The space agency plans to send its first manned mission to the Red Planet between 2030 and 2040.
However NASA must first tackle a number of obstacles to protect the crew – including finding a way to block harmful radiation rays that could cause cancer.
The Mars-bound astronauts will be exposed to high energy particles, so NASA needs to look at ways to protect their crew’s DNA and halt the damage these particles could do to it.
This could go so far as to actually alter the astronauts genetic activity and their genes.
The alterations may be necessary because when humans travel beyond the Earth’s magnetic field for prolonged periods, they are exposed to charged atomic nuclei.
These particles can rip through a person’s DNA, and is also likely to increase their risk of both cancer and dementia.
Douglas Terrier, NASA’s acting chief technologist, said: “We’re looking at a range of things, from drug therapies, and those seem to be quite promising, to more extreme things like epigenetic modification.
“I think those have a lot of ethical consequences so they’re still in the experimental thought stages.”
NASA hopes to speed up the race to Mars after President Donald Trump pledged $19.1 billion this year in funding to help the mission.
The 2018 NASA budget is slightly smaller than the one promised by Barack Obama last year, but it still provides a substantial amount of funding for the space agency.
NASA’s goal is to send humans to the red planet by the 2030’s – a goal authorised in 2010.
These plans also include sending a manned mission to intercept an asteroid by 2025, to capture it and put it in orbit around the moon.
The massive scientific undertaking is a culmination of years of research and technological development.