Generating Power on Mars | MARS: How to Get to Mars

So, power on Mars is going to be very important, and it will have to have the ability to run the microwave oven, along with the oxygenator and everything else that we're going to need to survive. You need power; every civilization needs power. It's what we fight wars over; it's important.

We can do it in a couple of ways. One, we can use all ourselves. We have very thin sheet solar panels that we can create now that are very light—it's just like a thin sheet of plastic. But solar energy on Mars is a bit thin. Mars's solar irradiance is about half that of the Earth. So, on a beautiful sunny day in the middle of summer at the equator on Mars, you're only getting about 60% of the sunlight that we get on Earth.

What is even more worrisome is the fact that it could periodically be blacked out by dust storms that would leave you without any power. Dust storms are an issue on Mars; they're visible from space. We can see that Mars just kind of turns into a hazy red ball. The solar power will only work for a little bit until the dust settles on top of the surface. So ultimately, solar is relatively inefficient on Mars. However, it's simple and easy to use.

When we first land on Mars, we'll probably put up a lot of solar panels. One of the most important resources is water. Now, there's water to be found everywhere on Mars—in the soil at at least five percent by weight levels. The reason we're interested in water is it's not just because we're going to melt it and brush our teeth with it, which, okay, we can do that, but also because water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.

Those are the two components of rocket fuel. Using Mars's atmosphere and a plentiful supply of water plus energy makes your rocket fuel, and you do that with a chemical reaction called the Sabatier reaction. So, you break apart the hydrogen and the oxygen, and now you've got this fuel source. That can help sustain you and keep you in this place.

Other types of resources could be nuclear. You know, by using plutonium or small reactors, you can actually generate, like we do on Earth right now. We know that we can take plutonium-238; we use that in our spacecraft. You know, Curiosity is powered by plutonium-238. The thing is, you can have a reactor capable of powering a city that you actually can put into space and set up on another planet. It doesn't have to be gigantic. Eventually, as we grow on Mars and we create significant size habitats and we bring more people in, nuclear power is probably our answer.