how far it is... With our spacecraft it takes us about 9 months to reach Mars – to get from earth to Mars... The other key challenge is the accuracy of navigation – when we send a spacecraft, after travelling 450 million kilometres, we have to nail it down within 2 kilometres, to land at the right location.... If you look at Mars at night in the sky, it is a tiny little dot – and we have to send a spacecraft to hit that dot... To give you an idea, if you are a golf player, this is the same as if I hit a golf ball from California towards Beirut – it has to land straight in the cup, a hole in one... and to make it a little bit more interesting and challenging the cup is moving at high speed – at 60,000 miles per hour. That’s how accurate we have to be to land successfully at the right location... Why do we explore? People ask me, why are we spending all that money? In general, I would say that if our ancestors were not explorers, we would still be living in caves. But they wanted to explore what’s outside those caves, just as the Phoenicians Dr Elachi oversees the mission from JPL