A scientist accidentally stumbled upon a shortcut to Mars that could potentially cut travel time in half. In a new study, experts looked at the trajectories of asteroids to calculate a shorter journey to the Red Planet.
Currently, it is projected to take roughly seven to 10 months to reach Mars, which is about 50% farther from the Sun than Earth is.
Taking a trip to Mars also depends on waiting for Mars’ and Earth’s orbits to align for fuel-efficient transfers before returning to Earth.
This is called a “Mars opposition,” and it only happens every 26 months, so a full round trip to Mars would stretch to nearly three years.
According to the recent findings, a round trip to Mars could be brought down to 153 days. One of the study authors, Marcelo de Oliveira Souza, a cosmologist at the State University of Northern Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, made the discovery of possible shortcuts to Mars back in 2015.
He was researching near-Earth asteroids when he noticed that the asteroid 2001 CA21 followed a rare path that crossed the orbits of both Earth and Mars at a five-degree tilt. Then, he calculated this journey for upcoming Mars oppositions over the next five years.
His calculations for the October 2020 opposition showed that a roughly 34-day trip to Mars could be geometrically possible if a spacecraft followed a similar path to the asteroid’s early orbital plane.
However, the spacecraft would be arriving on Mars traveling at a speed of around 64,800 miles per hour, which is far too fast for a safe landing.
When he looked into future Mars oppositions in 2027, 2029, and 2031, he used the Lambert analysis to explore possible trips. He found that a trip would only be attainable in 2031. During that window, a round-trip mission from Earth to Mars may be able to be completed in 153 days.
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“The 2031 opposition emerges as uniquely favorable under the CA21-plane constraint, yielding two outbound Earth to Mars trajectories (33 and 56 days) and corresponding dynamically consistent return legs forming complete round-trip architectures of approximately 153 and 226 days total duration,” wrote the study authors.
So, a spacecraft would leave Earth on April 20, 2031, at about 16.7 miles per second and arrive on Mars by May 23 after a 33-day journey.
After spending 30 days or so on the surface, the spacecraft would depart on June 22 and return to Earth by September 20. The return trip would take around 90 days.
The concept of a shortcut to Mars is still largely theoretical. There are many other factors that would contribute to how long the mission takes, including propulsion methods, fuel capacity, the total mass of the payload, and spacecraft design.
But the method of calculating asteroid trajectories could continue to be very useful for planning missions to Mars.
The findings were published in the journal Acta Astronautica.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
