Exploring space is beneficial for all of us. Mars has an atmospheric pressure of 0.6 kilopascals, not quite 1 percent of Earth’s. Professor Stephen Hawking is eager to see us search for a new planet to call home . "That's a phenomenal thing.". Absolutely. The current record for Mars missions is 18 successes, and 25 failures. The Core Skills Workout comes with every issue and will support your reading program no matter what your scope and sequence. If you want to explore the surface of Mars, you will also need fuel to get your lander off the surface of Mars. Mars is about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is, so it still has decent sunlight. After living on the Red Planet for a year-and-a-half, it's time to embark on the … The text consists of two letters, one from a girl telling her friend why she’d like to go to Mars, and one from her friend arguing against the idea. I've always been drawn to remote places—and extreme challenges. In spaceflight missions, the primary personal attributes of a successful astronaut are emotional and psychological stability, supported by personal drive and motivation. Either way, it would be risky. I grew up in Spokane, Washington, and I can't recall ever not wanting to be an astronaut. TM ® & © 2020 Scholastic Inc. All Rights Reserved. The candidates have made it through the first round of the selection process. "Going to Mars, if it takes 2½ years, yeah, that's doable," the astronaut said. To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories. Plus, four engaging resources for your ELA class. Mars would be a tough place to live, but then so is Antarctica. Last fall they gave Glamour exclusive access to watch them train at NASA's facilities in Houston—and talked about their epic adventure. Access this article and hundreds more like it with a subscription to Scope magazine. Once they've landed, the astronauts will have to navigate giant dust storms, temperatures that can plummet to minus 284 degrees Fahrenheit in winter, and an atmosphere filled with cancer-causing galactic radiation. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The air is quite thin, so people would have to have air tanks to go very far. I had always set my sights on working with NASA, but I didn't want to get there by checking the usual boxes, like learning to fly and scuba dive. It could end in death. And unlike the 1960s race to the moon, this time women are playing pivotal roles—building rockets, designing space suits, and controlling the remote rovers that are already sending momentous insights back from Mars. "When you go to Mars, you're going. He's almost four now but will be a teen or in his twenties by then. You repeat that cycle 30 or 40 times. You can't abort. I wanted to get there because I was passionate about science and the next frontier. But they will also go on what could be humankind's greatest exploration to date—an experience those who came before them can only begin to imagine. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. But the hardest thing to leave behind? I wish more people could step back and see how small Earth is and how reliant we are on one another. Both letters include cause-and-effect structures. By the end of the eight months, some of my crew mates were really ready to get out, but I could have stayed longer! Figurative Language: rhetorical questions; other figures of speech. As I understand it, it's relatively easy to get a guy to Mars, but difficult to bring him back. Two people help you into it, and a crane lowers you into the pool. Ginny Graves is an award-winning writer here on Earth. In general what I most worried about—like getting bored with the food since everything is freeze-dried or dehydrated—wasn't a problem at all. But it would also be really, really unpleasant. I did this calculator out of inspiration from the Mars Rover Curiosity landing from NASA. There I was in charge of more than 10,000 gallons of liquid helium to keep the telescopes supercool. In one series of NASA-funded studies known as HI-SEAS, six men and women spend up to a year in a 1,300-square-foot biodome on the side of a Hawaiian volcano to help answer those questions. Designing a Mars mission would be easier if we could use resources that are already available locally. It's inevitable that people will die in the process of going to Mars. Of course, A human on Mars wouldn’t last very long. When the pilot is at the top of the parabola and free-falls back down toward the ground, you're weightless for about 25 seconds. Richard Garriott de Cayeux, 54, a private astronaut who has traveled to the international space station: When you're floating in a slightly stale-smelling, noisy tin can, you have this experience astronauts call the overview effect: From space you can see how weather forms and moves, you can see Earth's tectonic plates' seams and deserts and oceans. "It's not like the moon; that's a three-day trip," says Jason Crusan, director of advanced exploration systems at the agency. Complexity Factors . Just ask the 78,000-plus people who signed up to move there, as part of Mars One’s hypothetical colonization project. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. That's a long time for four people to be hermetically sealed together. Once on Mars, they'll live up to a year in a structure that will have already been built by robots before returning to Earth. Once it begins, the actual mission will go something like this: The four crew members selected (potentially from this class and others) will spend two to three weeks in the launch capsule, then rendezvous with a larger spaceship—a.k.a. And that's a big sacrifice. Family. 4 Engaging Resources to Learn More About The Flint Water Crisis, Don't Miss This Fantastic Video About the 1960s, On your whiteboard, model text marking as students mark their magazines: Use a red-colored pencil to underline details that support the “Yes” side of the debate.Â. Mars One ca… It's a lot like how a quarterback passes a football. Humans have had a long fascination with Mars and a show at London's design museum explores this and what it would take to move to the Red Planet. Maybe that's why I wanted to be an astronaut from such a young age. But wait! Anne McClain: There were more than 6,100 other applicants for our class of eight, and I'd made my peace with not getting in. NASA won't hear an SOS for 10 minutes. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech. Imagine living on another planet, millions of miles from the Earth; looking up into the sky with the knowledge that one of the 'stars' is actually the planet you were born on. At one point I saw a classmate in a space suit, and I thought, Oh my God, he's really an astronaut. All it takes is one click! I joined the Army out of a deep sense of duty, but wanting to be an astronaut feels more like my destiny. How do you know? That’s why NASA is looking for ways to utilize the Martian soil and water, as well as other resources. Governments around the world—in China, Europe, and Russia—have plans in the works to at least land robots on Mars, while in the U.S., private companies like SpaceX are partnering with NASA on a human mission and plotting their own commercial trips. While doing research on emperor penguins for my Ph.D. in marine biology, I lived and worked in Antarctica, where I also went scuba diving under several feet of ice. "My son's life will change while I'm gone.". When you get there [after nine months], how sure on your feet will you be? The Core Skills Workout is a series of skill-based activities that will help your students "bulk up" in the comprehension skills they need most to become strong, analytical readers. A lot of people would much rather stay alive and deal with the usual craziness on Earth. He would dig seeing it floating in space. Will they fight? McClain: We try to prepare [for everything]. Is it the opportunity of a lifetime—or an insane death wish? I started crying. "Mars can teach us so much about the past, present, and future of our own planet," says Meir. Yet… this didn’t deter the great explorers of the past. But scientists say that in 15 years, we may be able to visit, even live there. 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