Life on Mars If the surface life has been reanimated as recently as 450,000 years ago, then rovers on Mars could find dormant but still viable life at a depth of one meter below the surface, according to an estimate. In 1965, the Mariner 4 probe discovered that Mars had no global magnetic field that would protect the planet from potentially life-threatening cosmic radiation and solar radiation; observations made in the late 1990s by the Mars Global Surveyor confirmed this discovery. Scientists speculate that the lack of magnetic shielding helped the solar wind blow away much of Mars's atmosphere over the course of
Human mission to Mars were for a launch sometime between 2016 and 2020. The Mars probe would carry a crew of four to five cosmonauts, who would spend close to two years in space. In late 2011, Russian and European space agencies successfully completed the ground-based MARS-500. The biomedical experiment simulating crewed flight to Mars was completed in Russia in July 2000. In 2011, Jean-Marc Salotti published a new proposal for a crewed Mars mission, with a release in 2012. The 2-4-2 concept is based on a reduction of the crew size to only 2 astronauts and the duplication of the entire mission. There