On June 28, President Barack Obama announced a new space policy that scratched plans by the Bush administration to send astronauts back to the moon and, instead, focused on a manned mission to Mars set for no later than 2040, according to a Fox News article published on the date the policy was announced.

On campus, Fred DeJarnette, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has been conducting research related to Mars ever since the mid-1980s. According to DeJarnette, research on campus may be used in the planning of future missions to Mars.

DeJarnette said a group of NCSU faculty proposed to NASA that a Mars Mission Research Center be formed on campus as part of a competition with other universities in the 1980s. NASA selected the University for the construction of the Mars Mission Research Center to assist in the national goal of learning more about the distant planet.

“We were one of the six that were selected and it turns out we were the only one that was a Mars research center” DeJarnette said. “We’ve been involved with [Mars] research ever since.”

DeJarnette said the University’s reputation helped gain NASA’s approval.

“The theme and the faculty, plus the support we got from the University was a tremendous help,” he said.

The most recent Mars research conducted at the University involves a mechanism called the tumbleweed rover, a spherical cage with measuring instruments at its core. Fabric flaps fan out from the middle of the sphere, meant to catch wind currents on the surface of Mars, rolling the sphere along without using any of its own power.

“The idea was if you had something like the tumbleweed, that we know about here on Earth out west in the old westerns, the wind blows it and it can go large distances without anything more than the wind,” DeJarnette said.

DeJarnette, however, agreed the tumbleweed could face unexpected adversities on Mars given its free-rolling design.

“It has a very deep canyon that goes on the surface about 4,000 miles and if one of these tumbleweeds got down in that canyon it’s not likely they are going to get out,” DeJarnette said.

The canyon, DeJarnette said, is larger than the Grand Canyon in the midwestern United States.

Despite the uncertainty, however, it remains very possible that the tumbleweed could take a trip to Mars. DeJarnette mentioned that NASA has planned several unmanned missions and he emphasized the ease of getting the tumbleweed Mars-bound.

“Tumbleweed could be compact and put on a piggyback payload on some other mission to Mars and that would cut the cost down considerably,” DeJarnette said.

As far as the ability for astronauts to survive on Mars, there are many challenges. One of the largest is the cost, DeJarnette said.

“You could send unmanned probes there relatively cheap, and when I say relatively cheap, we’re talking about $300,000 to $500,000 per shot,” DeJarnette said. “Sending people, we’d be talking about billions.”

According to the Fox News article, the budget for a human accompanied mission to Mars is $19 billion.

DeJarnette said the disparity in cost has a lot to do with the human body sustaining both microgravity and radiation for at least a year, the expected duration of a round-trip to the red planet.

“A human being in microgravity that long… they tend to lose tissue and bone marrow and stuff like this unless they have conditioning machines aboard which can help some,” DeJarnette said.

According to DeJarnette, microgravity is just the tip of the iceberg as far as health hazards on a Mars mission are concerned.

“Probably an even greater problem is the radiation exposure while in the spacecraft, and that is our biggest unknown,” DeJarnette said. “Most things we know about shields against radiation are rather heavy and people in this spacecraft business fight you tooth and nail for one pound.”

Brandon Wilkins, a sophomore in nuclear engineering, said he thought looking into Mars was a smart decision for the future of the nation.

“Basically we are in a new revolution, the technological revolution, where we are using up quite a bit of resources,” Wilkins said, “And I believe looking outside of the Earth towards Mars or the moon are great plans to think outside the box and try to get new forms of resources so we’re not necessarily using all of ours up.”

Wilkins said he thought humans should be sent to Mars despite the projected cost of such a mission.

“Humans should absolutely go,” Wilkins said, “We waste money every single day whether it’s brushing our teeth or running the water for two minutes extra-long.”

Minell Enslin, a junior in biological engineering, has a different take on the Mars proposal.

“There’s definitely more important things like poverty and things on Earth that needs to be explored,” Enslin said. “If we have a budget and we can set a little bit of money aside we can eventually accumulate a lot of money to get this Mars thing figured out.”

The next unmanned mission to Mars is scheduled for late 2013, according to the NASA website.