NASA is gearing up for a Mars mission in the 2030s — a timeframe that may seem far away, but for the space agency, it’s not too soon to start thinking about where these astronauts should land on the Red Planet.

A workshop is slated for this October in Houston to start some discussions on landing sites for the first manned Mars mission, which could be launched in the mid to late 2030s, according to a Discovery News report.

During the meeting, which will take place over four days, researchers are to come up with exploration zones spanning 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, which would have some scientifically interesting aspects and possibly some essential resources like water ice.

It’s likely to lead to some fierce debate, but it will be a necessary one to have to determine what a station on Mars should look like and how it could be operated. This discussion will kick off a series of studies on the most promising exploration zones in the next few years.

To assist in this mission, the agency will use the Mars Odyssey spacecraft — which began orbit in 2001 — and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) — which arrived in 2006 — to pinpoint some likely candidates.

The orbiters have a limited life, so the agency needs to start using them to look for candidate sites right away rather than wait until a few years before the mission launches.

That will be easier said than done. The MRO, for all the work it has done, has only capture high-resolution images of 3 percent of the Martian surface, but humans will need high-resolution images of the whole exploration zone in order to know where they’re going.