If I Had The Chance To Explore Mars
by Katelyn Humphrey
Many people dream of the wonderful expedition of going to Mars. These dreams often noble and great with aliens and laser guns are those of nonfiction, but those who have the dream of fiction thought and of scientific thought are often the ones who truly see the light. I am a dreamer and feel that if I had a chance to go to Mars and explore our sister planet that it would be the greatest experience in the universe! I myself am a person who admires the stars and wonders what is behind them, next to them and all around them. Though Mars is our sister planet, there is so much that can still be learned about that planet things such as, whether there is micro bacteria that we have not detected, or if the planet had any living creature at all in clay layers. The greatest thing would be able to create a biosphere in which humans can live and survive by building small communities in biosphere and then changing the outer conditions on Mars. What an adventure that would be!
This first thing I would do after landing would be to jump outside and see what there is to find. Of course any machinery that is going to be used would need to be gotten ready and then the adventures would begin, starting with some samples of the dirt and different minerals on the planet surface. Then into a lunar or mars rover I would jump and find myself a nice crater that looks like a good area to dig and see if I could find any clay. The crater I would choose to explore would be Holden Crater. Alfred McEwen, principal scientist for MRO's HiRISE camera says, "Holden crater has some of the best-exposed lake deposits and ancient megabreccia known on Mars." The crater is also known to have what people would look for when looking for fossils, which are areas that have layered sediment. It would be such a magnificent thing to find evidence of any type of life from unicellular bacteria to multicellular eukaryotic life. Using special drills, hammers, brushes and more, I would scour that crater for hours on end in search of what I would call a missing link.
Though Scientist have created a biosphere that was tested to see if humans could live in it and survive, many things went wrong. Think of everyday things that have to do with the outside. Things such as wind, sun, rain, sometimes sweat, heat, cold, etc. Now think of a world that has only half of those things, no rain, wind, hot days, or cold days,and even very little sunlight. This is what mostly happened to the first biosphere that was created. Trees had branches that were to heavy because as they grew they didn't have to grow strong enough to withstand wind because there wasn't any, no rain because they were inside, no days that were too hot, or days that were too cold all because this was all happening inside a building. Also another thing was that even though people were living in the building along with plants and animals slime from chemicals that were constantly excreted from the human bodies was collecting on the walls. This made for a disgusting habitat that would soon become inhabitable. Not only was there these problems, but one scientist had broke their leg and needed medical help so the project had to be stopped early. Though they had these problems just like Franklin said "I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong", so those scientist just found one way to do it wrong. If scientists were able to harbor this excreted chemical and find a safe and effective way to rid of it then that is one solution fixed, also the rain issue and be simply fixed with sprinklers, and so on. These are easy fixes, and if all the wrongs can be made right and if it were to be tried again with the fixes, just imagine if it works. This is where I come to another thing I would do on Mars which is create a biosphere that can withstand the horrible winds and weather of Mars. I would use materials such as very thick plexiglass, metal and more to build the creation and instead of starting off with trees and complicated plants I would try things such as grass, and simple food crops such as carrots. Of course certain amounts of Carbon dioxide would have to be sustained so I would also have to bring some kind of harmless animal such as a rabbit or two to help maintain such levels. This is where I and companion astronauts would live for about a year or less and watch to observe the state of the biosphere.
A chance to go to Mars would be the best ever. So much exploring would be done and I would bet anything that I wouldn't want to go home. I would spend sometime looking at the distant Earth and trying to find out what it would be like to live on our sister planet.