When is NASA going to send Humans to Mars?

Question

are the any plans in the process?

Answer 1

CURRENT PLANS

The next scheduled mission to Mars, not counting the brief flyby by the Dawn spacecraft to Ceres and Vesta, is the NASA Phoenix Mars lander, expected to launch in 2007 (the window of opportunity created by Mars moving into opposition with Earth in December 2007, opens in August 2006) and set to arrive in the north polar region of Mars in May 2008.

The lander will have a robotic arm with a 2.5m reach and capable of digging a meter into the Martian soil. The lander will be in an area with an 80% chance of ice being less than 30cm below the surface, and has a microscopic camera capable of resolving to one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Phoenix will be followed by the Mars Science Laboratory in 2009, a bigger, faster (90m an hour), and smarter version of the Mars Exploration Rovers. Experiments include a laser chemical sample that can deduce the make-up of rocks at a distance of 13m.

The joint Russian and Chinese Phobos-Grunt sample-return mission, to return samples of Mars' moon Phobos, is scheduled for a 2009 launch. In 2012 the ESA plans to launch its first Rover to Mars, the ExoMars rover will be capable of drilling 2m into the soil in search of organic molecules.

Manned Mars exploration by the United States has been explicitly identified as a long-term goal in the Vision for Space Exploration announced in 2004 by US President George W. Bush. NASA and Lockheed Martin have begun work on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), which is currently scheduled to send a human expedition to Earth's moon by 2020 as a stepping stone to an expedition to Mars thereafter.

The European Space Agency (ESA) hopes to land humans on Mars between 2030 and 2035. This will be preceded by successively larger probes, starting with the launch of the ExoMars probe and a Mars Sample Return Mission.

The ESA programme is known as the Aurora Programme. The third link below tells you more about it. The following snippet is worth noting, however:

"The human part of the program has been challenged by the main ESA contributors (France, Germany and Italy), making it quite possible that the whole Aurora Programme will be refocused on robotic-only exploration of Mars."

Answer 2

I will be somewhat surprised if as a nation we have the attention span and fortitude to keep the funding to even make it back to the moon in 2020, though that is possible it will happen. I give it 3 chances in 10.

Even the current super long term pie-in-the-sky NASA "Vision for Space Exploration" plan does not go beyond 2020 (see first link), simply saying we should make Mars an eventual goal after reacing the Moon by 2020. So, NASA is even less firm on that than on going to the Moon

Even the 'plan' to go to the Moon is not firm until they are actually building the hardware that is to be used to do it; right now we are in the early design phase of hardware that might be capable of doing it. Once that design is complete and some test launches are done and the design tweaked then maybe an actual moon mission will be planned and funded.

When a planned mission date for ANYTHING (including unmanned mission of any kind, a trip to the moon, etc) is less than 5 years away, then you can *begin* to believe it. When it is less than 3 years away, it will probably happen and within a year or so of the declared launch date.

For now, the moon date is 13 years out and they are not even pretending to put a year on a trip to Mars.

Answer 3

The link below might be of interest to you.

Elsewhere on that NASA subsite, you can find the current mission plans. There's no current definite plans for manned missions, so it's highly unlikely a manned mission will happen before the 2020s at the earliest.

Answer 4

I think the main current problems with this are:

. it takes about 5 years to get there ... now that's an awful lot of oxygen and food to carry, right
. temperatures and habitability of Mars are both rather low

However, the Rover missions may provide some answers to what it would take to survive. And the other answers, correct, there are no missions planned. They remain a pipedream (but then in 1957 we would have said the same thing about send a man to the moon)

Answer 5

Hey I think u can write to NASA guys, the PR department for this question. they will beable to give u a better answer.

In my view, it still is a remote possibility till 2020. But let us keep our fingers crossed.

Answer 6

Planning for this venture is going on right now at NASA.

I don't think that the trip will launch from Earth anytime soon. For the sake of "guessing" I would suggest a launch date around five years from now.

Answer 7

is NASA going to mars next year ?

Answer 8

Within the next twenty years.