Mars Exploration: History of Rejections and Achievements

Ever since several centuries ago, human beings have being interested in the space outside our earth’s atmosphere. But it was not until the 1950s that humans were able to send artificial objects into the space to further their exploration. Since then, the two giants, the Soviet Union and the USA, have entered a space race, as part of their competitions during the cold war. The technologies for space exploration developed rapidly during that time period. They sent numerous spaceships and military satellites into space as well as the lunar probes and landers to explore the moon. After the cold war ends, the new trend for space exploration turned into international corporation instead of competition. As scientists from all over the globe units together to achieve more advanced technologies for future space exploration. The most significant program must be the international space station which are built by several countries across the globe. As we stepped into the twenty-first century, one space mission became especially significant and challenging for the scientists. That is the exploration for mars.

In recent years, the environment on earth has deteriorate at an extremely fast pace. The most crucial problem for all humans is the global warming. With more extreme weathers in summer and winter as well as the continuing rising sea-levels, human scientists are now looking for solutions for future generations. With the minimal effect of the changes made by the solutions that all the countries offered, scientists are now looking for a more challenging solution, that is, the human settlement on mars.

In the past, different countries have developed their space agencies and put more efforts into space explorations. It is universally agreed that the next major milestone for humans’ explorations of space is to send crews to mars. However, the trend of most countries towards Martian explorations is to do it independently instead of seeking for a deep partnership with other countries.The exploration of Mars using robotic Spacecraft began in the 1960s, when the US National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s Mariner 4 flew past the planet and beamed back 21 fuzzy television pictures. In 1971, NASA’s Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit Mars. In 1976, NASA’s twin Viking landers touched down on different parts of the planet. Although the landers could not roam, they beamed back thousands of high-quality photographs , collected data on weather and chemistry, and performed sophisticated experiments on Martian soil to look for life.

Several attempts were made by the Soviet Union to send landers to Mars, but all failed. The Soviet Union’s Mars 3 lander made a successful landing on the Martian Surface but lost communication with Earth 14.5 seconds later. In 1997, the U.S. scored a third Mars lander success with its Pathfinder probe, which proved that a spacecraft could safely land on another world by bouncing inside a cluster of inflated airbags. Pathfinder released a tiny solar-powered rover called Sojourner that roamed near the lander. In its 83 days of operation on the surface, Sojourner traveled about 100 meters, took hundreds of photographs, and conducted chemical analysis on 16 locations.

Several other NASA attempts at landing on Mars failed. NASA’s Mars Polar lander crashed in 1999, its Deep Space 2 surface penetrators returned no data when they impacted Mars in the same year, and the Europeans Beagle 2 lander failed in 2003. Then, in 2003, NASA score a spectacular success: the large, sophisticated Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and , identical twins, successfully rolled out on the surface of Mars. It was the beginning of a mission that would continue for both rovers until far beyond engineer’s initial expectations of a 92.5 day missions. On March 22, 2010, Spirit became trapped in deep sand and transmitted its last communication took place. In May 2011, NASA officially ended the Spirit rover mission and transitioned single-rover operations supporting the Opportunity rover. In August 2013, Opportunity surpassed 3,500 days of operation on the Martian surface.

From this past experience, we can understand how hard it is for a single country to conduct exploratory missions on Mars. Most half go those missions have failed since Martian missions are far more complicated and challenging than the near earth missions. Another option of such complicated space exploration is international cooperation. Although the Age of Space began in a fiercely competitive mode, political and funding realities have now shifted the balance toward cooperation. This is particularly true in the case of the International Space Station, with its 16 partner nations. And it promises to be increasingly true with the vision for Space Exploration.

From the 1990s, a major milestone in the humans’s history of space exploration took place. That is the International Space station. From its first part launched in 1998 and the last module launched in 2011, the International Space Station is the fruit of the efforts paid by several nations. The International Space Station (ISS) Program’s greatest accomplishment is as much a human achievement as it is a technological one—how best to plan, coordinate, and monitor the varied activities of the Program’s many organizations. An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the ISS. The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.

The International Space Station Program brings together international flight crews, multiple launch vehicles, globally distributed launch, operations, training, engineering, and development facilities; communications networks, and the international scientific research community. Elements launched from different countries and continents are not mated together until they reach orbit, and some elements that have been launched later in the assembly sequence were not yet built when the first elements were placed in orbit. Operating the space station is even more complicated than other space flight endeavors because it is an international program. Each partner has the primary responsibility to manage and run the hardware it provides. Construction, assembly and operation of the International Space Station requires the support of facilities on the Earth managed by all of the international partner agencies and countries involved in the program. These include construction facilities, launch support and processing facilities, mission operations support facilities, research and technology development facilities and communications facilities.

Today, as more and more nations have the capability to build and launch spacecraft, and economic troubles have compressed the budgets of space agencies across the globe, the old mindset of international competition for 'space firsts' has made way for international cooperation in space to share costs and to take advantage of the special talents and facilities of each country for a common goal. Historically, human exploration of space has been driven by national prestige, the apex being the race to the Moon with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Apollo program and its Soviet competitor in the 1960s. After the cancellation of the Apollo program in 1972, several Mars human exploration programs have been proposed and even planned, but, to date, no governmental imperatives have spurred enough political and public desire for a sustained human Mars exploration program. Beginning in 1972, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine constructed an exploration plan that included a human mission to Mars in 1981.

Then-President Richard Nixon rejected this plan in favor of the Space Transportation System. A human Mars exploration program was revisited in 1989 when President George H. W. Bush announced his Space Exploration Initiative that included a human mission to Mars. This plan was abandoned after a study reported the cost of the program to be approximately USD 500 billion, an amount too expensive even with international collaboration. In 2004, President George W. Bush set forth his human exploration plan, entitled The Vision for Space Exploration. This plan was similar to his father’s and ultimately was cancelled by the Obama administration in 2009, because of significant scheduling overrun and lack of funding. The former Soviet Union had proposals for human missions to Mars in 1969, largely in response to the success of the Apollo project. Called the “Mars Expeditionary Complex,” plans for interplanetary spacecraft were created that were to fly aboard the planned N-1 rocket. However, no successful launches of the N-1 were ever accomplished; hence, the proposals were abandoned. Current Mars Exploration Policies Currently, there are several space-faring nations that have created preliminary proposals for human exploration of Mars - such as the United States, Russia, and China, none of which have initiated such a program.

There have also been various programs for robotic exploration of Mars by various nations. The 2010 Space Policy of the United States states: “It is the goal of the US space policy to expand international cooperation, pursue human and robotic initiatives and explore the solar system and the universe beyond. It is the national space policy of the US to send humans to orbit Mars by the mid 2030s and to maintain a sustained robotic presence in the solar system.” With the retirement of the Space Shuttle in August of 2011 and the lack of concrete plans for human exploration of Mars, Russia and China remain the only countries that have the capabilities to send humans into space. Although without the technical capabilities to send humans to Mars, Russia has put forth numerous concepts and proposals for human exploration of Mars. The Russian Federal Space Agency and the European Space Agency have also been cooperatively working with the MARS500 project, an analog experiment for simulating a human flight to Mars. While no formal plans exist for Chinese human exploration of Mars, it is likely that following the planned lunar exploration, focus will be diverted to exploration of Mars: however, any technical plan to explore Mars has yet to acquire governmental approval.