Radiation on Mars
... In the 1960’s it was the moon, and now and for the past few decades we have been intrigued by Mars. Humans have been interested in Mars for thousands of years, but only now do we have the right technology to make the dream come true. Now we are just sending pathfinders there to research the habitat and if it is any way possible for a human to survive on Mars. In doing so we hope to find out that Mars is in fact in habitual for the human race. Unfortunately there are too many reasons to believe that Mars is UN-habitual. The biggest one is that Mars doesn’t have atmosphere that protects it from harmful cosmic rays and solar flars, which is formally known as radiation. Radiation can and will kill. Sending humans to Mars will endanger their lives because radiation causes damage to living organisms by inducing chemical reactions within cells that create toxic substances that can kill or otherwise derange individual cells. If we visited Mars, our first concern, even before we opened the door of our spaceship, would be the atmosphere. ... Even for the astronomer observing safety from Earth, the atmosphere of Mars is a major concern. The gases that cloak Mars are critical to our understanding of the history of the Red Planet. The air on Mars is 95 percent carbon dioxide, with a few percent each of nitrogen and argon. ... If you stepped outdoors on Mars without a space suit, your own body heat would make your blood boil. ... This red dust, suspended in the atmosphere, produces a pink sky as seen from the surface of Mars. ... To understand Mars, we must ask why its atmosphere is so thin and dry and why the surface is rich in oxides. ... Because Mars formed farther away from the sun, we might expect that it incorporated more volatiles when it formed. But Mars is smaller that Earth, so it has had less internal heat to drive geological activity, and as we might suspect that is has not outgassed as much as Earth. In any case, the outgassing occurred early in the planet’s history, and Mars, being small, cooled rapidly and now releases little gas. Mars has only the thinnest atmospheres held by the weak gravity of a world containing scarcely one-tenth as much matter as the Earth.