Flying Over Mercury

Since we are going to the closest planet to the sun, heat is going to be a real issue. Our ship will have an outer layer of sun shades. We will use the research facility inside the ship, because it is so large. A small amount of equipment will be necessary to use outside, so our scientists have created a suit that allows us to walk on the surface of mercury, using a special material that absorbs great amounts of temperature. Also, the amount of light that passes through the windows will be controlled, so that the sun won’t affect us or our eyes. We will also load extra food, just in case there is a malfunction and we will need to use extra days to fix it.

Life Aboard Our Ship

As you probably know we are soon to be leaving on a mission to Mars and we are going to need some things to be able to wash, eat, sleep,etc.We will also need equipment for our mission I will be telling you what these thing are and what we will be using them for. One thing we need to have is sleep and we can’t really have beds or pillows because well theirs no gravity so what were going to do is we will have little sleeping bags that will be loosely attached to panels so we don’t float around and accidentally push the self destruct button while we are sleeping, just kidding we don’t have a self destruct button.We also need to eat and eating is different in space.Space food is usually packaged in little aluminum containers that are small and light so they aren’t to heavy and they won’t take up to much space,haha get it. Space food is always  bite-sized making the food easier to eat.Now lets think on what we have to wear in space.While we’re in the space ship we have to go through a whole procedure to put our lead-lined flexible plastic underwear, again just kidding we can wear anything we want on the space ship but on Mars we wear are usual space suits. Everybody wonders how we go to the bathroom in space, well is quite simple what we do is we sit on a specially formed

This is what our toilet looks like.

Courtesy of NASA

toilet seat, and buckle ourselves in so we don’t float away while we’re doing our thing, and to help us along even further there is this big vacuum that sucks all, that out to be reused and so it doesn’t float out of the toilet. Now when we take baths we don’t get into a tub with nice and hot water with bubble bath in it, if we get the chance to take a bath we would take a damp rag or cloth and we would wipe ourselves clean with that cloth which will have either a waterless shampoo if we’re cleaning our hair. The shampoo is waterless so the soap doesn’t foam up and do something to the space ship that could kill us. If we’re cleaning ourselves in general we will either use alcohol or liquid soap that is soaked into the cloth. When we get hurt or sick our medical officer will now how to do stitches or shots and all of us know how to do CPR just in case one of us have a heart attack. In our free time when we’re not working we could be exercising on a treadmill or ergometer. A ergometer is like a bike that you can control the resistance of the petals and your stationary. We’ll also have to spend some time on cleaning we will be cleaning the meal area, changing air filters, etc. The last thing we might be doing in our actual spear time is entertaining ourselves we could read books surf the Internet if we have a good connection with earth and listen to music, we can basically bring any belongings we want on the mission.

Now we will have to bring equipment, I will be telling you what our equipment is and what it does. The first piece of equipment is a soil testing kit we will use this to find if the soil on Mars has any signs of life such as evidence of water. Another device we will have is a weather prob that we will launch to see if its OK to enter the atmosphere or not due to weather. To go along with the weather prob we will have a A.S.I.A which stands for atmospheric structure investigation accelerometers we will use this when we are aerobraking. Aerobraking is when we reduce the ships elliptic orbit (the way we orbit, which is like an oval shape with the thing we are orbiting closer to one side than the other).This device will measure the drag of the ship when we are aerobraking which will give us the density of the upper atmosphere. Another device is called shallow radar this device will us radar to look under the surface to for frozen or unfrozen water. The gravity field investigation tool will measure the martian gravity field which will help in finding mass changes in the polar caps and land disturbances like earthquakes. the next piece of equipment is a Mars Climate Surrounder this peice of equipment will measure the temp., air pressure, dust concentrations, and water vapour concentrations while we’re on Mars. That is all the testing equipment we will be bringing to Mars, I hope we have a big trunk.