Take On Mars Game

[Trinh Livingston]

Commandrovers, landers, or probes, over a distance of hundreds of millions of kilometers - and collect important scientific data about Mars. Or take on the role of astronaut Mark Willis in the first manned mission to Mars.

Play with friends and establish the foundations of a human colony on Mars. Work together to extract raw materials from Martian soil and build your own habitat panel by panel. Develop a power grid, pressurize living areas, utilize botany to grow crops, and operate various vehicles to keep you and your crew alive.

Experience motion in locations with different gravity strength, including Zero-G. Break off cameras, robotic arms, or even individual struts and wheels - all affecting the way your vehicle handles. Each object, system, and instrument in Take On Mars is accurately simulated to offer a truly authentic experience.

Take On Mars just 'took off' in terms of visual quality when it comes to blending of terrain materials. Seen in the 'Before' and 'After' screenshots, we have implemented a new method of terrain material blending.

The time it takes to get from one celestial body to another depends largely on the energy that one is willing to expend. Here \"energy\" refers to the effort put in by the launch vehicle and the sum of the maneuvers of the rocket motors aboard the spacecraft, and the amount of propellant that is used. In space travel, everything boils down to energy. Spaceflight is the clever management of energy.

Some common solutions for transfers to the moon are 1) the Hohmann-like transfer and 2) the Free Return Transfer. The Hohmann Transfer is often referred to as the one that requires the lowest energy, but that is true only if you want the transfer to last only a few days and, in addition, if some constraints on the launch apply. Things get very complicated from there on, so I won't go into details.

Concerning transfers to Mars, these are by necessity interplanetary transfers, i.e., orbits that have the sun as central body. Otherwise, much of what was said above applies: the issue remains the expense of energy. An additional complication lies in the fact that the Mars orbit is quite eccentric and also its orbit plane is inclined with respect to that of the Earth. And of course, Mars requires longer to orbit the sun than the Earth does. All of this is taken into account in a common type of diagram called the \"pork chop plot\", which essentially tells you the required dates of departure and arrival and the amount of energy required.

If you want your spacecraft to enter Mars orbit or to land on the surface, you add a lot of constraints to the design problem. For an orbiter, you have to consider the significant amount of propellant required for orbit insertion, while for a lander, you have to design and build a heat shield that can withstand the loads of atmospheric entry. Usually, this will mean that the arrival velocity of Mars cannot exceed a certain boundary. Adding this constraint to the trajectory optimisation problem will limit the range of solutions you obtain to transfers that are Hohmann-like. This usually leads to an increase in transfer duration.

The answer depends on several factors, ranging from the position of Earth and Mars to the technology that would propel you there. According to NASA, a one-way trip to the Red Planet would take about nine months. If you wanted to make it a round-trip, all in all, it would take about 21 months as you will need to wait about three months on Mars to make sure Earth and Mars are in a suitable location to make the trip back home.

In theory, the closest that Earth and Mars would approach each other would be when Mars is at its closest point to the sun (perihelion) and Earth is at its farthest (aphelion). This would put the planets only 33.9 million miles (54.6 million kilometers) apart. However, this has never happened in recorded history. The closest recorded approach of the two planets occurred in 2003 when they were only 34.8 million miles (56 million km) apart.

So if you were theoretically able to hitch a ride on the Parker Solar Probe and take it on a detour from its sun-focused mission to travel in a straight line from Earth to Mars, traveling at the speeds the probe reaches during its 10th flyby (101 miles per second), the time it would take you to get to Mars would be:

The time it takes to get from one celestial body to another depends largely on the energy that one is willing to expend. Here "energy" refers to the effort put in by the launch vehicle and the sum of the maneuvers of the rocket motors aboard the spacecraft, and the amount of propellant that is used. In space travel, everything boils down to energy. Spaceflight is the clever management of energy.

Concerning transfers to Mars, these are by necessity interplanetary transfers, i.e., orbits that have the sun as central body. Otherwise, much of what was said above applies: the issue remains the expense of energy. An additional complication lies in the fact that the Mars orbit is quite eccentric and also its orbit plane is inclined with respect to that of the Earth. And of course, Mars requires longer to orbit the sun than the Earth does. All of this is taken into account in a common type of diagram called the "pork chop plot", which essentially tells you the required dates of departure and arrival and the amount of energy required.

The problem with the previous calculations is that they measure the distance between the two planets as a straight line. Traveling through the farthest passing of Earth and Mars would involve a trip directly through the sun, while spacecraft must of necessity move in orbit around the solar system's star.

Although this isn't a problem for the closest approach, when the planets are on the same side of the sun, another problem exists. The numbers also assume that the two planets remain at a constant distance; that is, when a probe is launched from Earth while the two planets are at the closest approach, Mars would remain the same distance away over the length of time it took the probe to travel.

In reality, however, the planets are moving at different rates during their orbits around the sun. Engineers must calculate the ideal orbits for sending a spacecraft from Earth to Mars. Like throwing a dart at a moving target from a moving vehicle, they must calculate where the planet will be when the spacecraft arrives, not where it is when it leaves Earth.

It's also not possible to travel as fast as you can possibly go if your aim is to eventually orbit your target planet. Spacecraft need to arrive slow enough to be able to perform orbit insertion maneuvers and not just zip straight past their intended destination.

According to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's website, the ideal lineup for a launch to Mars would get you to the planet in roughly nine months. The website quotes physics professor Craig C. Patten, of the University of California, San Diego:

"It takes the Earth one year to orbit the sun and it takes Mars about 1.9 years (say 2 years for easy calculation) to orbit the sun. The elliptical orbit which carries you from Earth to Mars is longer than Earth's orbit but shorter than Mars' orbit. Accordingly, we can estimate the time it would take to complete this orbit by averaging the lengths of Earth's orbit and Mars' orbit. Therefore, it would take about one and a half years to complete the elliptical orbit.

"In the nine months it takes to get to Mars, Mars moves a considerable distance around in its orbit, about three-eighths of the way around the sun. You have to plan to make sure that by the time you reach the distance of Mar's orbit, Mars is where you need it to be! Practically, this means that you can only begin your trip when Earth and Mars are properly lined up. This only happens every 26 months. That is, there is only one launch window every 26 months."

Evolving technology can help to shorten the flight. NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) will be the new workhorse for carrying upcoming missions, and potentially humans, to the red planet. SLS is currently being constructed and tested, with NASA now targeting a launch in March or April 2022 for its Artemis 1 flight, the first flight of its SLS rocket.

Robotic spacecraft could one day make the trip in only three days. Photon propulsion would rely on a powerful laser to accelerate spacecraft to velocities approaching the speed of light. Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team are working on Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration (DEEP-IN). The method could propel a 220-lb. (100 kilograms) robotic spacecraft to Mars in only three days, he said.

"There are recent advances which take this from science fiction to science reality," Lubin said at the 2015 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fall symposium. "There's no known reason why we cannot do this."

Explore NASA's lunar exploration plans with their Moon to Mars overview. You can read about how to get people from Earth to Mars and safely back again with this informative article on The Conversation. Curious about the human health risks of a mission to the Red Planet? You may find this research paper of particular interest.

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