Word: martianize
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...mankind is visiting Mars, why not the reverse? Maybe signs of life are hard to come by up there because all the Martians are down here. And maybe not. But here are the top destinations for the discerning Martian hunter...
...least a pretty good facsimile of it. Spread out inside the sprawling structure will soon be a dead-ringer Mars base, complete with habitat modules, an extraterrestrial greenhouse and even a ground cover of volcanic dust shipped in from Hawaii--about as close as you can get to real Martian dirt without actually visiting the planet. Astronauts training for a Mars mission could spend up to 600 days in this little village, learning to live in an unfamiliar world at least 35 million miles from Earth...
...first and most obvious challenge is to design and build a Mars-worthy spacecraft. Winged ships like the shuttle are clearly out--useless in the wispy Martian atmosphere and unreliable even close to home, as two shuttle disasters have shown. That means a return to something closer to the capsule model that served the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs so well. Boeing Aerospace has already been designing a podlike crew transfer vehicle to get astronauts to and from the space station and to take a little of the load off the shuttle. The design won a lot of backing...
...answer is to manufacture a lot of what you need on-site. If any of NASA's unmanned Mars ships do find accessible water on the planet, it will be very big news, and not merely because of what it means for the possibility of Martian life. Martian water, once purified, ought to be as useful for drinking and bathing as earthly water. What's more, since water is merely hydrogen and oxygen and since it's hydrogen that provides the propulsive fire in some liquid-fuel engines and oxygen that keeps those flames burning, breaking the two elements apart...
...soil and rock they would tuck into a spacesuit pocket so they would have something to show for the trip if a sudden emergency forced them to turn around and come straight home. Spirit, of course, is never coming home. It will spend its entire useful life on the Martian surface and die there sometime before the end of spring. NASA scientists plan to make sure it makes the most of every day it has. --Reported by Dan Cray/Pasadena