Nasa to start sending humans to Mars: agency will pick landing spots for colonisation in October

USA: Nasa is getting ready to pick the landing zone for the first ever manned mission to Mars.

The mission itself won't take place until the mid-2030s, but the space agency is already looking at potential sites.

A workshop will be held in Texas in October to discuss 100-kilometer-wide "exploration zones" that could work as landing sites.

The sites would need to have enough resources - such as sub-surface ice - to support human visitors as well as being scientifically interesting.

"This is going to be a hot debate," said Jim Green, head of Nasa's Planetary Science Division.

"[It] will start exactly the conversation we need to be able to architect what a station on Mars would look like, and how it would operate."

Once the sites have been chosen, Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Odyssey spacecraft will continue to scan the sites from space.

The idea of a manned mission to Mars has been around for years. The controversial Mars One project planned to turn a space mission into a TV reality show.

More recently, Nasa successfully tested its Orion spacecraft which will one day take human beings the 225,300,000 kilometers to Mars.

When the manned mission finally does take place, astronauts will be able to lay rest to the theory that a pyramid on the Red Planet represents and ancient alien civilization.