Human space travel to Mars - Questions and answers with David Saint-Jacques live from space

Uploaded on April 4, 2019

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Human space travel to Mars - Questions and answers with David Saint-Jacques live from space

2019-04-04 - During the launch of the Astro Pi challenge in Canada, Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques answers the following question, live from the International Space Station: How does the research in space help prepare to send humans for a journey to Mars and beyond? (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA)

Text: How does the research in space help prepare to send humans for a journey to Mars and beyond? –Manish

David Saint-Jacques: The research we do here is mainly about how does our body adapt to live in space and live in microgravity and live in the environment of space. And that way, we can be ready to go further. Here, it’s a bit as if we were camping in our backyard. We’re not very far from Earth; we can see Earth very easily. But when we are ready, then we will go to a real mountain. In our case, we’re going to Mars, when we’re ready to leave Earth. Because when we go to Mars, we’ll need to be going for several years. Right now, we are not ready to do that, because all the machines that are around us, that keep me alive here – keep the air, keep the water, keep the temperature – so often they break, and we need to fix them. We need to have stuff that is very, very reliable. So we do a lot of research on technology to keep people alive. A lot of research on technology to cure diseases, that happen to astronauts on orbit, that also helps us on Earth. And also a lot of research on the energy we need to go to Mars.

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