Extra! Extra! Get your Spring 2022 issue of Your Martian Daily! You’ve just completed a l

Extra! Extra! Get your Spring 2022 issue of Your Martian Daily! 

You’ve just completed a long flight to Mars, and you want to get out under the pink, hazy sky. It’s about time to kick back on the Red Planet for a catnap outside in the sun, right? Wrong.

While the sun’s rays would be much weaker on Mars than on Earth, the radiation dosage and the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere would make for a rather hazardous sunbathing experience for us Earthlings. That’s certainly not the only thing you would have to get used to in your new life on Mars.

“On Mars, you can’t go outside without putting on a 300-pound spacesuit,” says Stan Love, an astronaut and planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “The scenery is rarely going to change. The people are rarely going to change. You have to live in a sealed habitat.”

We may encounter such conundrums in the not-so-distant future. SpaceX’s Elon Musk estimates that a rocket capable of interplanetary travel might be ready for testing as early as next year, with plans to deploy a cargo mission to the Red Planet by 2022 in preparation for building a human colony. That got us thinking: If we get there, what would daily life reallybe like on Mars? And you had plenty of questions, too.

So, we asked an astronaut. Flip through the Q&A here! 

Illustration by Case For Mars/NASA and designed by Johanna Mayer