SpaceX Plans To Land On Mars

Hawthorne: Aerospace company SpaceX took to Twitter to say that it is planning to land on Mars in as soon as two years time.

The mission will involve sending a spacecraft called the Red Dragon to Mars to retrieve samples collected by NASA’s Mars rover and then return them to Earth.

SpaceX has had big plans to usher in a new era of reusable rockets that could send the first humans to Mars and return them home for a while. In 2011, SpaceX released a video showing how they were going to re-land a rocket booster after launching it to space — something that had never been done before.

On December 21, 2015, SpaceX successfully landed its first reusable rocket, a Falcon 9, on a launch pad. They followed that up on April 8, 2016 by successfully landing another Falcon 9 on a barge floating in the ocean. Musk has announced plans to relaunch this Falcon 9 as early as May.

The Red Dragon will be launched into space with the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is kind of like the Falcon 9 on steroids. SpaceX has announced plans to launch the rocket into space as soon as November 2016.

SpaceX has boasted that the Falcon Heavy is the world’s most powerful rocket, capable of carrying twice the payload of the Space Shuttle. Only the Saturn V, the rocket used to launch astronauts to the moon in the Apollo program, was capable of delivering more payload to orbit.

SpaceX plans to land on Mars using a simple approach that’s never been tried before. This is SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which is not designed to carry humans, sitting on the Red Planet:

This unmanned Dragon capsule has been making trips to the International Space Station ( ISS) since 2010. But to get to Mars, which is 560,000 times farther, the Dragon will need to ride a more powerful rocket than the Falcon 9, which it takes to the ISS. Getting to Mars is easy compared to landing on it because the Martian atmosphere is a tricky beast to control.

The Martian atmosphere is about 1,000 times thinner than Earth’s, so simple parachutes won’t slow a vehicle down enough to land safely. But that atmosphere is still thick enough to generate a great deal of heat from friction against a spacecraft. Therefore, to land on Mars, one has to have a spacecraft with a heat shield that can withstand temperature of 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, Dragon’s heat shield can protect it against temperatures of over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so plummeting toward Mars shouldn’t be a problem heat-wise.

But there’s still the problem of slowing down. Although gravity on Mars is about 1/3rd of what it is on Earth, the vehicle is still plummeting toward the ground at over 1,000 miles per hour after entering Mars’ atmosphere. If it were to hit the ground at those speeds, it would be a disaster.

The way that SpaceX aims to deal with this tricky problem is to use the thrusters on board the Dragon spacecraft to first redirect its momentum from downward to sideways, thus reducing its speed. And then, as the spacecraft continues to plunge toward the surface, it will fire its thrusters one final time for a soft, vertical touch down.

This sort of landing is unlike anything that anyone has ever tried before.

This mission marks an important milestone in the partnership between NASA and SpaceX, bringing them one step closer to achieving their goal of sending humans to Mars in by the 2030s.