Nasa aims to have people on Mars by 2033

WASHINGTON: Deadly radiation from the cosmos, potential vision loss and atrophying bones are just some of the challenges scientists must overcome before any future astronaut can set foot on Mars, experts and top Nasa officials said.

The US space agency believes it can put humans on the Red Planet within 25 years, but the technological and medical hurdles are immense.

“The cost of solving those means under current budgets, or slightly expanded budgets, it’s going to take about 25 years to solve those,” said former Nasa astronaut Tom Jones, who flew on four space shuttle missions before retiring in 2001.

“We need to get started now on certain key technologies,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

At an average distance of about 225 million km, Mars poses scientific problems an order of magnitude greater than anything encountered by the Apollo lunar missions.

With today’s rocket technology, it would take an astronaut up to nine months to reach Mars and the physical toll of floating that long in zero gravity would be huge.

For instance, scientists think prolonged weightlessness can cause irreversible changes to blood vessels in the retina, leading to vision degradation. And after a while, the skeleton leaches calcium and bone mass.

Jones called for nuclear propulsion systems that would have the added benefit of producing electricity on flights.

“If we start now, in 25 years we might have these technologies available to protect us from these long transit times,” he said. — AFP