than dwelling the good, bad, and mediocre of days past, young just do what needs to be done (but being smart they should not repeat past mistakes).

  2. Daniel Woodard says:
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    One of the biggest changes since the Apollo era is the phenomenal progress in robotics. The robots on and around Mars (today at least a dozen active rovers, landers and orbiters) are not just flags and footprints, they are extensions of our hands and feet, our eyes, and our minds. Even today, when our billion dollar rover is no smarter than a cellphone, we are past the point at which the presence of a few organic humans on Mars would make any qualitative difference in the scientific knowledge and the vicarious experience available to us here on Earth.

    If we want to go with our physical bodies, the primary motivation should be simply to enjoy the experience. We first have to do more than make it possible, as we did in Apollo. We have to make it practical.

    • Shaw_Bob says:
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      Lunakhod did many of the MER tasks, back in the early 1970s – and it was simply a repurposed Soviet version of the Apollo LRV, being used in unmanned mode. What was different then, I think, was the tiny dribble of data as compared to modern spacecraft.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        I agree but in addition to better computers, in situ analysis has also advanced, as had autonomous rover navigation.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      “we are past the point at which the presence of a few organic humans on Mars would make any qualitative difference in the scientific knowledge”

      Hyperbole surely, Dr. Woodard?

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        As a human, I would prefer if it were hyperbole. Simple observation says otherwise.

        A human on Mars will still be isolated from the environment by faceplate and not very dexterous gloves. Today surgical robots provide better visibility and more precise ability to manipulate human tissues than our organic hands, delicate as they are. I would never have guessed a few decades ago that critical military missions would be carried out by robots controlled from halfway around the world. We continue to debate sending humans to Mars orbit just to shorten the propagation delay for driving rovers, yet on Earth we have cars and military vehicles that can drive autonomously. It took many years for robots on Earth and on Mars to reach their present capabilities, but they continue to improve by the day. Our physical capabilities, in contrast, have remained the same for millennia.

        I’m not saying we should stay on Earth. I’s saying we should be honest about why we want to go to Mars personally rather than virtually. For those who have the opportunity, the experience will be unique, and I am all for it.

        • fcrary says:
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          I don’t think I agree, or at least I don’t think the state of the art in robotics is there yet. We still have plenty of work for terrestrial field scientists. There are still many sorts of work people are better at than robots and computers. Those generally involve noticing or dealing with unexpected things.

          It might be correct to say the added value of human scientists on the surface of Mars is small, or of incremental value. Certainly the cost is high, and the value is going down as the state of the art in computers and robotics improves. But I wouldn’t say it’s down to zero yet. I’ll agree that when I see a robot on the author list of a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            We should start a pool on when that will be. But AI systems such as Google already play a critical role in research.

            More seriously, I agree with PK that the basic reason we want to go might be summed up as adventure. For some the adventure is in learning new science, for others in art, writing, personal experience, or finding a new home. Adventure has brought us here from our primitive beginnings. In the case of sending humans to Mars, the first step is (still) to make human flight to LEO practical and widely available, with dozens or hundreds of humans working, living or vacationing in space on any given day. Then the Moon, then Mars, as Clark, Heinlein, von Braun and others long ago proposed.

        • P.K. Sink says:
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          I agree with you. But science has rarely been the motivation for people pushing beyond the boundaries of settled life. Profit, adventure, and a chance to start over in a new land are what will populate the solar system and beyond.

          • fcrary says:
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            Science wasn’t the real motive, but it was sometimes the excuse. Cook’s first voyage was nominally to observe the transit of Venus from the south Pacific. He also had less publicized orders to explore the region which we now know contains Australia and New Zealand, which the UK was interested in for non-scientific reasons.

    • fcrary says:
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      I think we currently have all-time record for the number of of spacecraft operating at Mars, and I can’t count more than seven (not the “at least a dozen active…” you mention.) The US rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, the US orbiters Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN, the ESA Mars Express Orbiter and the Indian Mars Orbiter (which they have describe as an engineering test rather than a science mission.) The ESA ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is on the way, but not there yet. Did I miss something?

    • Gonzo_Skeptic says:
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      “One of the biggest changes since the Apollo era…”

      Your words are important. They should be carved on a giant granite slab that is set at the entrance to JSC to remind them that unless they stop wasting taxpayer dollars building giant useless boosters and planning for some Mission to Nowhere, their days are numbered.