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The road to Mars: NASA's next 30 years
What will NASA be up to by 2030? The space agency (and even President Barack Obama) hopes it will be close to launching a manned mission to the surface of Mars. But, before that's possible, there's a whole lot of puzzle pieces to fit together. In fact, some of those pieces haven't even been invented yet. But NASA is already laying the groundwork. Dig through the agency's roadmap (a dense collection of science-heavy documents) and you can put together an outline of where its research and technology are headed. And, of course, the hope is that any invention or technological evolution will also find applications at home on Earth. Still, the focus remains on getting us to the red planet. Mars is certainly far, but it's going to seem much closer in a decade or two.
