Compared to earth what is the gravity on mars

However, ongoing research into the effects of microgravity on astronauts has shown that it has a detrimental effect on health — which includes loss of muscle mass, bone density, organ function, and even eyesight. Basically, the effects of long-term exposure to gravity that is just over one-third the Earth normal will be a key aspect of any plans for upcoming manned missions or colonization efforts. For example, crowd-sourced projects like Mars One make allowances for the likelihood of muscle deterioration and osteoporosis for their participants.

Their proposed mission calls for many months in space to get to Mars, and for those volunteering to spend the rest of their lives living on the Martian surface. Learning more about Martian gravity and how terrestrial organisms fare under it could be a boon for space exploration and missions to other planets as well.

And as more information is produced by the many robotic lander and orbiter missions on Mars, as well as planned manned missions, we can expect to get a clearer picture of what Martian gravity is like up close. We have written many interesting articles about Mars here at Universe Today.

How Can We Live on Mars? Information on the Mars Gravity Biosatellite. And the kids might like this; a project they can build to demonstrate Mars gravity. Astronomy Cast also has some wonderful episodes on the subject. Strap on a set of wings, and go for it!

There are a number of formidable problems that accompany long-stay missions. The first is life support. How do we invent a system that can keep a crew of four alive for nearly three years? For space stations, breathable oxygen requires electrolyzing a steady supply of water. But there is no easy way to resupply a team traveling to Mars, and so a number of ingenious solutions to this problem have been proposed.

One involves a grow-your-own approach to life support and nutrition. It turns out that if you grow 10, wheat plants, you can generate more than enough oxygen to breathe while removing the human waste gas of carbon dioxide. Better still, you have a partial source of nutrition. For a while, the Space Center had a team of four volunteers locked up in a hermetically sealed tube, subsisting pretty independently on this self-regenerating, hydroponically grown life-support system.

Another solution, discussed at a European Space Agency human space-exploration symposium, would be to grow vats of algae which might be easier to sustain than wheat and would also provide a source of protein. Between that and the wheat plants, you could get halfway to a diet of pizza-like food -- bread coated with flavored algae -- and massively reduce the weight and volume of the food and life-support apparatus required for a Mars mission.

A Frenchman who specialized in the field of regenerative life support told me how this might work, going so far as to explain the recycling of urine and the use of feces as a source of fertilization. A solar flare is like a neutron bomb going off next to you. Energetic particles -- charged helium nuclei, neutrons, protons, and the like -- would pass through our body, wreaking havoc and irreversibly damaging cells.

Even if we figure out a way to negotiate the radiation and build a life-support system that is at least partly regenerative, we keep getting back to the most elemental problem: having to contend with the absence of gravity. In our daily lives, our physiology is maintained by only intermittent exposure to gravitational load -- the standing up and stomping around we do during the day. Indeed, when researchers want to mimic the effects of microgravity here on Earth, they simply send a bunch of people to bed.

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