Friends of MIRA member and volunteer Brian Jacobson participated in the fourth annual Convention of the Mars Society at Stanford University during August 23 through August 26. This organization is building momentum capable of getting humans to Mars.
At the opening of this conference, Mars Society President and Founder Robert Zubrin proposed to the membership that the Society devote its resources to the construction of a spacecraft designed to perform an experiment to test the effects of an artificial Mars gravity (39 percent of Earth's) on the physical fitness of mammals, and learn whether fitness could be maintained over long space flights. NASA and Russian experiments have shown that a zero gravity environment results in the severe deterioration of human physical fitness. Teams from MIT and Cal Tech are designing proposals for payload. Computer entrepreneur Elon Musk has pledged a very large sum to help finance a space flight mission designed to perform this critical research. One proposal would launch the Mars Society-built payload aboard a Russian SS-18 rocket which had previously been a part of the Soviet nuclear weapon delivery inventory.
The Mars Society is conducting a competition to design and build the prototypes of pressurized rovers that would he used to explore the Martian surface for days or weeks, over hundreds of kilometers. The working vehicles would be landed with the first human crews on the surface of Mars. Teams from Canada, Australia, Poland, and from the University of Michigan are working on prototypes. Apollo Energy Systems CEO Robert Aronson has pledged two million dollars to furnish the fuel cell-type propulsion systems for two rovers being built by students at the University of Michigan.
Members of the German chapter of the Mars Society are designing an inflatable hydrogen balloon that would be deployed above the surface of Mars just after its spacecraft enters the atmosphere. This balloon would carry a camera that could take high-resolution images of the landscape from an altitude of several kilometers above the surface. Several German hi-tech companies and universities have offered their support in this mission designed to prove a new technique.
A recent accomplishment of the Mars Society includes the construction of a Mars Habitat analog in a 23 million-year-old impact crater on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. This base, the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS), is a model of the human habitat that would be landed on Mars and occupied by a crew of six for 500 days. The FMARS is a platform for testing tools and techniques for explor-ing the surface of Mars, and for learning more about human factors necessary for successful missions to the red planet. Six crew rotations began this process during July and August this summer. A second Mars Habitat analog has been built and has been on display at Kennedy Space Center, and it will be moved to its field station in Utah, where crews will work on some different sets of exploration problems.
The four days of plenary sessions and breakout tracks addressed a wide variety of topics, from propulsion to life support, from Mars geology to terraforming, and from robotic devices to political action. Friends of MIRA member Brian Jacobson gave a presentation, "Bringing Mars to School Children and Other Audiences" in the Education and Outreach track.
Founded in 1998, the Mars Society started with 1000 members, now has over 5000, with chapters worldwide. The next convention will be at the University of Colorado in Boulder in August of 2002. Read more at www.marssociety.org.
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