Oh, how I'd love to walk on that landscape -
Well firstly, if you want to live to remember the experience....you're gonna need a pressure suit. Probably similar to the ones used on the
Apollo missions, or even now for EVAs in low Earth orbit (for pure vacuum environments)....since the atmospheric pressure on Mars isn't anyway near Earth's, nor survivable by any of our lifeforms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
0.087 PSI is....well...would be fatal rather quickly.
Here is an interesting video (
link to it, rather than posting the thing as an "embed") about the development of the EVA suits, or "space-suits" that occurred as a need, for the ultimate Apollo missions. (
**) You can see some similarity to the suits flown on Gemini...but
those (though they protected the Astronauts from death) had some major limitations....the umbilical tether, for example....and a severe lack of flexibility. Essentially the Human exists in a "balloon", and has limited mobility (in the Gemini versions).
(**)Adding....the series "Moon Machines" is incredible, and worth a watch!!
Later iterations of suits worked better. BTW? "Some" people try to say that Stanley Kubrick "faked" the Apollo Moon scenes...(I know, this veers a bit off-topic, but is part of the point I am making). ANY person who casually observes the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey[/I]" or the stills that show the actors
from that film in their "space suits" can understand how wrong they are....(created by the "Props" Department based on, at the time, the images of Project Mercury pressure suits...NEVER intended to be exposed to actual vacuum of space). The actors are ALSO quite obviously walking in a 1-G environment.
Please also note, in the "
2001" clip? (A wonderful masterpiece film, don't get me wrong!!)....but, the Lunar "moonscape" is just wrong!!! Wrong, wrong!! Looks "alien" yes....but not like our actual Moon. This location is supposed to be in the Tycho Crater...hence the designation for the discovery of this artifact as
"TMA-1"...Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1 .
You can search online for actual images of the Tycho Crater, on our Moon.
(More nerdish things...in the "
2001" clip above? You can clearly see the "terminator" line on the Moon's surface....this is the line from dark to "sunrise" as the Moon rotates....BUT? The Earth, shown there in background, is illuminated from a different direction!!! So, really....the "Kubrick faked" stuff is just debunked...)
But to walk in that place! Go over those hills, pick up those rocks with one's own hands. It's amazing that we are really there on Mars - a place that was only speculation. Now we see. We actually can see it. And touch it. Amazing.
