Photo: AFP
Mark June 27th of 2033 on your calendar as a date to remember. That’s correct- nine years and one week from today, because that’s the day NASA is planning to send astronauts on a manned mission to Mars, because the distance between Earth and Mars will be at its shortest. Retired astronomy professor Harold Kozak is among those counting down the 3,294 days until then. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program and explained why it’s a mission Americans should actively follow.
“This is something that we have to do,” Kozak told Berman and Riedel. “When people say, ‘Well gee, do we have to do this?’, just keep in mind what happened with Sputnik and how we had to get really on our toes- well, China is going to launch a mission in 2033 also, and they’re planning other missions in 2035, I believe, 2037, and Japan and India are going to follow. So, it’s not a question of ‘Should we?’, but ‘We must.’”
The fact that we’re planning to send astronauts in 2033, Kozak says, leads to the next question- why? “We still want to take a look at what’s underground, because below the surface we know there’s liquid water. There still could be life there. We want to eventually terraform Mars, so that means we want to change its atmosphere back to what it was billions of years ago, when running water was on the surface. We have to terraform because if we don’t do it, like I said, others- Russia, China, India, Japan- they’re planning on doing it, so eventually, we’re going to have people living there.”
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