With its impeccable landing on Thursday, NASA's Perseverance became the fifth rover to reach Mars—so when can we finally expect the long-held goal of a crewed expedition to materialize?

NASA's current Artemis program is billed as a "Moon to Mars" mission, and acting administrator Steve Jurczyk has reiterated his aspiration of "the mid-to-end of the 2030s" for American boots on the Red Planet.

But while the trip is technologically almost within grasp, experts say it's probably still decades out because of funding uncertainties.

If experiments done in small bottles in a University of Oregon lab are accurate, the friction of colliding Martian dust particles are unlikely to generate big electrical storms or threaten the newly arrived exploration vehicles or, eventually, human visitors.

For 50 years since Viking landers and later orbiters detected silts, clays, wind-blown bedforms and dust devils on Mars, scientists have worried about the potential for large lightning storms and whether static electricity generated by the planet's mostly basaltic rock particles could damage vehicles or human protective gear.

In the journal Icarus, a UO team reports that the friction caused by dust particles making contact with each other may indeed produce electrical discharges at the surface and in the planet's atmosphere, but any resulting sparks are likely to be small.

Such concerns had resurfaced in relation to the new NASA Mars mission, which successfully put the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity robotic helicopter on the red planet Feb. 18.

In the lab of volcanologist Josef Dufek, researchers used a vertical glass tube comparable in size to a water bottle measuring some 4 inches in diameter and 8 inches in length.