My Backyard: Outdoor Lifestyle
OUTTAKES: News&Issues: The Outer Limits
By Nick O'Connell
Nov 1, 2005, 12:42

Forget Alaska and the Himalayas. Outdoor junkies will soon be able to tick off a whole list of first ascents and other wacky stunts in the untouched reaches of the interplanetary backyard.

Planet Earth is fast running out of firsts. Climbers have cherry-picked the best lines on Mount Everest. Rafters have ticked off many of the remaining first descents of rivers like the Blue Nile. Explorers have probed the major features of the globe, even those on the polar ice caps. Summiteers have resorted to all sorts of stunts (first diabetic, first extended family, first dog) to claim new firsts. So what’s left for the next generation to explore?

Plenty. Future generations of adventurers will travel to other planets to tackle even bigger challenges: climbing Mars’ 85,000-foot Ascraeus Mons (requires oxygen tanks and space suit to withstand temperatures of 200 below zero and colder), traversing the Moon’s Copernicus crater (requires three days of rappelling just to reach the bottom), or perhaps the solar system’s wildest ride—snowboarding the rings of Saturn (requires tear-resistant space suit and nerves of titanium).

Sound far-fetched? It’s not just science fiction according to University of Washington astronomy professor Paul Hodge, who highlights these adventure destinations of the future in his book, Higher Than Everest: An Adventurer’s Guide to the Solar System (Cambridge, 2001). “These trips will appeal to both mountain climbers and scientists,” says Hodge, who is an avid outdoorsman. “Climbing Ascraeus would be a great adventure, but it would also help answer questions about if there was life on Mars.”

All of the 20 trips Hodge describes in his book are hypothetically possible, though none are easy. In many cases, extreme conditions make the logistics formidable at present: They will require remarkable spacecraft and space suits, just as the Apollo moon landings required the development of super hi-tech gear and equipment to make them possible. But none of the trips are out of the question. Many “impossible” feats in adventure sports are now routine. Just think, ascents of Everest without oxygen tanks were once reputed to be out of the question. Now they’re run-of-the-mill.

“We could have gone to Mars 20 years ago if we’d wanted,” says George Nelson, a former astronaut who flew three missions aboard the space shuttle. “The amount of money spent on the Iraq war could have gotten us to Mars. It’s not the technology, it’s the politics.”
Once the political will arrives and our backyard stretches into the solar systems, each of the five adventures we outline below will likely follow.
The Solar System’s Highest Peak

The Trip: Mars’ Ascraeus Mons rises 85,000 feet above the dusty, rocky plains of the red planet. Nearly three times the height of Mount Everest, Ascraeus will certainly test the abilities of interplanetary alpinists, but it offers fewer technical problems than the South Col route on Everest. A shield volcano, built by successive lava flows spewing from its 25-mile-wide central crater, it resembles the Mauna Loa volcano on Hawaii, but without the palm trees, trade winds or tropical fruit drinks.

The approach from the northeast ascends through rough, jumbled lava flows before turning northwest to follow a shallow shelf. It then skirts steep cliffs on the southwest and ascends straight up the reddish boulder-strewn slope to the top, for a gentle ascent of the 25-mile-wide summit crater. There you can plant your expedition flag and snap summit photos. Careful with the champagne; in Mars’s low atmospheric pressure, the cork could prove a deadly weapon.

Logistics: Expect temperatures of 32 degrees Fahrenheit at base camp, and nightly lows of 200 below zero on the summit. It will take about nine months to travel to Mars, three weeks to summit and nine months to get back. All of your food, water and oxygen must be brought along or flown in prior to the expedition. “A modified Apollo suit would probably be best,” says Nelson. “It was designed to walk on the moon. Given the advances in suit technology in the last 30 years, I bet the folks in Houston could come up with great duds for Martian mountain climbers.”

But would Earthbound mountaineers really be interested? “Sign me up,” says top alpine climber Steve House, of Bend, Oregon.

“When Gaston Rebuffat and the French team made the first ascent of Annapurna [the first 8,000 meter peak to be climbed] their approach time was roughly nine months as well. It shouldn’t be a problem to get the time off work; I’d just quit.”

Previous Expeditions: US spacecraft Mariner 4 first flew by the planet and took pictures in 1965. The Soviet Mars 2 and 3 lander modules crashed on the planet in 1971. Recently, the Mars Expedition Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been exploring and sending back images from the planet’s surface since January 2004. See them at www.jpl.nasa.gov.

The Great Copernicus Traverse

The Trip: Be the first humans to visit the moon since 1972, as you make the three-day descent into this 55-mile crater. In the moon’s light gravity, it will require another three days to hop and bounce across the fantastically varied crater floor, passing volcanic cones, tuff rings, deep crevices and rocks melted from the impact of a 5-mile-wide asteroid that smacked into the moon and blew out the crater. Smack dab in the middle of Copernicus, a range of mountains rises some 7,000 feet above the crater floor, making an excellent objective for a first ascent. Count on another four to six days to return to the rim and to basecamp.

Logistics: The 17,000-foot descent into the crater will likely serve as the crux, as it would require hundreds of rappels down steep cliffs to reach the crater’s floor. “I’d say you’d need four days to descend,” says House. “The load of hardware you’d need to leave would be enormous. Can I have Sylvester Stallone’s bolt gun from Cliffhanger?”

Previous Expeditions: On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from Apollo 11 became the first humans to walk on the moon. In February 1971, Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard became the first to play golf on the moon.

Desend to Venus’ Maxwell Montes

The Trip: The summit of this peak represents a formidable goal—higher than Everest (39,370 feet), hotter than Hades (lead melts on the planet’s surface), steeper than the Alps (an average 67-degree slope), and enveloped in air more toxic than that of Houston (think clouds of sulfuric acid). This trip requires a basecamp in orbit above the peak, because the surface of Venus can easily hit 900 degrees and atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of Earth. However, at about 150,000 feet above the planet’s surface, the air pressure is like that of Earth and temperatures plummet to a balmy 120 degrees. Radar images of the high mountains look as if they are snow-covered, which is impossible, because they’re so hot. Don your protective space suits to venture outside of the ship, tag the scorching summit and perhaps make a few turns in the mystery material.

Logistics: An ideal craft for such an expedition would look like something out of Jules Verne—an airship with thick, well-insulated walls, portholes for view and an escape hatch for a brief trip outside. Descent would be slow, sideways and down to compensate for the high winds raking Venus’s upper atmosphere.

Previous Expeditions: The Soviet probe Venera 3—the first spacecraft to reach another planet—crashed into Venus in March 1966. The European Space Agency’s Venus Express will head to the planet in late 2005.

Snowboard the Rings of Saturn

The Trip: Bounce your way through the 100-foot-thick (but 175,000-mile-wide) band of ice chunks circling Saturn, the star attraction of the solar system’s most visually appealing planet. This won’t be easy. The rings move rapidly, but if you approach them by spaceship and adjust to their velocity, you’ll be ready for the solar system’s wildest ride. Strap on a specially designed snowboard. Duck when the massive snowballs streak toward you. You may be able to dodge and redirect house-sized icebergs by grabbing a television-sized chunk and using it as a shield. After popping out the other side, take in the otherworldly colors and amazing symmetry of the rings. (For a preview, check out the images captured this month by the Cassini spacecraft at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.) Bump your way back through the band, then ascend back to your spaceship to high-five your colleagues.

Logistics: “The technical challenge would be to control your direction,” says K2 Sports’ snowboard category manager Doug Sanders. “You’d need a jet propulsion system on the snowboard to keep from careening through the rings like a pinball. With a propulsion system you’d be able to reorient yourself like a ballistic missile.”

Previous Expeditions: Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to fly by Saturn in 1980. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft continues to fly through Saturn’s rings, with the next session scheduled for October 11, 2005.

Seek Out Life on Titan

The Trip: The late Carl Sagan, astronomer and star of TV’s Cosmos, was especially fascinated by Titan—Saturn’s largest moon—because of its abundance of organic materials (compounds with carbon, the building block of life, as a chief constituent). Sagan surmised that this moon, which is larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto and has seas of liquid methane, might provide the key to understanding Earth’s atmosphere, which several billion years ago may have resembled that of present-day Titan.

Most scientists believe that temperatures on Titan are too cold to support life, but others disagree. “Titan might contain viable organisms,” says Richard Hoover, Astrobiology group leader at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “Bacteria can freeze solid but not die. We’ve taken bacteria from the Pleistocene age and brought it back to life. So we might find life in a frozen state in one of Titan’s seas.” If life does exist, it most likely will be microscopic and located near a volcano.

Logistics: Just getting to Titan represents a formidable challenge. Your muscles will atrophy during the seven-year-long flight, even though you’ll work daily to maintain the rockets and spaceship, while doing research and communicating with Earth. Once on Titan, you could take samples from the methane muck to see if they might contain an entirely new form of life. “It would be important work and a great adventure,” says Nelson. “It’s real exploration.”

Previous Expeditions: Voyager 1 first flew by the planet-sized moon in November 1980. The Cassini spacecraft sent back images of Titan in October 2004 and its Hyguens lander module touched down in January 2005, yielding solid beta about what future explorers may find.