Astronauts Watched The Martian on Space Station This Weekend

Despite delays with the Orion spacecraft schedule, work to ship humans out into the photo voltaic system is reportedly progressing.

Apparently, these space experts love to watch films about space even though it may get terrifying.

In The Martian, Watney spends part of every day sweeping dust off his solar panels to ensure maximum efficiency, which could represent a real challenge faced by future astronauts on Mars.

The space agency chief said that he had dreams as a younger astronaut (Bolden was a space shuttle commander prior to becoming Administrator) of being the first man to explore Mars.

“We’re farther down the trail to sending people to Mars than at any level in NASA’s historical past”, the area company chief said throughout an occasion on the NASA headquarters on September 17.

Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” will hit the silver screen soon and while avid Sci-Fi fans are eagerly awaiting its release, NASA has penned a post wherein it has separated facts from fiction about the Martian dust storms.

“The Martian” is based on the 2011 novel of author Andy Weir. The movie takes you to the time 20 years from now, in 2025, the time when NASA is planning to send humans to the Red Planet.

The other crucial technological development is the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) which tries to pull carbon dioxide from the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars and converts it into pure oxygen and carbon monoxide.

So it looks like NASA’s plan to get to Mars is still on track. They take the form of an aeroshell that can be deployed once Mars is reached and the risky descent is underway.

“NASA is now developing and flight testing HIADs – a new class of relatively lightweight deployable aeroshells that could safely deliver more than 22 tonnes to the surface of Mars”, said Steve Gaddis, Game Changing Development Programme (GCD) manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule has completed a number of trips to worldwide Space Station (ISS) in the past years and researchers believe the design of this capsule could be altered to accomplish the Red Dragon mission. The results of such work should provide crucial data to help in planning crewed Mars mission that may last for 500 days or more.