• Question: has anyone in the world been on mars

    Asked by paul and james to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hey Paul and James,

      no one has been on Mars yet! Going to Mars would be a massive challenge for many reasons, including we don’t know much about health risks from radiation in space, we don’t know what living in anti gravity would do to the human body (bones, eyes and muscles in particular) and because of the stress of living in a confined space with the same people for months.
      Never mind having the life systems in place to survive a one way trip of over 9 months!

      There are now many countries that work on making a Mars mission happen!

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Not yet, it’s millions of kilometres away and would take months of travel at top speed just to get there. On top of that we don’t have ships that could both make the journey AND carry enough food and water for someone. And even if we got someone to Mars, the average temperature is 55 degrees below freezing, so they wouldn’t last long.

      But there are a bunch of people working on the problem right now, and there are actually a lot of people interested in making the trip, even if it was 1-way trip (landing on Mars is relaltively easy. Taking off again would need fuel you can’t find there!) So it’s possible you’ll see someone making the trip to Mars in the next ten years or so. It’s a very interesting time to be alive and interested in space travel 🙂

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