HOW THE CONDITIONS OF MARS COULD KILL ITS FIRST VISITORS

NASA and SpaceX plan to send the first humans to Mars in the near future, but the conditions of Mars prove to be deadly. Here are all the challenges posed by Mars to its first human visitors.

It's only been 50 years since the first human entered space, and then eight years later, mankind set foot on the Moon. Since then, there have been countless spaceflight missions for various purposes but, recently, mankind has set itself a greater challenge. Not only are we sending humans to the Moon in 2024, just two years later, in 2026, SpaceX and NASA plan to send the first humans to Mars.

However, the Moon mission – as difficult a challenge as it is – is far less of a threat than sending humans to Mars for a number of reasons.

The first technical difficulty to overcome is the vast distance needed to travel. The distance to the Moon from the Earth is 385,000 km – Mars is a whopping 348,000,000 km away! At that distance, live communication is not possible because it takes around 24 minutes for radio waves to get from Earth to Mars and vice versa.

Secondly, depending on where they land, Mars' rapid change in temperature will have a huge impact on the mission, followed by an uncomfortable amount of cosmic radiation. And, if that wasn't enough, Mars is notorious for violent dust storms that cover the entire planet so, before they even set of to explore the Red Planet, they have to think of how they are going to get back home!

Take a look at the video below by the YouTube channel, News Think, on How Mars Could Kill Its First Visitors.