Space

“The mid-latitudes offer the perfect compromise – they get enough sunlight for power, but they’re still cold enough to preserve ice near the surface,” Luzzi said. “That makes them ideal for future landing sites.”

Water and electricity are the basis for a lot of processes such as electrolysis to produce oxygen, and growing plants for food. It is required that when people land on mars, they need to have access to water and electricity.

Water is unevenly distributed across mars, with these two maps providing insight:

The first image displays the hydrogen content of mars rock (regolith); many studies such as this one discuss the technical feasibility of extracting water from that kind of regolith (with positive outcome).

The second map displays the depth that water ice is hypothesized to be buried on Mars, revealing that many areas on mars actually contain water ice close below the surface. This belief is further reinforced by findings such as this one:

This is what phoenix rover dug up in 2008. It displays water ice exposed through a shovel slowly evaporating over a course of 4 days.

Sedna, this reddish dwarf planet follows such an extreme orbit that it takes more than 11,000 years to complete a single journey around the sun. Now, scientists are proposing a new mission to reach this distant world using a revolutionary propulsion technology.

A new feasibility study, posted to the arXiv preprint server, has examined two cutting-edge approaches to technology that would reach Sedna within this narrow window of opportunity. The first involves the direct fusion drive (DFD), a conceptual nuclear fusion engine, designed to produce both thrust and electric power. For the DFD, researchers assume a 1.6 MW system with constant thrust and specific impulse, representing a massive leap beyond current propulsion technology.

The second approach involves an ingenious variation on solar sailing technology. Rather than relying entirely on solar radiation pressure, this concept uses thermal desorption instead. This is a process where molecules or atoms that are stuck to a surface are released when that surface is heated up, and it's this process that produces the propulsion. It would be assisted by a gravity assist maneuver around Jupiter, using the planet's immense gravitational field as a gravitational slingshot.