NASA Is Scouring Mars to Find a Site for Its First Manned Base

NASA is getting serious about sending humans to Mars in the 2030s, which means it's high time we picked the perfect spot to build our Red Planet outpost. That's why NASA exploration leads Richard Davis and Ben Bussey recently headed up the First Landing Site/Exploration Zone Workshop for Human Missions to the Surface of Mars, which went down in Houston at the tail end of October.

So, the billion dollar question: What is the perfect site? For Davis, it's still too soon to tell, given that this first batch included presentations on 46 locations, and double that number are expected to be proposed in forthcoming workshops. However, he said he has a personal soft spot for the sites bordering the ancient remains of Mars's northern oceans.

"Those are areas that are not only interesting from a geology and extinct life perspective, but they are also right near areas that we might be going after extant or current life on the planet," Davis told me over the phone.

Imagine finding fossils of Martian lifeforms from the planet's early oceans, which may have covered up to a third of the planet's surface billions of years ago, or discovering microbial survivors in the wasteland the sea left in its wake. If we hit up one of the shoreline sites proposed in the workshop, such as Phlegra Dorsa or Mawrth Vallis, we give ourselves a chance to find out.

Other particularly interesting sites include Kasei Valles, an ancient outflow channel, or the dune-rippled expanse of Noachis Terra. Several sites within Valles Marineris, the 2,500-mile-long canyon that sprawls across the Martian equator, were suggested, as was a landing site in Gale Crater, home of the Curiosity rover. You can get the skinny on the rest of the candidates on YouTube, or scroll through this satisfyingly organized spreadsheet representing the inaugural Martian brainstorm.

Interestingly enough, Palikir Crater—where flowing water was recently detected by NASA—was not on the list, but Davis said he would not be surprised to see it turn up at future meetings.

"There is a tremendous diversity there," Davis told me over the phone, "and yet there's data missing in every single one of them because this has never been attempted before. A big part of this is just figuring out what the heck we don't know."

That said, there are some solid parameters that all of these potential Exploration Zones (EZs) must meet. Most importantly, they have to be both scientifically interesting and rich in extractable resources, especially water.

"It's all about getting water, and that becomes the challenge on Mars—figuring out where it is and how you get it," he said. "That's cool to have that kind of clarity."

What's also cool about the stipulation for drinkable water is that it opens up the first real opportunity to study wet environments on Mars. Robotic rovers like Curiosity are barred from venturing into regions that might contain water due to concerns about "forward contamination," which means corrupting any potential Martian biologies with Earth microbes to that might have made it through the sterilization process.

But when it comes to sending humans to Mars, water is so crucial that forward contamination is a risk that we simply have to take.

"The fact of the matter is that human beings are pools of microbes," Davis said. "Spacesuits leak, habitation modules leak, airlocks leak—you are going to have catastrophes where something is damaged and causes serious venting. So, there's going to have to be a new set of criteria going into the future. We're trying to figure that out."

Moreover, in addition to concerns that humans might tarnish Martian biology, there is also the outside risk of backward contamination—in other words, the notion that Martian life forms might befoul our own biomes. "If there are Martian biologies, are they dangerous for human beings?" Davis asked.

"There is a lot of interest in trying to get samples back from Mars, not just for the really cool science you would get, but also for this backward contamination issue," he continued. "It is low probability, but you can't dismiss it and you need to do due diligence on it so ensure that you are not putting your crew members, or even Earth, at risk."

No kidding. Didn't the Martian invaders in HG Wells's The War of the Worlds die out precisely because they didn't account for backward contamination? It's one thing to taint Martian life with our own biological fingerprints, but quite another to unwittingly unleash a Martian plague on Earth. That's why NASA hopes to select a site within the next few years, so that sample return missions can be arranged before we chuck humans over to build on it.

These contamination issues are just one of many challenges involved in making humans a two-planet species. But just as there are enormous dangers inherent to manned interplanetary spaceflight, so too are there huge benefits to putting boots on Mars. Beyond the symbolic achievement of having reached a new frontier, humans stand to dramatically accelerate our scientific capabilities on the planet.

"Not only do you extend the range," Davis said, "but you extend the perceptive, creative, adaptive capabilities that humans bring." For example, it took the Opportunity rover 11 years to travel a marathon distance on Mars, compared to the Apollo 17 crew members, who knocked out roughly the same distance in three days.

On top of that, sending human specialists to Mars opens up the possibility of much more precise and intuitive on-the-spot observations, which rovers and landers—smart though they may be—are not capable of replicating.

"In the end, it's going to be risky, period," Davis said. "But there are smart things we can do if we interweave the robotic science missions recognizing these concerns with the human spaceflight side. Doing that, you can create a really compelling and cool program that will make humans a multi-planetary species."

Indeed, one of the main goals of the workshop was simply to establish the baseline community of interdisciplinary scientists that will need to work out the kinks of Martian settlement over the coming years. The stakes are particularly high because the plan is to go all in at one spot, so that astronauts can cumulatively secure a foothold on this alien world.

"The way I would think of it is like McMurdo in Antarctica or even the International Space Station where you send multiple crews there and then they build on what they did," Davis said. "You're in a hostile environment and getting stuff out there is really hard to do. You want to be able to build up logistics, spare parts, and all that kind of stuff so that when a bad day occurs you have fallback options to keep people alive.

"So, the idea of a permanent base is key."

As daunting as it may seem to commit to one EZ, it is, in some ways, a lot easier than what our ancestors had to deal with when exploring new frontiers. "I was at Jamestown two months ago," Davis said, "where they didn't have orbital recon. It was basically a crappy location and the community died."

"Mars is really alien and different, but we have things they didn't have then. We have satellites that can help us find a good spot. So we're trying to not pick a Jamestown, but to pick the right place."

On Mars, as on Earth, location is everything, and it's exciting to be in the early phases of picking out our new digs on another world. "When kids look up at Mars," Davis said, "they will know there are human beings up on that dot in the sky, and that they are doing amazing things up there."