Mars

NEW YORK - A manned mission to Mars could be put at risk by astronauts too tired to perform duties by the time they arrive on the planet, a study suggests.

In a 17-month simulation of a mission to Mars, 4 of 6 astronauts became increasingly sedentary and experienced problems in performance associated with sleep deprivation, according to research released Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The problems occurred early in the mission, scientists said.

OGDEN — Stephanie Baltazar looked at the labeled, premeasured sheets of plastic she and her mission teammates had pieced together with duct tape.

The fifth-graders awaited the command decision that it was time to connect their plastic structures to box fans, to inflate their habitats for the Mission to Mars activity.

“I think this could work on Mars,” said Stephanie, 11, from Clearfield’s Holt Elementary School. “We built a habitat, and I think we’ll be able to fit our team into it. It would work as shelter.”

A multibillion-dollar gamble, a most scary landing and possibly learning whether Mars once could have supported life - briefly, that’s what’s at stake in NASA’s Mars Curiosity mission, set to touch down early Monday. Mars is a difficult place to get to - only about a third of the 44 missions there have succeeded. Curiosity is the most ambitious and complex Mars mission ever conceived, writes Marc Kaufman, author of "First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth." Soon, we’ll know whether Curiosity’s creators were brilliant and far-seeing - or reaching too far.

Lean financial times are prompting belt-tightening far and wide -- and now that extends to Mars and the rest of the solar system.

President Barack Obama's proposed budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for fiscal year 2013 would eliminate $300 million from the agency's planetary sciences division, a 20 percent cut from the $1.5 billion it received for 2012. Though the budget plan, released last week, would preserve funding for high-profile projects like the James Webb Space Telescope and manned space missions, scientists were alarmed by the hit to relatively inexpensive programs that explore the solar system with high-tech robots.

MOSCOW -- Pale but smiling, an international crew of researchers on Friday walked out of a set of windowless modules after a grueling 520-day simulation of a flight to Mars.

The all-male crew of three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian-Colombian and a Chinese slowly emerged from the western Moscow facility, which simulated the confinement, stress and fatigue of interplanetary travel -- minus the weightlessness. Dressed in blue track suits emblazoned with the mission emblem, they carefully walked down a metal ladder to a greeting crowd of officials and journalists.

WASHINGTON -- Arizona researchers announced "the best evidence to date of liquid water on Mars," saying photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest more than 1,000 dark flows of briny water near the Martian equator.