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NASA sets plan of landing on Mars
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A HUMAN space explorer will be able to set foot on Mars by 2020 and visit other planets of the solar system in the following decades, National Aeronautics and Space Agency Administrator Daniel Goldin announced on Wednesday.
"In no less than 10 -- and if we decide to do it, it could be done in 10 -- and certainly no more than 20 years we'll start writing history again and not looking back but looking forward," Goldin told a rapt audience at George Washington University.
A probe called Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will soon be able to obtain high-resolution pictures of the planet, according to the NASA chief.
"It will find the landing spots, not just for the robots but for the astronauts," said Goldin.
If all goes according to plan, a US precision landing craft will then touch down on the Red Planet in 2007, while samples of the Martian surface would be brought to Earth between 2009 and 2011.
Experiments aboard the International Space Station will allow US scientists to figure out ways to safely leave Earth's orbit in the next five or six years, according to the NASA chief.
"Let's burn it into our brains that in our lifetimes, we will extend the reach of this human species onto other planets and to other bodies in our solar system, and build the robots that will leave our solar system to go to other stars, then ultimately to be followed by people," said Goldin.
But before astronauts could set out for Mars, the United States and its partners will have to resolve some formidable technical problems, according to experts.
Given the distance of the flight, a more reliable and robust spacecraft propulsion system and new robotic technologies will have to be developed, said astronaut William Shepherd.
Space crews will need to learn to function more independently from mission controls because it would take radio signals 20-30 minutes to reach Earth from Mars orbit, according to Shepherd.(SD-Agencies)
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