Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout.
A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle’s original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it’s able to contact home again next year.
Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team.
I'm of the opinion we can't safely travel to mars. Not in our lifetimes.
The earth has a nice magnetic field that protects us from background ionizing charged particles, and an atmosphere that catches most other radiation (X-ray, gamma).
The length of time it would take with modern rockets to get to mars exposes the crew to extreme radiation. They could survive it, but radiation over time kills you with cancer, if you survive any acute effects.
We could maybe make superconducting magnets strong enough to create a field to reduce the charged particles, but then you have to keep them powered, and still deal with the uncharged background radiation (mostly gamma/X-rays). You could create a giant cylinder of lead around the crew capsule, but that would take an extraordinary amount of time to build in orbit.
Not to mention once you are on mars, you have to maintain those protections too - the Mars atmosphere is too thin to be very helpful and it does not have a a magnetic core.
There has been a notable lack of progress in that realm, and it will likely remain the reason we don't see a human to mars program.
I think you may have missed the jibe. NASA's missions to the Moon were just as hazardous considering how little we knew at the time and we pulled it off. The pentagon's budget is more than a trillion dollars and with the know-how we have these days I don't think Mars is unattainable at all if those resources were at our disposal. They just won't be... I guess unless China decides to try and one up us to Mars first. All it takes is injured pride for some of these people.
No, going to the moon and back was a week long, and going just TO Mars is 9 months long at the closest point.
Your looking at least at a 10x-20x increase in radiation dose over the mission which would be around 1Sv to 2Sv. That's a very high lifetime dose in a short period of time.
And honestly, while it would be cool, there is little point of sending humans to Mars.
People really underestimate how unique and cool our planet is with all that's going on.
Now, sending robots, and bringing some stuff back for analysis... Why not? Way cheaper too.
Not to mention, there is still a scale of size, time and resource contraint. We can't send humans to Mars with all the tools they don't know they need yet, just like we can't send the rovers with all the tools we can imagine.
For humans to benefit from rapid discovery on Mars, they'd need to be able to produce those tools, chemicals, power, etc.
It would take decades to set up anything useful for a longer term mission on Mars, and it again becomes a numbers game. The longer period of time you have to account for, the wider the room for error. I don't know many people who would be comfortable traveling through space knowing that they may not see Earth again either.
You can compare the trip to the circumnavigation attempts in the age of discovery, you may never see your home again, and die of dehydration in the middle of endless ocean.
But you can still breathe freely in the middle of the ocean. Space is more akin to sittting in a submarine, where to surface you need to travel for several months.