Xeroxing the Brand

The informal Mars Underground group served as a model for other planetary scientists who wanted NASA to take their proposals seriously. Their strategy was considered so successful that, in 1989, another group of astronomers Xeroxed the brand," igniting a push for a mission to the outer solar system. Their name? The Pluto Underground. Many of its founding members are now scientists working on NASAs New Horizons mission. That initiative, led by Principal Investigator Alan Stern (and Pluto Underground member), flew past Pluto in 2015 and the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth in 2019.

In the 2000s, another unofficial-yet-passionate band of scientists replicated the Mars Underground model this time to advocate for sending humans to asteroids before attempting a journey to Mars. The so-called Asteroid Underground studied the science objectives, engineering requirements, and costs of such a mission. Eventually, in 2013, the seemingly wild idea became the space agencys official policy with the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). However, the Trump administration defunded ARM in 2017 in favor of a Moon-first policy.

Its been nearly 40 years since the Mars Underground formed, and its founders have risen to become some of the most prominent voices in todays push for space exploration.

Mars Underground co-founder Penelope Boston, who helped organize The Case for Mars conferences, went on to launch a cave studies program at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. In fact, she helped pioneer the study of life in Earths caves, paving the way for similar work on Mars someday. And in 2016, Boston became the director of NASAs Astrobiology Institute in California.

In 1998, longtime Mars Underground member Robert Zubrin used the group as inspiration to launch the Mars Society. Today, the group boasts thousands of members and hosts annual Mars conferences with high-profile attendees, including Elon Musk.

Chris McKay, who was still working on his Ph.D. when he co-founded Mars Underground, has had a storied career as an astrobiologist, studying organisms living in extreme environments on Earth for insights into life on Mars. These days, hes a senior planetary scientist at NASA, where hes actively involved in planning future Mars missions including eventual human trips. McKay now advocates for putting humans back on the Moon, which he and others believe is a necessary stepping stone to Mars. He is also a champion for a robotic sample return mission to Mars.

And thats exactly what NASA plans to do. This summer, theyll launch the most sophisticated Mars rover ever built, which will both search for past life and collect martian soil samples. Meanwhile, the space agency has hired a host of private spaceflight companies for its Artemis program, which NASA hopes will return astronauts to the Moon by 2024. From there, its on to Mars in the following decades.

Although the dreams of Mars Underground members might have taken far longer to come true than they would have hoped, with each passing year their ambitious vision of being an interplanetary species is marching toward reality.

Read the original post:

How 'Mars Undergound' sparked a return to the Red Planet - Astronomy Magazine