Mars is within reach!
A world with a surface area the size of the combined continents of the Earth, the Red Planet contains all the elements needed to support life.
In order to help develop key knowledge needed to prepare for human Mars exploration, and to inspire the public by making sensuous the vision of human exploration of Mars, the Mars Society has initiated the Mars Analog Research Station (MARS) project. A global program of Mars exploration operations research, the MARS project will include four Mars base-like habitats located in deserts in the Canadian Arctic FMARS, the American southwest MDRS, the Australian outback, and Iceland. In these Mars-like environments, we will launch a program of extensive long-duration geology and biology field exploration operations conducted in the same style and under many of the same constraints as they would on the Red Planet. By doing so, we will start the process of learning how to explore on Mars.
Mars is the great challenge of our time
Indeed, with so much at stake, Mars is a test for us. It asks us if we intend to continue to be a society of pioneers, people who dare great things to open untrodden paths for the future. It puts us to the question of whether we will be people whose deeds are celebrated in newspapers, or in museums; whether we will continue to open new possibilities for our descendants, or whether we will become less than those who took on the unknown to give everything we have to us. During World Space Week 2011 KiwiSpace Foundation produced a series of podcasts where inspirational people from around the world talked about their hopes for the future of humankind. Amongst them, Dr Robert Zubrin, President of Mars Society explains in an extraordinary interview why Mars is the place to go.
