The Abreu Faro amphitheatre, located at Técnico – Alameda campus, is the perfect place to show the distance from Earth to the Moon, since this distance is proportional to the one separating one tip of the stage to the other. This was one of the first ideas shared by Dr. Gernot Grömer, director of the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF), teacher and researcher in the field of Mars exploration and Astrobiology, last Tuesday, February 21st.

Invited by the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa), Dr. Grömer explained that the atmosphere on Mars was at a middle spot of not being too aggressive, but also not being very useful. That’s why we really need the help of autonomous robots, such as “Perserverance”, which luckily landed right in an ancient ocean on Mars. “We have very good reason to think that there was a lot of water on Mars and that there is permafrost on this planet. So, if you want to make beer on Mars, the water is already there,” he joked.

The researcher also showed a lot of images from the field experiment with simulated elements of a Mars expedition, which took place in October 2021, in the Negev Desert (Israel), with OeWF researchers and partners from more than 20 countries, including the Instituto Superior Técnico. The team’s motto for these missions seems to be “fail fast, fail cheap have a deep learning curve”. The simulated missions are essential so that humans are prepared when they get to Mars, which Dr. Grömer believes is just a matter of time and extremely profitable to society. “Within 2 or 3 generations of people staying on Mars, we’re going to see more patents than any other time on Earth”, he explained.

These missions involve complex scientific challenges, like the 10-minute delay you would have with a control mission on Earth, which includes readings of vital signs by Doctors. Another challenge is that of static electricity, which is very high, meaning that space suits have to be almost like faraday cages. This means that astronauts like João Lousada need training for “donning”, or putting on a suit, which takes about 3 hours to do. The next experiments will take place in March and involve even bigger teams from Portugal and Técnico.

After quoting Saint-Exupéry “if you want to build a ship don’t just use wood, but make people long for the ocean”, Dr. Grömer concluded “getting to Mars seems very hard…it takes about one thousand days just to get there, but we’ve done it before. Just think of the Portuguese explorers, who had fewer resources like maps or the internet, and what they managed to achieve.”