It may still be 20 years or so before NASA lands its astronauts on Mars, but the space agency is already mapping out the ideal place on the Red Planet to do so.
According to Space.com, NASA is hosting the First Landing Site/Exploration Zone Workshop on Oct. 27-30 in Houston in order to "identify and discuss candidate locations where humans could land, live, and work on the Martian surface."
Launch for the manned mission to Mars is not set to take place until the 2030s, but choosing the landing spot may be one of the most vital aspects of the operation.
"This is going to be a hot debate. "[The October meeting] will start exactly the conversation we need to be able to architect what a station on Mars would look like, and how [it] would operate," Jim Green, head of NASA's Planetary Science Division, told reporters on a recent teleconference, Space.com reported. "Humans are going to need high-resolution [imagery] over their whole exploration zone.
"Therefore, we need to know where they're going. It's really that simple."
At the meeting in Houston, attendees will propose potential "Exploration Zones," NASA noted in a press release. The zones will need to be a certain size and have resources worthy of studying and sustaining a long-term human stay.
"NASA's efforts for building the knowledge and capabilities for sending humans to Mars is underway today, with spacecraft monitoring Mars from orbit and rovers on the surface, the International Space Station being used to test systems and to learn more about the health impacts of extended space travel, and the development and testing of the next generation of launch and crew vehicles - the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crewed spacecraft underway," NASA said in its release. "As we explore the path to Mars, we gain new knowledge and capabilities that will make life better here on Earth, right now. This preliminary work on potential landing sites will facilitate dialogue about this next giant leap in human experience."
