Mars Exploration Missions - Research Paper Example

Mars Path Finder: The mission was launched in 1996, a month after the Mars global surveyor…………………………………….. Mars Exploration Rovers: This is a robotic space mission…………………………….. Manned Mission to Mars: Scientists have planned to land and settle the Mars planet in near future…………………………………………. Future Programs: In 2010, NASA announced to award 50 million US$ to different companies for manufacturing low cost……………………………………………….

Conclusion: US is continuously committed to explore the universe. Numerous missions have been sent till now to different planets…………………………………. Mars Exploration Missions Introduction Till 20th century, Human being could only think of exploring the planets of the solar system. Urge to find life on the nearby planets convinced people to touch the soil of other planets. Mars exploration missions were started in 20th century. Since then different exploration mission has been sent to analyse the soil of the planet and ultimately to find life.

US has always shown interest in exploring space due to which, it has started many Mars exploration programs in order to find signs of life on the planet. . Mars pathfinder and rover missions were also launched to get more data about the structure of the Mars. NASA has also planned manned mission to Mars in near future. First manned Mars mission is also planned to be launched by 2030. US Mars exploration programs and future programs shall be discussed in chronological order in paragraphs to follow.

Exploration Missions Mariner Program NASA launched Mariner program for carrying out investigation of Mars. Ten vehicles were launched as part of the mission out of which seven were successful and three got lost. All mariner spacecrafts were loaded with electronics, cameras, power source and propulsion systems. Rockets were mostly used as a delivery mean to send the spacecrafts in the space.TV cameras were used to send pictures of the Mars structure (Lyle, 2002). Viking Program This program comprises of Viking1 and Viking 2.

Each space vehicle comprised of two main parts, the orbiter and the lander (Platoff, 2001). Orbiter was used to take photographs of the Mars from the orbit. Lander was designed to land on the surface of the Mars to gather information about surface of the Mars. Viking program brought revolution in Mars missions as it indicated presence of water on Mars surface and in atmosphere as well (Lyle, 2002). Mars Global Surveyor NASA launched this program in 1996 as part of the US space missions. This was the first program launched after the pause of almost ten years.

The mission accomplished its basic tasks in 2001 (Lyle, 2002). Very high-resolution cameras were used to get pictures of the Mars surface. Until, November 2006, the cameras sent more than 240000 pictures of the surface of the Mars (Baucom, 2006). Despite all the efforts and initial success,