In this Chapter, we will learn about the other terrestrial or rocky planets.

Keep in
mind that as we are learning about the properties of these planets how they are
different from the Earth and why it would not be possible for us to live naturally on
these planets. When discussing the properties of these planets I will not focus on
numbers or statistics about the planets since you can easily look up these figures in
your book. What I will focus on is what makes these planets special.

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The following slide reminds you of the sizes of the terrestrial planets in comparison to
each other and shows you what the surface looks like on each planet. Of course Pluto
is not a planet, but its size is more comparable to the size of the inner planets than the
outer planets. The largest inner planet is the Earth, then Venus, Mars, and lastly
Mercury.

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Mercury is the innermost of our Sun’s eight planets. Thus, it is fitting that it is named after the Roman
Messenger god, because it is the fastest planet to travel around the Sun, and being fast is one of the traits of a
good messenger. Mercury travels around the Sun in 88 days.

Its average distance to Sun is 0.4 A.U. It has the most elongated orbit, except for Pluto. Since it is the
closest planet to the Sun, it always appears close to Sun in the sky. Because of this, Mercury is only visible
for a short time before sunrise and sunset, but since it is low in the sky when it is visible, the light from
Mercury has to travel through a lot of atmosphere, which makes Mercury blurry, even through the best
telescopes, from Earth.

So in order to know more about it, a spacecraft needed to be sent to Mercury. This was the Mariner mission
sent in 1974 by the Soviets to map the surface of Mercury 10. Until the 1974 Mariner mission, little was
known about Mercury. This photograph of Mercury on the slide shows that Mercury looks very much like
our Moon because it is littered with craters. The smooth part on the top of Mercury is not a real feature, but
The part that was not mapped by the spacecraft.

The fact that we can still see the craters on Mercury gives you important information about Mercury. One of
these information is that Mercury
has very little atmosphere. It’s atmosphere is thicker than the Moon’s but it’s still very thin and is made of
sodium. Because the atmosphere on Mercury is very thin, there is very little erosion on Mercury and the
craters are still visible even after billions of years.

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What is interesting about Mercury is that the temperature variations on this planet is the most extreme in
the solar system. That means that difference between the high temperature and low temperature on
Mercury is greater than on any other planet. It can get as hot as 660 degrees Fahrenheit or as cold as -280
degrees Fahrenheit! It’s easy to understand why Mercury gets very hot (since it is the closest planet to the
Sun), but it can also get very cold on Mercury too!
There are two reasons why the temperatures on Mercury vary so much:
1) It has a very slow rotational period. That is, it takes a long time for it to spin on its axis. It takes 59
days to spin on its axis (compared to 24 hours on the Earth). Because it takes 59 days to spin on its
axis, one side (the daytime side) of Mercury will be facing towards the Sun for about 30 days straight,
whereas the night time side of Mercury will be facing away from the Sun for 30 days straight! It makes
sense that the daytime side of Mercury will get really, really hot (up to 660 degrees) because the Sun is
hitting its surface for 30 days straight! It also makes sense that the nighttime side of Mercury will be
very cold since it does not receive any sunlight for 30 days straight!
Compare Mercury with the Earth. The Earth is a fast rotator. It takes 24 hours to spin on its axis, so we
get on average about 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night (of course these numbers could be a
few hours off depending on the season). But, the temperatures on the Earth can’t vary much because by
the time it starts getting a little warm, we turn away from the Sun and cool off, and before it gets too
cool, we turn again to face the Sun and warm up. So Earth’s fast rotation kind of acts like a natural
thermostat to keep our temperatures pretty even.
2) The second reason why the temperatures on Mercury vary a lot: It doesn’t have a significant atmosphere,
that is its atmosphere is very thin.
The atmosphere on the Earth helps to circulate the temperature around the Earth. That is, the nighttime
side is not too cold because some of the heat from the daytime side circulates to the nighttime side. The
same goes for the daytime side of the Earth. It doesn’t get too hot because some of the cool
temperature from the nighttime side circulates to the side that faces the Sun. Thus, the atmosphere on
the Earth also acts like a natural thermostat.
Since there is no atmosphere on Mercury, there is no temperature circulation, thus the daytime side
doesn’t get the coolness from the night time side, and the nighttime side doesn’t get the heat from the
daytime side.
Imagine having to live on such a planet where for 30 days straight you would be baking and for 30 days
straight you would be frozen! Not too comfortable right?

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The second closest planet to the Sun is Venus. Since Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth is, we also
always find Venus near the Sun in the sky. Venus can be seen above Western horizon just after sunset (when
it is called an evening star) or before sunrise above the Eastern horizon (called the morning star). It is one of
the brightest objects in the night sky. Venus’s cloud cover reflects 76% of the sunlight that falls upon it.
Only the Sun and the Moon can outshine Venus at its greatest brilliancy. Some people mistaken Venus as the
North star because people often think the North star is the brightest object in the sky besides the Sun and
Moon.
Venus orbits the Sun at a distance of 0.7 AU, and although it is closest to us than any other planet, we still
don’t know much about it because of the heavily shrouded atmosphere.
Venus was named after the Roman goddess of Love and Beauty because, in the early days, when people first
observed Venus through small telescopes, they thought that it was similar to Earth. People imagined that it
could be a paradise and that there might be life on it.
This slide shows a famous painting by the Italian artist, Boticelli (one of my favorite Italian Renaissance
painters) called “The Birth of Venus”. In this painting, it shows that Venus was so beautiful that the winds
lost their breath at the sight of her.
At first glance, Venus and Earth do look like twins; they have almost the same mass (mass of Venus=80%
the mass of Earth), size (diameter of Venus = 95% Earth’s diameter), and density (density of Venus= 95%
Earth’s average density and surface gravity).
But looks can be deceiving. That is why I call Venus the fatal beauty. It looks very serene on Venus, but of
all the terrestrial planets, the conditions on Venus would be the most deadly for any kind of life. Even
though Venus at first glance has similar properties to the Earth and could have potentially been Earthlike, the
fact that Venus is exposed to a greater intensity of sunlight since it is much closer to the Sun than the Earth
is transforms it from a potentially Earthlike environment into an extremely hostile world!

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In the early days, when people first observed Venus through small telescopes, they
thought that it was similar to Earth. People imagined that it could be a paradise and
that there might be life on it. But behind it’s serene appearance lies a very hostile and
far from tranquil world.

First of all, its serene looking clouds are toxic, consisting of 96% carbon dioxide and
no oxygen to breathe. Also, it has droplets of sulfuric acid, so when it rains, it rains
sulfuric acid! As some of you may have learned in your Chemistry class, sulfuric acid
would not be pleasant if it gets on your skin; it will burn through your skin!

In addition to not being able to breathe due to lack of oxygen and your skin being
burned through by sulfuric acid rain, if you were to land on the surface of Venus, you
would literally be crushed. The atmosphere of Venus is so thick that the pressure that
you would feel from its atmosphere would be 95 times stronger than what you would
feel on Earth. If you were standing on Venus, it would be like having ten 18 wheel
trucks stacked on top of you, that would be how much pressure you would feel!

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If the lack of oxygen, sulfuric acid rain, and high pressure are not uncomfortable enough for you, then
you would also have to endure the extreme heat on Venus. Although Mercury is closer to the Sun than
Venus is, Venus actually gets hotter than Mercury. Remember the highs on Mercury is about 660
degrees Fahrenheit…well on Venus, it would be 900 degrees Farenheit, this is hot enough to melt lead!

The reason why it gets so hot on Venus is because of an effect that we also experience on the Earth (but
on a much lesser scale). The high temperature on Venus is due to the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is named for what happens in a greenhouse. The glass in the greenhouse lets
visible light through from the Sun, but when this radiation passes through the glass, it heats up and
reradiates in the infrared. Well, the molecules in the glass do not let the infrared radiation through,
instead it traps it. Thus, all this infrared radiation is trapped by the glass and the greenhouse heats up
and becomes hotter than it is on the outside. This effect also occurs when you park your car in the Sun.
The glass in the car traps heat and when you open the door, it can become warmer in the car than
outside.

Venus’ thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide acts like the glass in the greenhouse. It allows the visible
radiation to get through. At the temperatures that result, the surface heats up in the infrared. But the
carbon dioxide and other constituents of Venus’s atmosphere are largely opaque to infrared radiation
so the energy is absorbed. Since the infrared radiation doesn’t get out, we say that it is trapped by
Venus’ atmosphere. Thus, Venus heats up far above the temperature it would reach if the atmosphere
were transparent. The surface radiates more and more energy as the planet heats up. The situation is
so extreme in Venus that we call it “runaway greenhouse effect”. The carbon dioxide atmosphere is
like adding layers of blankets and trapping heat.

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How did Venus reach this extreme condition? It may have began its existence in the past with a
pleasant climate and possibly with oceans. But since it is closer to the Sun than the Earth is, the water
vapor was gradually broken apart by UV radiation from the Sun into H and O2 and the hydrogen, being
so light escaped from the surface of Venus. Without the water to absorb the carbon dioxide atmosphere
(like here on Earth), Venus then began to heat up quickly.

Or it could be possible that Venus was always in this hot state with no oceans? Remember that the
Earth’s early atmosphere also contained a lot of carbon dioxide and some water vapor; the major
difference is that Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth so that its water vapor could never become
liquid so no life could evolve to produce oxygen or remove the carbon dioxide. Just this one detail
turned Venus from a possible Earth-like paradise to a hellish hostile planet.

It is good to study the atmosphere of Venus because we can learn more about our own atmosphere and
what might happen if the carbon dioxide layer increased on Earth. It is very unlikely that the Earth will
experience a runaway greenhouse effect that will make the planet unfit for all forms of life. In the
past, there have been times when the Earth was much warmer than it is now. Life on Earth recovered
from collisions from asteroids and comets; some of which dumped enormous quantities of green house
gases into the Earth’s atmosphere. But on the other hand, even a rise of a few degrees in the Earth’s
global average temperature over a timescale of a few decades would have terrible consequences for
humans in including flooding of coastal cities and destruction of many agricultural areas.

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Since Venus’ atmosphere is so thick, we would not be able to know much about the properties of the
surface of Venus if we were not able to send spacecraft to land on it since the clouds obscure its
surface. However, the conditions on Venus are so harsh, with the high pressure and temperatures,
that engineering a spacecraft that would survive all of that would be a difficult task indeed. But this
was done in 1981.

The Soviets sent the Venera mission to Venus and the spacecraft was able to successfully land on
Venus and return images of the surface of Venus! This was an amazing feat considering the harsh
conditions. They were able to send 10 probes, but the longest that the probes survived under these
harsh conditions was 2 hours. However, that was long enough for the probes to send back useful
data. It showed that the surface of Venus was very dry and cracked with lots of regolith and cooled
lava. This slide shows you the actual photographs of the surface of Venus returned to us from the
Venera spacecraft probes.

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From Venus’s size and from the fact that its mean density is similar to that of the Earth, we conclude that
its interior is also probably similar to that of the Earth. This means that we expect to find volcanoes and
mountains on Venus.
But of course since its surface is obscured by clouds and the Venera probes were not able to roam across
the surface (because it only survived 2 hours), it was difficult to verify this.

However, in the 1990s, new technology made it possible to study the surface of Venus by using radar to
penetrate through Venus’s clouds. Regions that reflect a large percentage of the radar beam back on Earth
show up as bright and other regions as dark. By bouncing radar through the clouds, scientists were able
to map 98% of the surface of Venus and determine its changes in elevation.

In 1990, NASA’s Pioneer Venus, Venera 15/16, and Magellan were in orbit around Venus allowing them to
make observations over a long time period. From radar maps, we know that 60% of Venus is covered by
rolling plains, flat to within plus or minus 1 km. Only about 16% of Venus’s surface lies below this plain.

Two large features the size of small Earth continents extend several km above the mean elevation. The
Northern “continent”, Terra Ishtar (Babylonian goddess of love) is about the size of the continental U.S.
The giant chain of mountains on it is called Maxwell Montes which is 11km high (2km taller than Mount
Everest). The Southern “continent” Aphrodite Terra (Greek goddess of love) is about twice as tall as the
northern one and much larger.
Unlike the earth, Venus crust is made of only one plate. Venus may have such a thick crust that any plate
tectonics that existed was choked off. Thus, Venus quakes must be less common than earthquakes. Since
there is no plate tectonics, build up of magma underneath the hot spots caused high mountains to rise in
the same location. The radar maps also showed that Venus has over 1600 volcanoes and some craters.
They also see lava flows extending hundreds of kilometers across the fractured plains.

The image on the right shows Maat Mons, the largest volcano on Venus in a simulated perspective view
based on radar data from Magellan, arbitrarily given the orange color that comes through Venus’s clouds.

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Next we will talk about perhaps the most interesting planet other than the Earth. That planet is Mars.
The reason why Mars is so interesting to astronomers is because, of all the bodies in the Solar System,
Mars would be the most likely place for human beings to colonize because it has the best conditions to
possibly support life in the future. It also may have had conditions that may have supported life in the
past.

But from first inspection, Mars doesn’t really look anything like the Earth.
Mass of Mars= 11% Mass of Earth
Radius of Mars= 50% Radius Earth

So its much less massive than the Earth which means that if we go to Mars, we would have to contend
with much less gravity. It is also only half the size of Earth.

But in other ways, Mars is more similar to Earth than any other planet. For example, the length of a
day on Mars is about the same as the length of a day on Earth. That is, it also takes Mars about 24
hours for it to rotate on its axis. So if we were to live on Mars, we would not have to get used to a
different day length.

Also, Mars has a similar tilt as the Earth. It’s axis of rotation is tilted 25 degrees (versus the 23.5
degrees of the Earth). That means that it experiences similar 4 seasons. In addition, at the poles, like
the Earth, Mars has polar ice caps (in the image the polar ice caps are the whitish regions). The ice on
Mars is made of carbon dioxide and also water ice. This is important because we know for a fact that
there is water on Mars, except that it is too cold for the water to be in liquid form currently.
Currently the average temperature on Mar is about -67 degrees Fahrenheit. But the fact that there is
water is a good thing. That means that if we decide to go to Mars, we don’t have to bring water with
us.

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Even though the water is currently in ice form, astronomers have long suspected that in the past, Mars
was warm enough to have liquid water. We will later discuss the most convincing evidence for this
intriguing possibility. One piece of evidence is in Mars’ color. Mars looks reddish, that is why they
named it after the God of War, because red is associated with blood. The red color of course is not due
to blood, but due to the existence of iron oxide. In other words, rust. All of you should be familiar
with rust that occurs on metals such as your bicycle wheels.

Suppose that it gets warm and wet on a planet... warm and wet enough for there to be water in the
atmosphere for awhile, or maybe even water on the surface. If that happens, rocks that have iron in
them can change. This change is called weathering and it can be brought about by water. Pure iron
weathers to make rust. And iron-rich rocks can weather to make reddish, rust-like minerals.

What you see when you look at Mars is just a beautiful, red dot shining in the night sky. But that red
color is telling you something important: that long ago Mars may have been warmer and wetter than it
is today. It's one of the reasons we think there could have once been life on Mars, and also one of the
reasons why we explore there.

Thus, the rust that exists all over Mars could have indicated that in the past Mars was a hotter and
wetter place. But the fact that there is rust on Mars doesn’t necessarily mean that there was liquid
water, as rust can be formed just by the presence of oxygen alone also. We will come back to this
important discussion about liquid water on Mars and discuss more evidence for it.

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Another way that Mars is like the Earth is that it is the only other terrestrial planet that
has moons, besides the Earth. Remember Mercury and Venus do not have any moons.
Mars has two moons named Phobos and Deimos. Their names are consistent with the
war theme, meaning fear (Phobos)) and panic (Deimos). These moons are pictured
here in this slide. If you take a look at the moons, you would notice that they don’t
really look like the Earth’s moon. They look kind of like large rocks. That is what
they are, they are large rocks in space (or asteroids) that were most likely captured
into orbit by Mars’ gravity.
It is believed that the moons on Mars, like our Moon helps to stabilize the tilt of the
planet. That is without our Moon, the Earth’s tilt would be unstable and would
change.
Mars has two moons, and these two moons help to stabilize the tilt of Mars. However,
since these two moons are much less massive than Earth’s moon’s they do not do such
a good job. Thus, Mars tilt does change; it can vary from anywhere between 13-40
degrees tilt in 10 million years, whereas the Earth’s tilt stays somewhere between 22-
24.5 degrees. Perhaps this variation in tilt can also cause temperature changes on
Mars and polar ice caps to melt, thus causing Mars to go through periods where it can
have liquid water on its surface. Interesting thought!

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It is easy to see from a spacecraft what Mar’s surface looks like since its atmosphere,
which is made of carbon dioxide is very thin. From maps of Mars’ surface, we can see
that Mars has some huge volcanoes. But the most prominent feature on Mars is given
the name Valles Marineris, named after the Mariner mission to Mars. It’s a huge
canyon system similar to our Grand Canyon, but much much larger in size and created
by a different mechanism than our Grand Canyon.

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To give you an idea of the immense size of the volcanoes and Valles Marineris, we
superpose the map of the United States onto the surface of Mars. Here you can see
that Valles Marineris would stretch across the entire continental U.S.! What created
this feature was probably not the same as what created the Grand Canyon. The Grand
Canyon in the U.S. was created by the erosion due to water from the Colorado River.
Even though astronomers now know that there was liquid water on Mars, there was
probably not enough to carve out such a large canyon. The most likely explanation
for this feature is the same as the explanation for the plates on the Earth, that in the
past, Mars was molten, but then it cooled down, and when it cooled down, the surface
of Mars cracked and formed this feature.

Also take a look at the sizes of the craters and the volcanoes on Mars. They are pretty
huge, aren’t they?

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Now let’s get back to the most interesting part about Mars, which is that fact that there
is water currently in frozen form present on Mars and there is a lot of evidence that
shows that Mars had liquid water flowing on its surface in the past.

We know that there is an abundance of frozen water because we see it at the Martian
polar ice caps. But the existence of frozen water doesn’t necessarily mean that water
there was liquid in the past. What kind of evidence is there for liquid water in the
past? Well, all over the surface of Mars, there are erosion features that seem to
indicate that they were formed by liquid water. For example to the right is an image
of what look like water that could have flowed on the surface of Mars due to melted
ice and snow on Mars. Scientists believe that these “gullies” on Mars could have
formed as recently as 1.25 million years ago. Some scientists do not think that these
features were formed by liquid water but that these gullies could have formed by dry
landslides on Mars. In any case, there is still debate over whether these gullies
represent evidence of recent water flow on Mars.

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Other erosion features on Mars that could have indicated past water flow is shown in
the image on the right. If you can compare it to the image on the left (which
represents the Ohio river system on the Earth), they appear to resemble each other
very closely. Thus the image on the right could be dried up river channels on Mars.
These are again found all over the surface of Mars. It indicates that running water
could have carved out these features. Convincing? But recent studies have shown
that flowing lava may also create these features. So again, there is still debate over
whether these features were due to flowing water.

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In 2003, NASA sent out its exploration rovers called Spirit and Opportunity to find out conclusively
if Mars ever had running water in the past. Both rovers did just that when they successfully landed
on Mars at two different locations in 2004! These spacecraft were targeted to land on the opposite
side of Mars, both locations, astronomers believe may hold evidence for liquid water. The sites were
at the Gusev Crater, a possible former lake in a giant impact crater, and Meridiani Planum, where
mineral deposits (such as hematite) suggest Mars had a wet past. These rovers have equipment to
analyze the rocks and soil on Mars to determine if there is evidence for liquid water. Be sure to watch
the exciting video clip of Spirits landing that I posted this week!
Both spacecraft found conclusive evidence of sedimentary rocks and the mineral hematite with
rounded shapes that could have only been formed in liquid water (as opposed to volcanic in origin).
Thus, it has now been proven with these spacecrafts, that in the past that Mars must have been a
hotter and wetter place than it is today.
What do you think could have made Mars hotter and wetter in the past? Take a moment to think
about this first and then scroll down for the answer…
Well, we said the most important determinant of average temperature on a planet is its distance from
the Sun; this is what gives Earth the ideal temperature for liquid water.
However, this is not the only factor that affects the temperature of a planet. We discussed, as in
Venus’ case, that a planet can get hotter if there is a greenhouse affect on the planet. The greenhouse
affect can occur if the planet has a thick enough atmosphere with greenhouse gases such as carbon
dioxide that traps heat from the Sun. Well we know that on Mars, the atmosphere currently consists
of 95% carbon dioxide. Currently the atmosphere is too thin for the greenhouse effect to warm the
planet up to temperatures high enough for liquid water to exist, but maybe in the past, Mars may
have had a thicker carbon dioxide atmosphere. If that was the case, then the water that is currently in
frozen form may have been in liquid form in the past.
Make sure to check out the exciting video clip of Spirit’s landing on Mars posted this week!

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Just recently, on July 30th, 2020, NASA sent up the Mars 2020 Rover named
Perseverance. It is scheduled to touchdown on Mars on February 18th, 2021. The
rover will analyze the geology of Mars to determine if it was ever habitable for life. It
will deploy, for the first time ever, a helicopter drone named Ingenuity to help
Perseverance find the best path on Mars to travel.

The Astronomy Club was luck enough to get a tour of NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory located in Pasadena California. The highlight of the tour was that we got
to see the engineers working on the Mars 2020 rover. The picture of the engineers
working on the heat shield that would cover the rover is on the right (the rover itself is
in the background). We felt that we won the golden ticket!

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The fact that Mars had flowing water in the past was very exciting news to astronomers because here on
the Earth, anywhere we find liquid water, we also find life.
In 1996, scientists believed that they may have found evidence that there was life on Mars in a Martian
meteorite. This rock was blasted from Mars 15 million years ago by a collision and landed in Antarctica
about 13,000 years ago.

The meteorite contained carbonate globules which generally form in liquid water. It is thought that these
globules formed when water flowed through the rock which was still on Mars about 3.6 billion years ago.
Within the globules, certain types of organic compounds were found. Although these types of compounds
can be formed in a number of ways other than by life, these particular ones were unusual. Photographs
representing tube like structures resembling the tiniest Earth bacteria received a lot of publicity.
Structures in the Mars meteorite seen with a special type of microscope are thought by a few scientists to
be remnants of primitive life, but by other scientists to be a natural formation, too small to be fossils of
life forms. They cited evidence for contamination of the meteorite by substances in Earth. Results were
highly controversial.
Although none of these findings definitively gives evidence for life, it is still interesting and exciting to
ask ourselves these questions.
What may be an intriguing possibility, if life ever developed on Mars, (and what some scientists
hypothesize but there is no proof for) is that Earth life may have originated from Mars and was
transplanted on to Earth by a meteorite; we may all have been originally Martians!

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The Mars reconnaissance orbiter was launched in August 2005 and reached Mars in November
2006. Its mission is to prepare future missions to Mars by studying the weather on Mars and
searching for future potential landing sites. On September 28th, 2015, using a spectrometer, it
found darkish streaks on Mars flowing downhill mountains. NASA calls these streaks
recurring slope linae or RLS. The streaks have hydrated salts that can only form with liquid
water. These streaks seem to ebb and flow with time. They appear on Mars when
temperatures are warmer (about -10 degree Fahrenheit) and then disappear when it gets colder.
The interesting thing is that normally water is frozen at -10 degrees Fahrenheit(because the
freezing point of water is 32 Fahreneit), but the presence of the salt lowers the melting point of
water so that it is possible to have liquid water even at these low temperatures!

The amount of liquid water that exists when the streaks appear is very little, just moist patches,
but this is enough to get all scientists and the world excited because this is the first time that
there is evidence for liquid water currently flowing on another body other than the Earth!
Before we only thought liquid water could have existed in the past on Mars. NASA has been
spending time and money to search for this kind of evidence and they have finally found it.
This means that there could potentially be bacteria life on Mars currently! This is another one
of NASA’s majors goals, which is to find evidence of life on another body besides the Earth.
We may find the evidence of this out very soon!

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Most recently, there has been the exciting new discovery of a possible liquid water
lake beneath Mar’s southern polar ice cap. This subterranean lake is similar to the
subglacial lakes that were discovered under several kilometers of ice in Greenland and
Antarctica. This discovery was made the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and
Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) in July 2018. This instrument used radar to detect
bright echoes underneath Mars South Polar ice cap that demonstrated that the material
is very reflective, which could indicate the presence of liquid water.

22
Due to the budget cuts in the past, the future of space travel probably relied on private
industry. I attended the NewSpace conference during the summer of 2012. During
that conference I was able to hear about exciting proposals by private industry. They
were looking for institutions and wealthy individuals to sponsor their programs.
There were several organizations that had plans to send human beings back to the
Moon and also within the next decade set up a colony on Mars! These private
industries think that space will be a great investment and will bring a lot of revenue.
Space tourism will be a new money making venture for these industries. With enough
$$$, you can go into orbit around Earth and someday even stay at a hotel on the
Moon! Some of these organizations are pictured here. Virgin Galactic (upper left)
wants to send future space tourists in low Earth orbit, Open Luna (upper right) wants
so set up a colony on the Moon, and Mars One (lower left) to set up a permanent
human colony on Mars by 2024 (not really realistic)! Mars One’s ambitious but not
really realistic plan is to finance their mission by making it a reality series! They also
want to save money by sending human beings there to live on Mars permanantly!

I believe that of all the private companies, the one that is most likely to succeed will
be SpaceX. SpaceX who’s CEO is Elon Musk has been building spacecrafts and
launching their rockets successfully (and unsuccessfully) in to space and sending
payloads as well as humans to the International Space Station. They even launched a
Tesla with a dummy names Starman to orbit around the Sun! Now NASA wants to
work with them to send humans to Mars. Watch their exciting launch visualization of
the Tesla in this week’s video clip.

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It may be a good thing that private companies are aiming to sending human beings to
Mars because it puts pressure on NASA. They probably don’t want the private
industries to beat them so they have come up with a plan to send human beings to
Mars by the 2030s. I have included two videos that gives information about NASA’s
path to send human beings to Mars. In my opinion, they represent the most realistic
option and are more likely to be successful at sending the first human beings to Mars.
I hope that I will be alive to witness this! Of course whether they do send human
beings within my lifetime or not depends upon politics and budget.

Please watch them and participate in the discussion. NASA will may be partnering
with SpaceX in this mission. That would help to provide the funds and combine
expertise from the two organizations, which would be a powerful combination.

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Note, this next discussion is optional, but it is very interesting to think about…so please read if you are
curious…
We mentioned that of all the terrestrial planets besides the Earth, Mars would be the best candidate to
actually send human beings to possibly live there for long periods of time. With current technology, it
would take about 4 months to send humans to Mars. Some astronomers not only envision sending
human beings to Mars for a temporary visit but actually setting up a colony for a permanent stay!
Some believe that it might even be possible to transform Mars into a place that human beings can live
on naturally. This hypothetical process of process of transforming Mars into a habitable place for
humans is called terraforming.

Well, how would terraforming work? We know that in order for humans to live naturally, we need
liquid water and oxygen. We know that Mars has plenty of water, but it is currently in frozen form. In
order for the water to be liquid, we have to somehow warm up the planet. Well, we know how to do
that really well because we are currently doing that to our Earth with the greenhouse effect. We are
currently sending up carbon dioxide into our atmosphere mostly from our cars, and this traps heat from
the Sun. The idea would be to send machines to Mars that would pollute the planet with more carbon
dioxide (thickening its atmosphere). Once there is enough carbon dioxide, the planet will warm up and
the water would melt. Then we can introduce bacteria which can survive in liquid water. The bacteria
then will remove the carbon dioxide and produce oxygen for us to breathe, and after that happens,
humans can live naturally on the planet.

It sounds like science fiction right now and will not happen any time soon, but who knows what can
happen in the distant future. There are some who favor this for scientific research; we can know a
planet better if we visit it, and also for survival of the human race. Someday our planet may be
uninhabitable; in such a case, we should have a back up place that we can live on. However, others do
not believe that it is right to spend money go to another planet and pollute it. It would be better to
continue to send robotic missions to study it.
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