part them like probably 50 rugby ball all the way to a large number of normal solar wind i'm optimistic that. we're not total idiots so it's busy. and you don't want. to know. the. astronauts marcus game is climbing of all came there when lanza rushing in the canary islands. in return from his long space mission just a few weeks ago space agency send their astronauts here for training the terrain is

what is called a planetary analog very similar to the landscape on mars. the french astronaut sees a man's mission as the apex of his career the 6 and a half months he spent on the international space station i s s we're a 1st 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 i s s paves the way for future missions and puts a journey to mars into the realm of the imaginable. package.

back in november 26th team at the bike and earth space board's temperatures have fallen to minus 28 degrees celsius. the rocket is being driven to the launch pad a pretty routine occurrence in the space business preparations for the 1992nd soyuz launch. but for some up a scale this mission is the 1st. altitude of half years of intensive training he is about to take a seat in the small capsule 40 meters above the ground. these

are his last moments on earth moments during which anticipation turns into intense concentration. he joins russian cosmonaut all acknowledge skiing and american peggy whitson as they set up for the international space station i guess. he is the only newcomer on expedition $5051.00. small part of a book. maximum concentration you're taking off on a rocket it wasn't quite clear to me what that meant but just 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 and belching smoke billowing from a. on november

17th at 2120 sharp the soyuz rocket lifts off the ground. and in. its 1000 tons of fuel generating 20000000 horsepower the thrust in the 8 minutes ascent phase is enormous. tension is high for the 1st 10 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 28000 kilometers per hour. days huddled together in the so you are nightmare for anyone who is claustrophobic you're sitting in a kind of cannonball that catapulted 400 kilometers into orbit around the earth.

but human strength is to be able to see that is normal otherwise you'd go crazy. after orbiting the earth 30 times in 2 days the crew has so muscles but now the isis is in sight. it takes more than 2 hours of intricate maneuvering for the caps who are to dock on to the space station. there's relief in the mission control center in moscow with the astronauts relatives are watching the whole operation live. the airlock opens and all the peggy and some are welcomed by the 3 crewmembers who arrived in months earlier.

the orbiting research facility has been continuously manned since the early 2000 it's where 400 kilometers above the earth they are preparing for the interplanetary missions of the future. with. the eye is this is a 900 cubic metre labyrinth with everything arranged in a manner as precise and as it is complex. it's a high tech lebar a tree when microgravity turns every notion of them up and down on its head. newcomers have to quickly learn how to find their way around. although you know 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 1st symptoms but they disappear very quickly. at least that's how it was with me so i was very lucky. humans are not adapted to life in space our anatomy and metabolism are geared to earthly gravity. without gravity the blood migrates from the lower to the other parts of the body creating a vascular overpressure that can damage the organs this phenomenon is still an obstacle to long term missions.

in france the c. and e. f. snatch and center for space studies is looking closely at the issue. professor philip albay and tom up a scale have devised a new experiment for the i s s. l bay has headed in the number of research programs at the institute of space medicine and physiology all made a case here volunteers wrapped in impermeable fabric are immersed in water filled tell us this so-called dry immersion is currently the primary method available for studying the effects of microgravity on the human body down on us. sit them warmly and assume really it's a good way of simulating the effects of microgravity on fluid transport in the 1st 3 hours those are the conditions in space that reproduced exactly. stagnation in

the blood vessels the problem of the brain in the eyes and the 1st 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 bessel walls to age as much in 6 months in space as in 30 years for a normal person on earth. the nasa astronauts didn't find that funny at all they're not really jokesters anyway just you can make up for 6 months but we don't know if anything beyond that is reversible or it could be me i played. during the 6 months on the i assess the crew was confronted with another central problem of long term flights a psychological one. what does former cosmonauts canady padalka think even in spaceflight circles but delta

is considered an extraterrestrial he's a legend who has lived in space longer than anyone else so far. on 5 space missions he managed a total of $879.00 days of weightlessness that's 2 and a half years in other words the estimated duration of a journey to mars more charges reach for about 12 hours millard ever be possible for humans to live and work in outer space. over the last 50 years countless experiments have been carried out and more experience has been gained with the trials that it was almost. human organism has become more resistant to the aggressive conditions in space for some of the crew members psychological compatibility is the greatest challenge or going to. be ideal crew or cosmonaut doesn't exist and never will we're not robots on your own but. when you wanted to

what more did was that we told you you can't just slam the door between yourself and your colleagues and but with the crew is damaged to find a common language and make compromises. is exactly the right word of this case. over $400.00 astronauts have now been on all. in the space station since the 1st one was launched in 1971. the personal selection criteria for long term flights have been honed. but no one knows yes what a group flying 2 months would ideally look like. while you all must be for all of your crew you fly to mars we must learn to survive in space for the long term it's easiest if we do it close to the earth which is why the i s.s. is a stage on the way joe if it's not just a research station divorced from the mars project. you know

a good 50 percent of what happens on the ai s.s. is about sending people even further into space. where you don't print one called on express. even further into space today everyone thinks of months when they hear that. some parts of the earth's share features with the red planet. decades of intensive volcanic activity on lands are right in the canary islands have given it's the geology that is similar to that of mons. geologist child fun carol is often drawn to the island as an expert on the red planet he advises nasa. he's 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 mons. i saw not just your people on the going to mars reflects our profound urge to explore it's in our genes it's let me spire the discovery of america and other planets. and we also want to find out about the origin of life. it was a thing maricopa only happened on earth with a chance if you. in a 1000000000 years or was it a process that happens naturally i know that there was liquid water on mars in the past because we'd seen the remains of lakes i really going to see old art but i think one should live for ever reason there too like maybe we can find the missing link between inanimate mineral matter and the 1st cells never let any 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 how is that supposed to

work. that situation fit to what m.r. is it is about 227000000 kilometers from the sun you whereas the earth is 150000000 . orbit the sun so the path to mars isn't a straight line but a curve and i can orbit. mars is hundreds of millions of kilometers away 200 times as far as the moon these are completely different dimensions sit at. the most optimistic forecast estimates the voyage to mars and back would take about $640.00 days 6 months with the outbound flights a month on site and 15 months time. to travel to mars we need of course a rocket or 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

6 months. what 5. to chemical rocket propulsion projects are currently making advances now says space launch system or s l s. it's a deep space launch vehicle with several propulsion stages that could transport 4 people and 50 tons of payload to mars. the space x. company with its basilan musk is behind the 2nd project with typical optimism musk has said that 2024 will be the year of the colonizing mars because. the company is working on a reusable launch vehicle and space ship the country doesn't astronauts into space at one go the way the various rocket parts can be reduced or recycled is a revolutionary boss 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 as him's through an electromagnetic field. the

speed at the outlet nozzle reaches 180000 kilometers per hour and ensures a continuous constant thrust. this type of drive is already being used for some probes and satellites however it can't generate the power needed to propel a spaceship. but this man is trying. change that was. franklin chang diaz is a physicist and astronauts who has been involved with more space missions than anyone else. if you were on the u.s. space shuttle 7 times for 40 years he has been working on the ideal propulsion systems. in 2015 that his calculations showed it would be possible to reach mars in 39 days. that number is correct. you can do this if you have

a lot of power. and that's the thing that's where the nuclear electric propulsion comes into play. chante is calculations involved capturing a small nuclear reactor to plasma engine to generate the necessary electrical power . my interest. was stored 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 shorten the flight time. these are missions that are game changing that changes the chemistry of the me of the mission the 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 them human body all of those things. begin to get less and less 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 3. point 40 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 the station at the moment there's still a lot to do in terms of waste management we'll have to grow our own lettuce will have to go without a lot of things but that won't stop us from travelling to mars. $30.00. chance have been cultivated on the i s s with some years now including by the members of the expedition 5051 an egg and a bevel 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. or kind of struck the shop to sis's simpson said on our own let us made us happy. green spot just for us to use courses on cherished and cared for only especially by taking. obvious but we were all happy about it we watched our salad grow and on friday evening we ate it it was a morsel of life that took on a very special meaning. joy a mass that directs the program at nasa's kennedy space center. this is a fairly classical project to find out how to grow plants in space and thus ensure the astronauts food self-sufficiency at some point the joy of nasa scientist carly

trained smith have quickly realized that gardening in space has more than just nutritional advantages. between 20152016 american scott kelly spent over a year with russian mission on the i as a. transmitter observed that kelly constant he sent some tweets of his plan. kili board the international space station. i want to go and check on my. flowers i'm a girl here in the. columbus module. so scott when he took care of the flowers it was very important for him to take ownership of the flowers in and i could tell he really enjoyed it because it through his twitter feed hey our plants aren't looking too good would be a problem on mars to my space flowers on the rebound and finally when you've got

the 1st bloom how does your garden grow here's my space flower he took his flower out of all around space station he took it to the cooper well they had a centerpiece for dinner and most telling of all of to me is what i saw scott in the show with their 300 days in space and lo and behold scott's holding his space foreign to me that told. everything how important it is to both. you 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 nature in this very. you know hostile environment where there's a lot about all the plastics and wires running around and there's 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 it's 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 soon is only present. seen from the coop in a penny remix madill the earth fills the sky. tomorrow biscay never time is of watching the fascinating spectacle. but can ready you also imagine a time when our planet will no longer be visible from the spaceship. so maybe they're just well there 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 won't even feel any progress it will be like hanging in between the stars that will be hard when humans fly to mars the great unknown will be psychological to critic all the elements. to man. leaves the station for the 1st time on the 13th of january 2017 it's his 1st spacewalk. these are the spacesuit this one is mine it's in my size. a suit is like a real mini spacecraft equipped with all systems needed for autonomous survival in the boyd of space. communication devices protection against the vacuum in the heat including the gold visor and an integrated computer control functions are attached to the chest. where the rest is in the backpack. this is very bulky and

heavy but it's the price you pay for a walk in space. 2 hours before the pressure chamber opens tomorrow and commander shane kimbra already . pressure to p.s.-i so that small amount of air so inquest gets tenderly dumped overboard it gets expelled out into space that at 1300 hours the hatches finally open. the 1st impression is a feeling of heat and glistening lines. to close their gold vines is to protect themselves from the sun's rays. their movements are not as certain as they were in the training pool it takes a few moments to get used to this new environment. and

. then the mission begins replacing the space station solar panel for the to have finished sooner than planned and are given further tasks by mission control before they want to mount a photograph parts of the space station at the window openings you can see the scars left by my crimean. really it's. we're coming back with. for you. in here and yes every outside mission is meticulously prepared you don't want to mess it up i kept thinking just watch what you're 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 won't be down to me so. i want it they speak it. but you also look around you have to gather some impressions and images that you'll remember for your entire life

when he also. was destroyed to space shuttle bus i was on a platform above the space station as the i asked this was 2 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.

6 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 fast pass here. follow us. my biggest worry on this assignment was losing my equipment you mustn't let go even though everything is attached with ropes and small wheels you're always worried for awhile i thought i'd lose the bag with all the tools for a minute or 2 my heart was in my mouth. i mean we're familiar with all these disaster scenarios but of course we do everything we can to make sure they don't actually occur you don't think about it all the time either keep 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 of these impressions in their memories. back to mark fraction as in the airlock peggy and all the big help the 2 astronauts divest their equipment to mark his scares just completed his 1st spacewalk. work 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 582-8000 kilometers per hour. nevertheless this danger is not the biggest concern of the scientists planning

a long term mission. for the earth's magnetic field protects us from cosmic rays from deep in space and from bombardment by the so-called solar wind streams of particles emitted by the sun. our magnificent polar lights are formed when the energize particles collide with our atmosphere. but the protective shield of the earth's moon. fields doesn't extend deep pain to the said the system. one hazard is radiation on the one hand there are solar storms protons blasted out from the sun and on the other we have cosmic rays extremely high energy particles. built this way it's as if you wanted cosmic rays hit you from all directions you need a lot of material to intercept them before they get the astronauts and damage their d.n.a. . to match radiation is a problem but there are solutions we shouldn't overdramatize it i think these are

just joyful but i think. as head of the italian space agency in rome physicist roberto bettis done coordinated a project to shield astronauts from cosmic rays. but the problem and the name may start off with a less well this problem has never been fully addressed you know they still plays in for they learn till now the magnetic field surrounding the earth has kept radiation at an acceptable level that they live i don't see on yes that's nice but sadly. it's our best chance of looked at more but when we go deeper into space the radiation levels there are 3 to 4 times higher than it was the 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 510 or 15 years the change that the actual queen the chandni. civil yaml.

problem here if we wanted to tackle the problem of high energy cosmic rays mechanically we were unfortunately need 3 to 4 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 the space ship is that only that that's so that's without it. this space radiation superconducting shield or s r 2 s. project may be halfway towards finding a workable solution to the problem. it's idea in itself a simple a force field generated around the spacecraft deflects the rate is similar to the earth's magnetic shield but as simple as the idea is putting it into practice is highly complex it requires an extremely powerful yet lightweight super conducting magnets that work efficiently at temperatures of just above absolute 0.

at cern the european organization for nuclear research to rossi and his team may have found the ideal material magnesium dipole ride. called the said meter superconductivity is contained in these fine wires. or in some that are more like ribbons. this superconductivity is produced by magnesium dry bore i said and this material has the advantage of being very light in my museum it's very lightweight it's going to become superconducting at a temperature above that of liquid helium i'm going to feel superior if this makes it an ideal material for magnets to protect astronauts in space on the mall in dallas bos if there's a lot of them are home. yes

. the station has anti radiation armor we even have extra protection in our sleeping patterns 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 with flee into our sleeping berths. i guess as asked general it absalom 60 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 hominis. radiation levels may be one of the main challenges facing man's missions but there are others to. biscay dreams of future missions but for the engineer i must learn to is the stuff of night. one in 3

missions that has failed so far. and the whole public one of the biggest problems for a mars mission is the landing because of the rapid descent into the martian atmosphere at 5 or 6 kilometers per 2nd with a heavy load for them on that machine to date we've dropped one ton of payload on mars but a man to be a cool way 30 times and we don't know how to do that yet and so you have to multiply everything in. the heat shield of a small probe it is 5 meters in diameter with a 30 ton or that'll be 25 meters fans were not capable of launching a device with the diameter of 25 meters from the earth into space is a shield like that naturally causes drag and at twice the speed of sound the spaceship is traveling at 2000 kilometers per hour so it needs another braking device and parachutes but in the thin atmosphere of mars parachutes can't do

a lot to the seller a 30 tons you'd need a parachute with a diameter of 80 meters that's practically the size of a football stadium but that's good and even with his parachute fully deployed you'd still drop from the sky like a stone at 300 kilometers per hour it needs retro rockets and they have to keep going within minutes if it goes. wrong you're dead so everything has to be worked out the last details. 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 we'll see which one i like it was. in fact. the gravity on the surface of mars is only about 38 percent of that on earth so $100.00 kilos human being weighs only $38.00 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 we're already doing on the i assess if people don't leave the module they'll need muscle training and gymnastics. physical exercise is an important person the astronauts daily routine in the i s s every team activity as essential as sleeping or eating. in space you just float around there are many muscles that you don't use at all we have to exercise for 2 and a half hours a day to counteract bone and muscle loss history of.

technics exercises also help the astronauts relax they prefer to use the strength training device specially designed for muscle training in a way to snit's which has the added grace advantage of being opposite the cooper. when he now takes place under the eyes of the space agency's medical teams muscular atrophy can be compensated for quite easily losing bone density is a more serious problem. of a sliver and valerie not because of study bone loss in astronauts who have competed i s s missions. i want to share the show you my new religion we're focusing on the d mineralisation of the bones during the roughly 6 month flight as we can see from

these graphs the loss of bone density is approximately 7 percent. it will give you a comparison the average loss of bone density in post-menopausal women is 2 percent a year she thinks the score is good or normal conditions for men show hardly any loss but in these men here we're looking at about a 7 percent loss in bone density was low enough. but you mean you're right it will if these girls are not want to fly to mars they'll have to counter these bone structure changes his reasoning in him but it's favorable that's not. the mission on the i s s is joined to a cleanse and the crew is torn between melancholy and impatience to finally get home. to marcus kaye takes his camera into the computer for one last time. it's a paradox out in space beyond the earth's atmosphere the astronauts are mainly struck by the fragility of our mother planets. are permitted up here from

a distance you see the consequences of human actions with your own eyes you can see how fragile our planet is are you realize it's not just a theory it's really like that the earth is basically just a big space ship with its motley crew and its limited resources we have to look after it. tama biscay documented the earth for $196.00 days the 1st thing that catches the eye in his photos is our planet's beauty. but the frenchman has also taken a critical stance on some aspects like growing urban density. having the chance to observe earth at a remove of 400 kilometers has given the astronauts a sense of social responsibility. are all the 2 we have the role of witnesses even photojournalists my message and i'm not the only one to say it is sort of the

earth is fragile and we must take care of. my photos make people think about that the limitation has already been a success only if i'm going to mars the great adventure of the 21st century is to save our planet that it will take some doing to get it.

europe transformed the focus on europe's summer series. razors arm barbed wire and hungary seals are the bulk and how many refugees entered the e.u. shut down. 30 years ago borders were dismantled with bold colors hungary opened its gates and let east germans meet austria. 30 minutes. illusion influence

our perception our thinking and our actions. were willing to change the trying to the beautiful and also easily fail to see the danger of what happens when the bubble. it's time for clarity made in germany 90 minutes on double. up today don't miss our highlights. programme on line d.w. dot com highlights. the quiet melody. rizzo's michael lighten the mood.

resonate with and it's. the mind and amusing. token 1st along 2019 from september 6th to september 29th. israel has marked 2 u.s. democratic congresswoman from entering the country after president donald trump said they should be banned in a tweet representative rashida tali in both michigan and omar of minnesota are highly critical of israel's treatment of palestinians and have been calling for a boycott of the israeli products.