During the weekend of the 27th and 28th July the BBC broadcast a 30-minute TV programme “How to put a human on Mars”. The programme explored some of the key aspects of how a mission to Mars might look.
Dr Simon Foster, Outreach officer for the Physics Department at Imperial College London, was one of five researchers at Imperial who took part. He showed how ice could be used to produce fuel for the return journey and how parachutes would be deployed to slow down and stabilise the landing craft before the astronauts could step foot on the red planet.
To demonstrate this he threw a camera off of the Queen’s Tower, attached to parachutes to simulate a possible landing on Mars.
The full show can be seen here.