That is probably quite pessimistic I think it takes less than 4.5 years to get to Mars, for example  Phoenix  only took 10 months to get there, and if you were carrying  people  you  would  probably  travel  faster. Probably somewhere around 6 months or so, depending exactly the orbits and the trajectories that you're looking at and how close Mars is to Earth at the time.

The way it's normally done is that every two years Mars does a close swing past of Earth. That's when we launch all our space missions: every 2 years. What you're looking at for a human mission is you're either going to go there and back, quickly while Mars is close or you go there, stay for 2 years and then come back again.

One of the worries with human health isn't just the microgravity and that making our bones thin.  Radiation on Mars is going to be a serious problem because it doesn't have the atmosphere that the Earth does and it doesn't have the magnetic field that the Earth does to protect us.  It's not just the space journey. It's also on Mars itself. we're going to have to think very carefully about how we shield our astronauts.

There was a recent experiment to look at just this sort of thing, which looked at how light was bent by the gravity of Jupiter. Our recent observations are yes, we think the gravity travels at exactly the same speed. If you plucked the sun from out of its orbit, just removed it completely - we would still orbit around the sun for eight minutes before suddenly the Earth realised that it wasn't there anymore and disappeared off into space.
 A wonderful statistic I heard from Brian Fulton, who was professor of Astrophysics at York, is that the light emerging from the sun (because the sun's so big and massive and has so much gravity) the light is already something like a million years old. Even if the sun went out tomorrow we'd still have a million years' more light. 

No, it would not. Unfortunately Mars does not have a magnetic field anymore. The magnetic field on Earth is generated by the core rotating inside the Earth and Mars has just cooled down too much and that whole process has just been frozen. So it has lost its magnetic field. Some rocks are still magnetised but the planet itself has no overall field.

Yes there is a lot more UV on the surface of Mars because we don't have the atmosphere to protect us. However, Mars is a lot farther from the sun than the Earth is. The sunlight in general is a lot dimmer and solar panels don't just respond to UV. They respond to normal light as well. There's also a lot of dust in the atmosphere of Mars which is a major problem with the solar panels on the recent rovers. They get covered in dust and stop working effectively.

The seasons on Mars are longer than the ones on Earth due to the fact that Mars' year is longer than Earth's year. Because it's farther from the sun, It's got farther to go around. So Mars' summer is about twice as long as you'd expect on Earth.  Which, if you're having good summers like they do in Australia would be fantastic but a bummer if you live in Britain!

The asteroid belt is remains of a planet that didn't quite make it. So, we can look at those asteroids if we could get a sample of one we could look at its structure and then basically we can explore what would be in the Earth's centre so the core and the mantle and their composition by looking at these asteroids. They're a kind of vestige of what we're made of and one of the bonuses is sometimes we get meteorites fall on the Earth which is essentially bits of asteroid. We can analyse those in our labs. We've got bits of Mars here on Earth just a few little bits that have come off and been blasted by asteroid impacts and just through luck have landed here and someone's found them.

Essentially we assume that because that's all we know. People have speculated that there could be silicon-based life or other, more exotic forms of life but we've only ever seen carbon-based life. It's a good place to start, really. Something that's based on carbon and water is probably what we're looking for. If we look for something more exotic we'd probably struggle to find it in the first place.

It's likely to take hundreds of years, as you’ve got to change the composition of the atmosphere of a whole planet.  You need got to undo the reasons that Mars doesn’t have an atmosphere already, which is that it doesn’t have a magnetic field. The solar wind has gone past, but there’s no magnetic field to deflect it, so much of the atmosphere has been lost.  We’re still looking at probably 30-50 years before we send a man to Mars, which we will almost certainly need do do before we even think about starting to terraform Mars.

The answer is certainly yes. You can see quite a lot of examples if you go to the Natural History Museum or if you're local, go to the Sidgwick Museum in Cambridge. One of the researchers there is digging up Plesiosaurs, a swimming reptile closely related to dinosaurs locally in Ely.

Basically. The same laws of physics apply here as apply on Mars, well we think as least, as everywhere else in the Universe. It would be the same basic elements: carbon, silicon. The same elements but we do get some different mineralogy. The way they are fitting together on Mars is often slightly different to the way it works on Earth.

According to Einstein gravity attracts things, because it bends space, and a black hole occurs when this bending becomes extreme. As far as we know electric and magnetic fields don't bend space in the same way, so they wouldn't create a black hole. Also because like charges repel it would be very difficult to squeeze a large amount of charge together, so even if theoretically you could produce an electric or magnetic black hole practically it would be impossible.

But, in theory a black hole can be magnetic or at least the gas that's swirling around it would be magnetic. The gas becomes charged and essentially becomes electric current going around the black hole along with all the matter. You get a magnetic field created there. Whether you get something that actually sucks in magnetic field may be slightly different. Magnetic field in theory is related to light so really black holes should suck it all in at the same time.