READING 2 Exploring Mars

EXPLORING MARS

Read the following article. Pay special attention to the words in bold. 11.4

Mars, our closest planetary neighbor, has always fascinated people on Earth. If you watch a lot of science fiction movies, you see people from Earth meeting strange-looking “Martians.” But, of course, this is just fantasy.

In 2004, the Spirit rover landed on Mars to study the climate and geology of the planet and to prepare for human exploration. In 2012, the Curiosity rover landed on Mars. Its mission is to find out if there was ever life on that planet. One of the jobs of Curiosity is to figure out where a future mission should look for life. If enough information is gathered, astronauts will probably arrive on Mars by the 2030s.

Travel to Mars will be much more difficult than landing on the Moon. When people landed on the Moon, they carried with them all the supplies they needed. But sending a spaceship with people and all the supplies they need for their time on Mars would make the spaceship too heavy. So if astronauts go to Mars, scientists will send supplies first. Many other problems will have to be solved, too.

Astronauts will have to return within a given time period. If they don’t come back within this period of time, they will miss their chance of return. If astronauts have a problem with their equipment, they will not be able to rely on messages from Earth to help them. Because of the distance from Earth, it can take about 40 minutes from the time a message goes out from Earth until it is received on Mars. Also, a visitor to Mars will be gone for at least three years because of the distance and time necessary to travel there. But one of the biggest problems with traveling to Mars is the danger of radiation. Astronauts will be exposed to much more radiation than someone traveling to the Moon.

If you had the chance to go to Mars, would you go?

Curiosity, one of NASA’s Mars rovers, took this selfie on May 12, 2019.