The article was originally published at The Conversation.
A student in Geological Sciences at the University of Florida.
Jack J., age 7, is from Alexandria, Virginia.
Imagine you were anastrologer who just landed on the planet Mars. What do you need to survive?
Water, food, shelter and oxygen are included in this short list.
Oxygen is in the air on Earth. Plants and some types ofbacteria help us.
12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover's 1st year on Mars.
Oxygen is one of the gasses in the Earth's atmosphere. It is not the most abundant. Only 21% of our air is made up of oxygen. Almost all the rest is nitrogen.
If there is more nitrogen in the air, why do we breathe it in?
When you breathe in, you take everything in the atmosphere. Your body only uses oxygen when you exhale.
The volume of the Martian atmosphere is 1% of the Earth's. There is less air on Mars than on Earth.
Mars is half the size of Earth. Its gravity is not strong enough to keep atmospheric gases out of space.
Carbon dioxide is the most abundant gas in that air. That is a poisonous gas for people on Earth. It makes up less than 1% of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is the main pollutant on Mars.
Mars has less than a tenth of 1% of the air, not enough for humans to survive.
If you tried to breathe on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, you would die in an instant. Your blood would boil at the same time because of the low atmospheric pressure.
There has been no evidence of life on Mars. Our robotic probes have barely touched the surface.
Mars is an extreme environment. The air is not the only thing. At night, the temperatures are more than minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
There are many organisms on Earth that survive extreme environments. Life has been found at the bottom of the ocean and miles below the surface of the Earth. Many of those places have very hot or cold temperatures and little to no water or oxygen.
It is possible that life still exists on Mars, even if it does not exist on the planet's surface.
One of the goals of the Mars Perseverance rover mission is to look for signs of ancient Martian life. Perseverance is searching for fossils of organisms that once lived on Mars, most likely primitive life.
The Perseverance rover has a device called MoXie that takes carbon dioxide out of the Martian atmosphere and turns it into oxygen.
If MOXIE works the way scientists hope it will, future astronauts will be able to make their own oxygen and use it as a component in the rocket fuel they will need to fly back to Earth. The easier it is for visitors to go to Mars, the less oxygen they will need to bring from Earth. Even with grown oxygen, astronauts will still need a spacesuit.
NASA is working on new technologies to send humans to Mars. It could happen in the next decade or so. You will be an adult by then, and maybe one of the first to go to Mars.
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