The ability to travel through space used to exist only in childhood dreams, but at UCLA, those dreamers have become researchers working to make widespread space exploration a possibility in the not-so-distant future.
Work on robotic and remote-controlled space missions at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center ““ both of which are places where UCLA researchers work ““ is laying the foundations for space travel by refining the technology and reconnaissance required to plan manned missions in the future.
“UCLA is an exciting place; research is being conducted about where there might be water and life on other planets, which relate into reasons why we might want to go there,” said Paul Hayne, a graduate student in the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences.
“Since there are not really any economical reasons to cause us to want to explore space, we still get to be driven by curiosity.”
Most of the research at UCLA involves unmanned missions to places such as Mars.
The vehicles used on these missions do not have people in them but are instead operated by remote control, Hayne said.
Currently, researchers are working on a mission to be launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., later this summer.
Nasa’s Dawn mission is the first of its kind, since it is set to orbit two asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, said Britney Schmidt, a graduate student in the earth and space sciences department.
“Most missions are planned to either fly past or orbit one target for observation. This is the first spacecraft designed to orbit one object and then go orbit something else,” Schmidt said.
Dawn has been in development since 2001 and is currently at Cape Canaveral waiting for launch, which is set for later this summer. It is expected to pass Mars by 2009 and reach the first asteroids by 2011.
“Asteroids were among the first to form. They can give us an idea of what Earth is made of and how it formed. This is the first time a major mission has been sent to asteroids,” Schmidt said.
But there are many hurdles, such as distance, time and cost, that still must be overcome before human space travel can become more of an available opportunity.
“The main problem for space travel is the distance,” Hayne sad.
“It takes six months to actually get to Mars, so a mission to and from Mars would have to be a minimum of two years, while a trip to the moon takes only three days,” he added, accounting for the additional time it would take to do research while in space.
Fuel sources for space travel, though, are not major barriers in the same way that they are on Earth, said Matt Siegler, a graduate student in the earth and space sciences department.
“Fuel is not really a problem. One of the research areas is the ice caps of the moon. The hydrogen and oxygen in the water can be used as rocket fuel from the ice,” Siegler said.
Researchers also know there are materials on Mars that can be used for fuel on the return trip, such as the water in ice form, but the placement of these resources may limit where missions can land, said Ben Greenhagen, a fellow graduate student in the department.
“We need to know where these resources are,” he said.
Scientists want to predict where there may be ice on the moon or water under the surface of Mars, he added.
The robotic missions, like the ones worked on at UCLA, collected the information that allowed scientists to predict where the useful materials are likely to be found and may eventually be used to plan manned missions.
“We know there is ice at the poles of Mars, but that would be pretty bad if that were the only place missions could therefore land,” Siegler said.
“With the data collected from other missions we can try to predict where water might be,” Siegler said.
Though the last manned moon missions were almost 40 years ago, and current astronauts’ trips are low-orbit missions conducted in the shuttle, Hayne said that by using data collected from earlier missions, scientists are paving the way for trips back to the moon to potentially set up a starting area for farther missions into space.
“Now we are working to go back to the moon as a staging area for future further missions,” Hayne said.
“A lot of the technology that will be used to go back to the moon is being developed to go to Mars as well.”