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I was thinking about sumitting it, but why the hassle - small chance it will get accepted

about water on Mars. The problem is that temperature and pressure on Mars are oscilating around water triple-point, it means that there is a chance that you will get liquid/ice water at night, but it will vaporize during the day (speaking about non-polar areas, in polar areas water can stay in ice form). Colonists are more likely to settle near equator due to temperature and (maybe) resources. If we consider pressure also, then hellas planitia is very tempting.

And it looks like there is a workaround for problem with constantly vaporizing water - use salt water instead :)

I took this piece from http://marsnews.com/

First, they must have taken a page from the particle physics book: smash things together and see what happens.

Second, we already know they're good at crashing things, so this shouldn't be a problem. In all seriousness, I look forward to it.

No Life on Mars, But Many Bugs

Three Minutes With Mike Deliman

Out-of-memory problem caused Mars rover's glitch

MarsNews.com :: NewsWire :: Mars Exploration Rovers :: Archives

Red Rover's master coder

You are talking about NASA's older plan; I am talking about Mars Direct. I am not arguing that costs have decreased; only that better mission plans exist. What has advanced is not the technology or the financial situation, but the plan.

The reason I say your figures are out of date is that (unless I misunderstand) they come from the 90-day report of ca. 1989/90. Since then, NASA has itself considered Zubrin's Mars Direct plan and adopted based on it the "Mars Design Reference Mission," with costs about twice that of Mars Direct (so, 40 billion dollars). Reference here. I found the Design Reference Mission plan document itself in .gov but could not find the official estimates; the plan itself breaks down by percentage but not dollars.) So as you can see, costs of 400-500 billion dollars are way off.

And there is no need for a moon base before we go to Mars. This is part of the foundation of Mars Direct.

I encourage you to get ahold of the book A Case For Mars, which lays out the Mars Direct (though only at layman-level detail). Even NASA does not now believe Mars will take 400-500 billion dollars.

More references:

A design reference mission based on Zubrin's proposal, but considerably scaled up in personnel and equipment landed on Mars, was costed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who estimated the cost at around $50 billion for three missions. (emphasis added)

It was essentially a compromise between Mars Direct and the Ninety Day Report, and became known as the Reference Mission. A cost estimate even emerged from the Reference Mission design: $55 billion.

They then produced a cost estimate for what a Mars exploration program based upon this expanded Mars Direct would cost. Their result; $50 billion, with the estimate produced by the same costing group that assigned a $400 billion price tag to the traditional cumbersome approach to human Mars exploration embodied in NASA's 1989 "90 Day Report."

Mars Direct homepage

My rant Friday on the subject (I was hot about this issue at the time; still am, though I've cooled off somewhat)

Actually, you can bet that when NASA launches a rover designed to have a significantly longer lifespan, say, in 2009, there won't be solar panels on it to need cleaning.

They can do that, while the USA tries to play whack-a-beagle.

> I'm not sure what exactly "Nozomi" means, but a search on images.google.com sure didn't give me a bullet train :/

Well, do some more homework and you'll find out that "nozomi" can also be interpreted as wish, desire, or hope . It is also a common woman's name as well as the name of Japan's first mission to the planet Mars.

W e l l , I 'l l l e t y o u d e c i d e f o r y o u r s e l f .

W e l l , I 'l l l e t y o u d e c i d e f o r y o u r s e l f .

This movie is nothing more than a cheap, poorly made rip-off of Mission to Mars, only without the good acting and the pleasant special effects. The worst thing about it was the computer Al didn't do anything. It just sat there and tried to kill the dude by locking him outside.

And when Al the Computer died, all it did was sing a song. Zzzzzzzzz....Maybe I'm missing something, but this movie was boring. I mean, if they're going to rip off Mission to Mars in this direct-to-video release, they should at least try to fix some of the more boring elements of Mission to Mars.

Oh, and whats up with that lame classical music?

Sigh...

NINE YEARS! You, too, can buy a space station for $3,168.81/SECOND for the next nine years (yes, that's $20,000/minute, $11,407,711.61/hour). Of course, ;Ma rs Direct would have cost around $30 Billion. Maybe if China goes to Mars first, we'll take notice that there is something there that we may be interested in.

This link tells of the ease of going to Mars. But I can't find the real link of interest. Telling of that the ISS is being built so that the shuttle has something to do. If we took the money from the ISS, and not even touch the money from the shuttle runs, we could colonize Mars in 20 years.

Oh, and I loath the idea of terraforming Mars. Let's rip out Yellowstone and pave it over while we're at it. We need to adapt to the other planet, not ruin it the second we get there.

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You may joke, but don't disregard the real truth behind this. There are numerous examples of alien influence on our potatoes - the faces you mention, potato crop circles, even linux distributions.

You want proof? Here's a quote from Debian:

alien 6.43 -> 6.44 into dists/potato/main/binary-all/admin
alien (6.44) unstable;

For the past two years, the Hungarian-born scientist has been consumed by the most precious specimen of his career: a tiny bit from a potato-size lump of rock blasted to Earth billions of years ago from Mars.

There you have it. The facts don't lie. The aliens are probably already on to you, and will blast you away from the face of the planet as soon as they've taken care of those two Mars probes.
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Plus, this doesn't explain with BOTH deep space 2 microprobes also failed. More likely is some kind of atmospheric entry problem or else the cruise stage never separated.

Jim Burk
The Mars Society

P.S. For a slashdot-like Mars news site (that I happen to maintain), check out MarsNews.com