My essential question I had about space was: What technological advancements do we need to explore past mars?

There are a lot of technological advancements needed to go past Mars because we haven’t yet been able to send humans there but everything is a learning experience and helps further our technology and ability to go different places.

InSight is a lander that is going to Mars already but when it was being made it had a lot of different factors that were taken into consideration including EDL – entry, decent, landing. These factors are crushal to getting the space craft to safely land on Mars. They are landing this space craft at a higher elevation than they did with Phoenix Mars Lander so there will be less time for deceleration and there is more dust storms up there. To adjust to these conditions they used a thicker heat shield and its parachute will open at higher speed with stronger suspension lines. This might not be a huge technological advancement but when exploring other places to land space crafts they have to look at these types of factors and this helps with exploration of other places where they have to assess the conditions of what they need. InSight isn’t the first space craft to go to mars and they have learned from past experiences of what they need to excel further. This was a small change in just landing at a higher elevation but landing on a different planet will be a whole other challenge with its own factors.

As they say in the end of the video “We learn everything from the past that we can and we apply all those things to the future projects and future missions” and this is a very important part in my opinion because they are learning from their experiences and mistakes and will apply it to the future projects and missions to make them better and more successful.

NASA build a engine that broke records for being able to run without issue of over 12 years. This is important because having an engine that can run for this long will help them be able to go further. This engine would be eligable to go past mars on a round trip but they need to test the consistency of this and what other factors can play into not making it run smoothly.

At this point NASA is very focused on going to Mars because there is possible life there and it is the closest planet to earth in our solar system to us. Other expeditions they are working on are going closer to the sun than they ever have before and are also planning on landing on an asteroid.

In conclusion this question is very open ended because there is endless amounts of places we could explore and so many things are needed. NASA’s main focus is going to mars at the moment and there is not a lot of information about the other places. There is a lot of factors into going to anyplace because everyplace is different and those have to be researched and found out before the technological advancements are made, but many of the inventions listed above are a every good start to getting there and based on conditions of where the space craft would be landing, these inventions can be modified and improved.