Astronauts im up escape is climbing a volcano in lands the rotting in the Canary Islands. He returned from his long Space Mission just a few weeks ago the space agency sent the astronauts here for training the terrain is what is called a planetary analog very similar to the landscape on moms. With friends astronauts hes a Monster Mission as the apex of his career the six and a half months he spent on the International Space station i s s were a First Step Towards potentially being part of a crew lifting off for the red planet one day. Humans have to adapt to space travel with closed recycling loops total autonomy drive technologies and the use of robots and novel materials the ideas is pave the way for future missions and puts a journey to mars into the realm of the imaginable. But. They are. Above. Back in november twenty eighth sixteen at the baikonur spaceport temperatures have fallen to minus twenty eight degrees celsius. The rocket is being driven to the launch pad a pretty routine occurrence in the Space Business preparations for the one thousand nine hundred ninety second soyuz launch. But for to mother scale this mission is the first. Object two and a half years of intensive training he is about to take a seat in the small capsule forty meters above the ground. These are his last moments on earth moments during which anticipation turns into intense concentration. He joins russian cosmonauts are they not with sli and american Peggy Whitson as they set up for the International Space station i guess. He is the only newcomer on expedition fifty fifty one. You need maximum concentration so youre taking off on a rocket it wasnt quite clear to me what that meant to your tethered to a Ballistic Missile in the so use your fasten down everywhere only your arms can interact with the control panel otherwise you feel really tied up in the rocket is vibrating in the belching smoke below you i can feel it. On november seventeenth at twenty one twenty sharp the soyuz rocket lifts off the ground. Its a thousand tons of fuel generating twenty million horsepower the thrust in the eight minutes ascent phase is enormous. Tension is high for the first ten minutes after the launch this is the most dangerous time. The earth quickly begins to look like a sphere as the various stages of the launch of bring the capsule up to its orbital speed twenty eight thousand Kilometers Per Hour. Days huddled together in the so you are nightmare for anyone who is claustrophobic if youre sitting in a kind of cannonball it catapulted four hundred kilometers into orbit around the earth. But human strength is to be able to see that is normal otherwise youd go crazy. Right. After orbiting the earth thirty times in two days the crew has saw muscles but now the ion says is in sight. It takes more than. Two hours of intricate maneuvering for the capsule to dock on to the space station. Theres relief in the Mission Control center in moscow with the astronauts relatives are watching the whole operation live. At the end of opens and our leg peggy and tomorrow welcomed by the three crewmembers who arrived a month earlier. The orbiting Research Facility has been continuously manned since the early two thousand its where four hundred kilometers above the earth they are preparing for the Interplanetary Missions of the future. This is a nine hundred cubic metre labyrinth with everything arranged in a manner as precise as it is complex. Its a high to calabar a tree where microgravity turns every notion of them up and down on its head. Newcomers have to quickly learn how to find their way around. When you suddenly start floating around in weightlessness you can feel your own disorientation or your organs of balance are out of kilter everything is distorted. Your stomach feels full because everything in it is clouding. Your head hurts it feels bloated because of the High Pressure in your brain. These are the first symptoms but they disappear very quickly. At least thats how it was with me so i was very likely. Humans are not adapted to life in space our anatomy and metabolism our kids are earthly gravity. Without gravity the blood migrates from the low it to the upper part of the body creating a vessel or overpressure the can damage the organs this phenomenon is still an obstacle to long term missions. In france to see any estimation will center for space studies is looking closely at the issue. Professor philip obey and to my pisky have to fight a new experiment for the i s s. Albans had it and number of Research Programs at the institute of space medicine and physiology all made a mess here volunteers red impermeable fabric are immersed in water filled tests this socalled dry immersion is currently the primary method available for studying the effects of microgravity on the human body down a. Sick the woman younger seemingly its a good way of simulating the effects of microgravity on fluid transport in the first three hours it was the conditions in space that reproduced exactly. Stagnation in the blood vessels the problem with the brain in the eyes and the first this shows the devastating symptoms that can occur when bodily fluids move upwards which is the case in space. We now know that over pressure can also cause the vessel walls to age as much in six months in space as in thirty years for a normal person on earth. The nasa astronauts didnt find that funny at all theyre not really jokesters anyway just you can make up for six months but we dont know if anything beyond that is reversible or it could be me. During the six months on the i assess the crew was confronted with another central problem of long term flights a psychological one. Lets us form a cosmonaut Canady Padalka thing even in spaceflight circles but deltas considered an extraterrestrial hes a legend who has lived in space longer than anyone else so far. On the five Space Missions he managed a total of eight hundred and seventy nine days of weightlessness thats two and a half years in other words the estimated duration of a journey to mars small Church Ritual but its worth it will it ever be possible for humans to live and work on outer space. Over the last fifty years countless experiments have been carried out and more experience has been gained with the trials that it was almost organised the human organism has become more resistant to the aggressive conditions in space for some but the crewmembers psychological compatibility is the greatest challenge. Your ideal crew or cosmonaut doesnt exist and never will were not robots and when youre old. When you want to hold more details of that which well you cant just slam the door between yourself and your colleagues and what i think crew is down to find a common language and make compromises. Is exactly the right word of this case. Over four hundred astronauts have now been on all. Between the space station since the first one was launched in the one nine hundred seventy one the personal selection criteria for long term flights have been honed. But no one knows yes what a group flying two months would ideally look like. While living our must see for apollo vehicle you fly to mars we must learn to survive in space for the long term its easiest if we do it close to the earth which is why the i s. S. Is a stage on the way. Its not just a research station divorced from the mars project. You know of a good fifty percent of what happens on the i s s is about sending people even further into space. Where you dont prewar called on express. Even further into space today everyone thinks of months when they hear that. Some parts of the earths share features with the red planets. Decades of intensive volcanic activity on lands are right in the Canary Islands have given it a geology that is similar to that of mons. Geologists shy of one kettle is often drawn to the un and as an expert on the red planet he advises nasa. He is also an important figure in the month society and International Association of scientists engineers astronauts and aerospace officials. All of them advocates a journey to manas. I just ask yourself people on a going to mars reflects our profound urge to explore its energy thats let me spiral good discovery of america there are other planets. And we also want to find out about the origin of life. As most of the american thought only happened on earth with a chance of one. In a billion years or was it a process that happens naturally. I know that there was liquid water on mars and it passed just because weve seen the remains of lakes i recall the still dark but see i think why shouldnt live forever isnt there too like maybe we can find the missing link between inanimate mineral matter and the first selves never let out of the miracle of life come about. Mars may give us the answer. But it. Is undoubtedly fascinating but can we really send people there how is that supposed to work. Not secured fit throughout the morning as it is about two hundred twenty seven million kilometers from the sun. Whereas the earth is one hundred fifty million. Orbit the sun so the path to mars isnt a Straight Line but a curve and i can orbit. Mars is hundreds of millions of kilometers away two hundred times as far as the moon these are completely different dimensions sift out to. The most optimistic forecast estimates the voyage to mars and back will take about six hundred and forty days six months with the outbound flights a month on site and fifteen months home. To colonel to mars we need of course a rocket conventional chemical propulsion engines are pretty advanced the fuel is burned with oxygen to give maximum thrust this will enable us to fly to mars in six months. In what five. To chemical Rocket Propulsion projects are currently making advances nasa space launch system or enceladus is a deep space launch vehicle with several propulsion stages that could transport four people and fifty tons of payload to mars. The space x. Company with its passing on musk is behind the second project with typical optimism musk has said that twenty twenty four will be the give the colonize ation of mars because. The company is working on a reusable launch vehicle and space ship they can transport it doesnt as to. Nords into space at one go the way the various rocket parts can be reused or recycled is a revolutionary but as far as Propulsion Technology for conquering distant planets is concerned the real revolution is taking place elsewhere. Houston engineers from the Ad Astra Rocket Company are testing their propulsion system. The project seems like something out of science fiction. But one of its underlying technologies is already well known the plasma propulsion engine. Plasma thrusters have been around for some years now in contrast to conventional combustion engines they work by heating and i noticed gas to ultra high temperatures and then accelerating its i noticed assamese through an electroMagnetic Field. The speed at the outlet nozzle reaches one hundred eighty thousand Kilometers Per Hour and ensures a continuous constant thrust. This type of drive is already being used for some probes and satellites however it cant generate the power needed to propel a space ship. But this is trying to change that. Franklin chang d. S. Is a physicist and astronauts who has been involved with more Space Missions than anyone else. He flew on the u. S. Space shuttle seven times for forty years he has been working on the ideal propulsion systems. In twenty fifteen he announced that his calculations showed it would be possible to reach my. In thirty nine days. That number is correct. You can do this if you have a lot of power. And thats the horton thing thats where the Nuclear Electric Propulsion comes into play. Chante is calculations involved cutting a Small Nuclear reactor to plasma engine to generate the necessary electrical power. My interest. Was towards developing a rocket which had all the nice features of the electric blast my rockets. The low power rockets but they had a lot a lot of power and essentially building the equivalent of the Diesel Engine of space something that will allow you to really move heavy massive pieces of equipment from point a to point b. Jan diaz says the reactor which generate the Electrical Energy needed for the past my engine this would offer the autonomy that no chemical drive would guarantee. Chemical propulsion thrusters could still be used to launch and guide the spaceship into orbit where plasma Engine Running on Nuclear Power with then take over that. This would considerably short and the flight time. These are missions that are Game Changing that changes the chemistry of the me of the mission it changes the architecture it reduces a great deal of the issues of human survivability all the problems that we have with physiology with the conditioning of the human body all of those things begin to get. This difficult. Time is a crucial factor. Shaving a few months off the trip means less food would be needed. As well as reducing the harmful physiological effects of long spaceflight. Puts months with the three. Point four low like all other things variable we want to minimize as the flight duration it has to be as short as possible so that we need as little logistics and as few supplies as possible because we have to recycle more to achieve this even more than we do at this station at the moment theres still a lot to do in terms of Waste Management will have to grow our own lettuce will have to go without a lot of things but that wont stop us from travelling to mars. Last. Chance have been cultivated on the ice as for some years now including by the members of the expedition fifty fifty one tama an egg and above all taking. The program has been so popular with the astronauts that the researchers did away with an agenda and left the care of the plants to their discretion. To shock you sisu simpson said on our own let us made us happy the green spot just for us to give cherished and cared for especially by thank you whose hobby is what we were all happy about it we watched our salad grow and on friday evening we ate it all it was a morsel of life that took on a very special meaning of oxycodone. Joy and massa directs the face you program at now says Kennedy Space center. This is a fairly classical project to find out how to grow plants in space and thus ensure the astronauts food selfsufficiency at some point the joy of nasa scientists call the train smith have quickly realized that godling in space has more than just nutritional advantages. Between twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen american scott kelly spent over a year with Russian Mission on the ion. Train smith that kelly constantly sent some tweets of his plan. Kill it for the International Space station. Want to go and check on my. Flowers a girl here in the. Columbus module. So scott when he took care of the flowers was very important for him to take ownership of the flowers in and i could tell he really enjoyed it because it through twitter feed hey our plants arent looking too good would be a problem on mars to my space flowers on the rebound and finally when youve got the first bloom how does your garden grow heres my space flower he took his flower out of bed all around spacestation he took it to the coupal up they had a centerpiece for dinner and most telling involved to me is what i saw scott in the show with their three hundred days in space and lo and behold scotts holding his space foreign to me that tells everything how important it is to both the show and scott. I think for psychological for morale relaxation and then of course food you know having those fresh food is going to be very important having that connection back to earth having that little piece of meat. Sure and theres a very. You know hostile environment where theres a lot of mad all the plastics and wires running around and theres this piece of earth that they can smell they can touch and finally eat i think it means a lot to them in when we go to mars when the earth is getting smaller and smaller and smaller its going to be even more important to have that piece of earth have that reminder of home the smell of home and then the taste of home to remind them where they come from. On board the i s s how home is only present. Seen from the cooper penny remick madill the earth fills the sky. Biscay never tires of watching the fascinating spectacle. But can he also imagine a time when our planet will no longer be visible from his spaceship. Users or maybe the artist while theyre throughout history we have never lost sight of the earth well just once for a moment when the apollo crew orbited the moon on a mars Mission Earth will be lost in the distance at some point you want to even feel any progress it will be like hanging in between the stars spalding that will be hard when humans fly to mars the great unknown will be psychological to critique all the arguments. To man leaves the station for the first time on the thirteenth of january twenty seventeen its his first spacewalk. Mr holmes who is real that these are the spacesuit this one is mine its in my size. A suit is like a real mini spacecraft equipped with all systems needed for autonomous survival in the full weight of space. Communication devices protection against the vacuum and the heat. The gold visor and integrated computer control functions are attached to the chest and. The rest is in the backpack all of this is very bulky and heavy but its the price you pay for a walk in space. To alice before the Pressure Chamber opens tomorrow and commander shane kimbra already. Has Ground Troops with the pressure to p. S. I so that small amount of air so inquest gets tenderly dumped overboard it gets expelled out into space and that at Thirteen Hundred hours the hatches finally open. The First Impression is a feeling of heat and glistening lines. To close they go advisors to protect themselves from the suns rays. They movements are not as certain as they were in the training pool it takes a few moments to get used to this new environment. Then the Mission Begins replacing the space stations solar panels. The two have finished sooner than planned and are given further tasks by Mission Control before they want to mount a face across parts of the space station at the window openings you can see the stunts left by micrometeoroid. Back when. For you. Every outside mission is meticulously prepared you dont want to mess it up i kept thinking just watch what youre doing so nobody can say you screwed up things can go wrong because a maneuver like this is extremely complicated i thought so if it fails it wont be down to. Me. But you also look around you up here to gather some impressions and images that youll remember for your entire life when. We saw it just visit us i was on a platform above the space station as the i s s was two meters behind me my feet were fixed to the platform where you from there i saw the earth as a sphere where you would want to be on the solar array as i could see it turning in the distance it seemed to be rotating like a bowling ball in slow motion beneath me that was really great also. Now. Six hours of hard work nevertheless the moment to return to the station comes much too soon even though the astronauts worry about making a mistake right up to the last seconds things can happen fun stuff here. My biggest worry on this assignment was losing my equipment but you mustnt let go even though everything is attached with ropes and small real youre always worried. For a while i thought id lose the bag with all the tools for a minute or two my heart was in my mouth about what i mean were familiar with all these disaster scenarios but of course we do everything we can to make sure they dont actually occur you dont think about it all. Neither you from sleeping. One of many lasting memory. As with any exceptional experiences the astronaut senses are in turmoil and they have trouble fixing all these impressions in their memory. Back to the work that marks action. In the airlock peggy and all egg help the two astronauts divest their equipment. Scares just completed his first space walk. It works to. Get. The fear of losing a tool on an outside mission is shared by all astronauts no wonder since every piece of debris every object over one centimeter in diameter can cause devastating damage to a station racing by at twenty eight thousand Kilometers Per Hour. Can. Nevertheless this danger is not the biggest concern of the scientists planning a long term mission. For the earths Magnetic Field protects us from cosmic rays from deep in space and from bombardment by the socalled solar wind streams of particles emitted by the sun. Our magnificent polar lights are formed when the energized particles collide with our atmosphere. But the protective shield of the earths Magnetic Field doesnt extend deep into the soda system. One hazard is radiation on the one hand there are solar storms protons blasted off from the sun and on the other we have cosmic rays are extremely high energy particles. Cosmic rays hit you from all directions you need a lot of material to. Symptoms before they get the astronauts and damaged their d. N. A. To match radiation is a problem but there are solutions we shouldnt overdramatize it i think this recently. As head of the Italian Space agency in rome physicist Roberto Bettis done coordinated a project to shield astronauts from cosmic rays. With a problem and they may start off on. This problem has never been fully addressed you know this plays in for the until now the Magnetic Field surrounding the earth has kept radiation at an acceptable level so yes thats nice but sadly. Its our best chance of more but when we go deeper into space the radiation levels there are three to four times higher equator so we know that this entails a measurable but still considerable risk of damage this can include cancers that can shorten the lives of astronauts returning to earth by five ten or fifteen years be changed at the show queen. Civil yet more powerful problem if we wanted to tackle the problem of High Energy Cosmic rays mechanically we were unfortunately need three to four metres of absorbent material such as water this is of course absolutely out of the question it would be far too heavy for use in a spaceship but. This space radiation superconducting shield or as our two s. Project may be halfway towards finding a workable solution to the problem. Its idea in itself is simple a force field generated around the spacecraft deflects the rate is similar to the earths magnetic shield but as simple as the idea is putting it into practice is highly complex. It requires extremely powerful yet lightweight super conducting magnets that work efficiently at temperatures of just above absolute zero. At cern the European Organization for Nuclear Research you to rossi and his team may have found the ideal material magnesium dipole write. A call to the set me the superconductivity is contained in these fine wires. Or in some that are more like ribbons only. This superconductivity is produced by magnesium diab or eyes and this material has the advantage of being very light in my magnesium is very lightweight and it becomes superconducting at a temperature above that of liquid healing. Superior. This makes it an ideal material for magnets to protect astronauts in space on the mall in dallas boston but theres a lot of them out. There station has and he radiation armor we even have extra protection in our sleeping cabin the banks are the best protected places with extra shielding in the event of a solar storm a sudden increase in solar activity or an ion bombardment we flee into our sleeping berths. And i guess astronauts absorb sixty percent more radiation in a single day than a person at sea level on earth does in a year however even this amount is still considered harmless. Radiation levels may be one of the main challenges facing loss missions but there are other. Biscay dreams a few to me. But for the internet is a must learn date is the stuff of night. One in three missions has failed so far. I think one of the biggest problems for a mars mission is the landing because of the rapid descent into the Martian Atmosphere at five or six kilometers per second with a heavy load for the man that was here to date weve dropped one ton of payload on mars but a man to be a cool way thirty times and we dont know how to do that yet he insults you have to multiply everything. That heat shield of a small probe is five meters in diameter with a thirty ton or thatll be twenty five meters and its like were not capable of launching a device with the diameter of twenty five meters from the earth into space its a shield like that naturally causes drag and at twice the speed of sound the spaceship is traveling at two thousand Kilometers Per Hour so it needs another braking device and parachutes but in the thin atmosphere of mars parachutes cant do a lot to do celebrate thirty tons youd need a parachute with a diameter of eighty meters thats practically the size of a football stadium but thats big and even with this parachute fully deployed youd still drop from the sky like a stone at three hundred Kilometers Per Hour it needs retro rockets and they have to kick in within minutes and if it goes wrong youre dead so everything has to be worked out to last detail. Suppose a storm for the shock landing on mars is like a game of chess you know there are lots of solutions and scenarios and strategies that we can play through well see which ones i like it was the. This. Gravity on the surface of mars is only about thirty eight percent of that on earth so one hundred kilo human being weighs only thirty eight kilos on mars that should be enough for the muscles to work the bones to stay firm and so forth but this is basically only speculation since how an organism will actually adapt to these conditions over a long period of time has never been properly investigated on mars we have to do a lot of sport as were already doing on the i assess if people dont leave the module theyll need muscle training and gymnastics. Physical exercise is an important part of the astronauts daily routine in the i assess every teen activity as essential as sleeping or eating. In space you just float around there are many muscles that you dont use at all we have to exercise for two and a half hours a day to counteract bone and muscle loss so that theres trail. Goodness exercises also help the astronauts relax they prefer to use the average Strength Training device specially designed for muscle training in weightlessness which has the added great advantage of being opposite the coop and. Now takes place under the eyes of the space agencys medical teams Muscular Atrophy can be compensated for quite easily using bone density is a more serious problem. On a vessel year and valerie not because of study bone loss in astronauts who have computed i s s missions. I want to share the show you mine your religion up were focusing on the d. Mineralisation of the bones during the roughly six month flight as we can see from these graphs the loss of bone density is approximately seven percent history it will give you a comparison the average loss of bone density in postmenopausal women is two percent a year she thinks which is quite as good under normal conditions if you like men show hardly any loss but in these men here were looking at about a seven percent loss in bone density was low enough but she reached the point you mean it and it will if these girls are not want to fly to mars theyll have to counter these bone structure changes his reasoning in him but its the thought of all thats not. The mission on the i s s is drawing to a close and the crew is torn between melancholy and impatience to finally get home. To marcus kaye takes his camera into the cooler for one last time. Its a paradox out in space beyond the earths atmosphere the astronauts are mainly struck by the fragility of our mother planets. That enormous bust disappeared up here from a distance you see the consequences of human actions with your own eyes you can see how fragile our planet is one of you realize its not just a theory its really like that i mean earth is basically just a big space ship with its motley crew and its limited resources we have to look after at one. Time of escape documented the earth for one hundred ninety six days the first thing that catches the eye in his face has is our planets beauty. But the frenchman has also taken a critical stance on some aspects like growing up and density. Having the chance to observe at a remove of four hundred kilometers past. Given the as you know its a sense of social responsibility. Our order the team we have the role of witnesses even photo journalists are so my message and im not the only one to say it is one of the earth is fragile cease up and we must take care of all. My photos make people think about that then the mission has already been a success only from going to mars the great adventure of the twenty First Century is to save our planet that it will take some doing to get it. I. Really mean to me. Not everyone who loves books has to go in the same. T. W. Literature list a hundred german must reads. A muse unless it is just not suitable and some. Of the socalled changes out for his confidence boost side by. The people he puts big dreams on the big screen. Movie magazines on the dummy. Where is home. When your family scattered across the globe. I was in love with the kids if you dont believe that it was a journey to the roots get him in the lead the charge only from somalia loser running. Into systems. Against holy starch january twenty. Eighth. This is d w news live from but it will change at the top in brazil hardliner devils or not it takes place to as the new president takes the election mocks a radical shift of the right off the decades of centrist world green day campaigners in particular worry about the impact of his policies. Also on the Program Authorities in germany say a man who rammed a car into a new movie a crowd intended to kill foreigners will get the latest from our reporter in the west and talk