Mars 101 | MARS

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In the early formation of the solar system, when all the planets were being formed, Mars and Earth were actually surprisingly similar. Mars at one time was once fertile, temperate, much like Earth. And, uh, something happened to it. There are massive water erosion features that are on Mars, dating from its early period.

The young Mars had rivers and lakes; it even had an ocean similar to Earth. And so, in this period when life originated on Earth, Mars was pretty similar. The solar wind blasted off Mars's atmosphere, and as the atmosphere went further and further away, and less and less of the atmosphere remained, then the water started to have to boil off or freeze.

And then it couldn't maintain its, uh, temperature day to night quite as well. It just caused a very, very slow change in its environment until it's like it was today. Mars has the four critical elements that you need for life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And it has them all in abundance.

The gravity on Mars is less than Earth, so you know you'll have a little bounce; it'll be easier to move around. It's roughly half the size of Earth. The surface of Mars has got about the same amount of land as all the continents of the Earth put together today.

On Mars, a day is 24 hours and about 40 minutes. The year on Mars is about 2 years on Earth. The sky is going to be red during the day and blue in the evening, and in the morning it has unbelievable vistas. It has some of the tallest mountains in the solar system and certainly has the longest and deepest valleys in the solar system.

Mars would like to kill you in a number of exciting ways. Uh, first off, it's very, very cold; the warmest it gets is about 0 Celsius. The average temperature, I think, is around -50 to -40 degrees Celsius at the equator on the warmest day. You know, it's like Minnesota in the winter.

Uh, the rest of the time it's like, you know, Antarctica without any clothing. Mars is about half a g as far away from the Sun as the Earth is, and so it's colder. If you were on the goal line of a football field and the moon were 1 inch in front of you, Mars would be the other goal line. That's the scale of difference between how far the Moon is from Earth and how far Mars is from Earth.

But if you think about it in a more cosmic scale, it's actually not that far; it's the next planet over. We can do the trip to Mars using current technology in 6 months. It's a long trip, uh, maybe not very different from the trip that, uh, the pioneers, you know, when they came to the West. It typically took them 6 to 9 months.

The biggest issue by far is the pressure on Mars. The atmosphere is very, very thin, so that means the pressure on Mars is about 1% the pressure on Earth. That's about the equivalent as if you're flying at 30,000 feet. You'd have to have a hole; you'd have to have something to keep the pressure in for your civilization.

It's about as hostile an environment as you can think of, except possibly for deep space. [Music]