NASA has set its sights on sending astronauts to Mars sooner than most people realize. The ambitious plans include preparing for crewed missions in the coming decades, with a focus on technology, sustainability,

NASA has plans to send astronauts to Mars surprisingly soon, but their exact timeline is still rather vague for a number of different reasons.

What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. NASA’s best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.

In a breathtaking new view from the Mars Express mission, ESA has released an image of Flaugergues Crater, captured in a flyover video that provides a bird’s-eye perspective of the Martian landscape.

Radiation on Mars is far more intense than on Earth because the Red Planet has virtually no magnetic field and a thin atmosphere to shield against cosmic rays and solar particles. Measurements by orbiters and rovers show radiation levels about 40–50 times higher than natural background on Earth — and a multi-year Mars mission could expose astronauts to hundreds of millisieverts.