There is apparently some discussion among scientists about the idea of sending manned missions to the two moons of Mars - Phobos and Deimos. According to one scientist cited in the article, the cost to send people to one of the moons would be as little as $30 billion compared to $200-$300 billion for a mission to Mars itself.One reason for the interest is that the two moons are so small - the larger one is about the size of Manhattan and the other is about a third of that size. The article cites that their gravitational pull is about 1/1000th that of Earth, so it would be "more like docking with another spaceship". Landing on Mars or a our Moon is much more difficult because of their size and gravitational pull - to be able to land slow and safely, ships would have to fire rockets that burn up a lot of expensive fuel that is also heavy to cart around. This adds a lot to the cost, although I'm not sure how much.
The article says that a manned mission to one of the moons could be in as few as 10 years. Right now it doesn't look like there are any plans to go however, although Russia does have a robotic mission planned that will collect rocks and then return them to Earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment