British researchers aim to send humans to Mars

British scientists at the Imperial College of London have designed a new space craft to send a three-person team to Mars, the BBC reports.

The vehicle would consist of two parts, a lander and a cruise vehicle, which would spin around each other to generate artificial gravity, a crucial factor to the mission's success.

The crew would reside in what the researchers call a habitat vehicle, where the centrifugal forces would prevent astronauts’ tissue from degenerating during the journey to the Mars that could take at least 9 months.

"Bone loss [in a weightless environment] is about 1-2% a month and if they're landing they'll be susceptible to fractures if they've got to be exerting themselves,” Ryan Robinson, the Imperial team's physiologist, told BBC News.

The crew would return using a vehicle stationed on Mars beforehand, which would fuel itself with the energy created by splitting water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, a process also known as electrolysis.

The new design has reignited debate about the costly dream of sending people to Mars, which has spurred two recent private initiatives that aim to put humans on the red planet within the next 12 to 15 years or even establish a full-fledged human colony, the BBC reports.

The Imperial team points at the significant risks of undertaking a journey to Mars, like solar flares and exposure to galactic radiation.

"We've got some great results from the Mars curiosity rover," Martin Archer, a researcher at Imperial College who specializes in solar and cosmic radiation, told the BBC.

"On its trip to Mars, it measured the radiation from these galactic cosmic rays and it was exposed to quite a lot - about two-thirds of the level that NASA is prepared to risk over the whole of an astronaut's life, just on the way there and back again," he said.

The U.S., China, Russia and European countries have all launched several successful mission to the planet before. This would be the first mission to Mars that would put people on the surface of the red planet.