Habitability

Mercury and Venus are too hot to go to. The surface of Mercury is about 800 degrees. 

The pressure of the atmosphere is 90 times what we experience on Earth. It would crush us. 

Just right!

While humans could not live on Mars without special equipment, scientists believe they could live there. 

Jupiter and Saturn both have radiation belts. Too much radiation kills humans.

Planets known as “gas giants” don’t have hard surfaces for humans walk on.  

Neptune has some of the strongest winds in the solar system—it would tear a spacecraft apart.

Brrr! The average daily temperature of Uranus is -320 degrees.

In 1962, Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to travel to another planet. 

MESSENGER was the first spacecraft to explore the entire surface of Mercury. It carried a shield-like sunshade to keep the spacecraft and its instruments cool.

In 1984, the Soviet Union launched the Vega 1 and Vega 2 spacecraft, which flew by Venus and sent scientific instruments into its atmosphere.

We’ve been exploring Mars with robots for 50 years, starting with the Viking Lander in 1975. 

In the outer parts of our solar system, icy worlds such as Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus display evidence of subsurface oceans. These places are ocean worlds that may be habitable for some form of life... though not for humans.

With the Artemis missions, NASA is sending astronauts back to the Moon, where they will learn to work and live on another world, leading to the first human steps on Mars.

When humans explore space, we have to reproduce all the same systems that Earth provides to sustain life—water, air, surface, and biota — in order to survive in the unforgiving environment of space. In several decades of continuous presence on the International Space Station, we have learned surprising things about the engineering of systems that support human life.

Ground-based analogs provide opportunities to address many of the key challenges of space missions while providing substantial immediate benefits on Earth today.