Question: do you think we will ever land on mars? :) XXD

Jen Gupta answered on 16 Jun 2011:

Well we’ve already landed robots on Mars but I’d like to think humans will go there eventually! The problem is that it’s very expensive to develop a space programme so that we could go to Mars and nobody really want to spend the money. However the European Space Agency at the moment are pretending to send people to Mars – they’ve got some volunteers living in a mock spacecraft who aren’t allowed out of it for around 500 days because that’s how long it would take to get to Mars and back (with a bit of time to walk around on Mars!). ESA are studying the effects that being locked up in a small space for so long has on people. The project is called Mars500 – I think it’s been going for a year now and they recently “landed” on Mars.

One of the issues with going to Mars is that you have to carry loads of fuel with you so that you can get off Mars again and come home. You need all this fuel to overcome the gravity on Mars, just like you need powerful rockets to get into space from Earth. This fuel will take up loads of space on the spacecraft and be really heavy as well. A solution to this that some people have thought of is to send people to Mars who won’t come back. They would take enough stuff with them to set up a camp and then more people would follow and you could build a little community on Mars! Another idea is to send people to one of Mars’ moons and then go to Mars from there. It would be easier to come back to Earth from a moon because it has less gravity.