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NASA Prototype: Could It Make Mars Breathable?
spiralx writes: "Scientists at NASA have successfully tested a solar-powered machine that takes carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and produces pure oxygen. It will be tested for real on the next lander to go to Mars, planned for 2003. The article is here at Line One News." Mars will start seeming a little closer as news like this continues.
I personally believe life is ubiquitous. Intelligent life is another question. It I believe to be common, but nowhere near as much so as life itself.
I agree with this. Given that the time span over which life arose on Earth is far too short for purely random processes, it does seem like there are organising principles that come into play very early on in a planet's development. This would tend to point to life being relatively common on worlds with the conditions required to support it.
And given some of the places we find life on Earth today - hydrothermal vents, arctic wastes, miles below the Earth's surface and so on - the range of conditions under which life of some description could arise would also seem to be fairly broad, again supporting the theory that life might be fairly common.
OTOH intelligent life is a totally different question. Out of all of Earth's species it only seems to have arisen once - as a surivival adaption it seems that there are a lot better routes which living creatures have followed. After all, look at sharks and crocodiles, animals which have remained essentially unchanged for millions of years. There's no need for intelligence to produce an animal capable of surviving for huge spans of time.
So I think colonising Mars is a good thing. Eggs and baskets, you know :) Sure it's not going to solve the population crisis - if you had a thousand spaceships each taking a thousand people to Mars each year that's still only a million people every year - currently only 1/5000 of the Earth's population.
But it gives us a better foothold in space, and Mars' gravity well is much easier to get out of than Earth's is, allowing it to be used as a base to reach the asteroids and beyond.
Yes there is: fewer billboards.
DNA just wants to be free...
Interesting you should have qualms about this, considering that making the atmosphere breathable is only the least of the things we would do to it.
Before that, most theories say that you would pump the atmosphere so full of greenhouse gases that the planet would increase in temperature by over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. This would make it possible to cultivate plants which would exchange CO2 for O2. How does that strike you for ecological rape?
This theory would seem to bypass that by using solar-powered machines, but be honest: you're not going to fill the atmosphere of an entire planet with oxygen via machines (except in Total Recall, that is). The only way for this to be even remotely possible is with large-scale agriculture over a sustained period of years, even decades (I don't know).
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
"Is it right or wrong? I don't know, but eventually it will happen."
"Let use redefine progress to mean that just because we CAN do a thing, does not mean that we MUST do that thing."
There is no reason why we couldn't just live on mars without trying to turn it into another Earth. At some point I would like to see us accept a planet for what it is and try to live there without bending it to our will. I think it would be nice to know that Mars will always be red and never be green or blue. To think that someday, we might have technology and not feel obligated to use it to destroy something that is pretty beautiful to begin with is a nice dream. Wouldn't that be a more difficult thing to do that teraforming? To NOT mess it up?
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
The Director of NASA was on CNN last week and was asked about Mars. He stated that "There will be a man on Mars in no less than 10 years and no greater than 20 years."
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
A plant. We've created an artifical algae substitute. Kinda cool eh?
P.S. idea for a slash feature... when writing comments in html, wouldn't it be good to be able to write literally and have it pass through the html scanner unchanged. Since there is no tag allowed in slash-html (or regular html for that matter), a moron (or more accurately, a computer program) can always distinguish whether a HTML tag or a smiley is intended.
:/
:P
/. doing it, but rather the browser getting rid of it.
Or how about showing all 'tags' that aren't part of HTML? Then I wouldn't have to write *grin* or *laugh* anymore
And I'm too lazy to throw around the &'s and lt's and gt's
The only thing is that I don't think it's
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
This sounds very cool, but I'm a bit concerned after NASA's mistakes on two previous missions (the lost polar probe, and the whole metric-english conversion fiasco). This machine could be a fundamental step in the colinization of Mars in the future, but another blunder and NASA might lose too much funding.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I think there is a big question here. While I do see the merits of this on a small scale (ie. for a habitat of astronauts on a mission, etc.), there are serious questions about possibly doing this on a large scale.
Eventually, people are going to want to do this to the entire atmosphere of Mars to make it breathable. What will happen then? Should an undertaking like that be considered? Should we totally alter a foreign planet and bring it away from its natural state? What would the result be?
While today this may seem like science fiction (Aliens, Total Recall, etc.), it won't be all that long before this kind of thing becomes a real possibility.
It is a curious but worrysome proposition.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
So this means NASA went all the way to Mars then? Or did they just set up a really long tube from Mars and syphon the air to Earth?
You don't seem to get my drift. I don't care about what we've done or not done to Earth. Why do we have to terraform Mars to live there? It's a waste of effort and time and (in my opinion) a perfectly good planet.
"I think terraforming Mars is a GOOD first step in our interplanetary expansions."
If we can't live on Mars without terraforming it, what makes you think we can terraform it? The science and knowledge required to terraform a planet are barely within our grasp. It's a much better concept to make Mars a home before we begin to re-decorate.
It's quite possible teraforming Mars could be the most dangerous thing we can do with Mars. Getting there and living there will do many positive things without us having to re-arrange Mars. We can learn about Mars. We can learn about new technologies that will help us be self sufficient on a new world. Then, and only then, should we start to think about teraforming. Here we are sureying a new entire branch of technology and seeing no drawbacks. Well, we also thought anti-bacterial soap was a good idea. Now we're over-run with bacteria that's resistant. Just because teraforming LOOKS like a sure thing, or APPEARS to be harmless doesn't mean it won't come back to bite us.
Sure, I may sound too much like some raving luddite, but when Mars is sitting in a super dense, poison filled, CO2 atmosphere because we made some mistake, don't say I didn't warn you.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
My exteremely intelligent professors (one has 3 phds, the other has only one but he worked at Lawrence Livermore back in the 80's) are working on some pie-in-the-sky project like this that was some system to get rid of greenhouse gasses. The way they had it set up was to actually burn fossil fuels to power it. I think they actually got the equations to get rid of more CO2 than it burned. They were still working on getting a real device last time I checked. They were pretty secretive about it even though we (my awesomely intelligent 6-person chem class) were pretty tight with them. :)
Yes... Another unsubstantiated claim from me..
The important point: If global warming really exists (subject of some debate) on Earth, can we use it to eat greenhouse gasses?
A lot of people tend to forget the temperature of Mars when talking about colonizing/terraforming it. A balmy day on Mars is equivalent to a cold day in Antartica or therabouts, so Johnny Appleseed isn't going to be planting trees all over Mars anytime soon. Some sort of greenhouse effect will be needed to warm the planet before you plant a rain forest there, not to mention you've got to water all those plants as well!
We're gonna need machinery here, not plants folks.
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Maybe a large artificial satellite to re-heat the core via tidal-flexing.
Or maybe just pirate Mars bit by bit as land-fill for our Dyson spheres!
**>>BELCH
Mars is approximately the same diameter as the Earth's iron cores (i.e. take away the crust and the mantle) and is very iron-rich.
This has long fuelled speculation that mars used to be about Earth-sized but that a collision with something ripped the top off (and with it the atmosphere) a loooooong time ago.
Venus is closer to the Earth in mass and size.
Hohum
troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Would you mind explaining what might be wrong about terraforming Mars? It's not like destroying anything other than a dead planet, anyway. Nothing lives there, and spectacular claims to the contrary notwithstanding it doesn't seem like anything ever did live there.
However, I don't think we have the resources to terraform it anyway, so the issue is moot.
http://www.spacedaily.com/spacecast/news/mars-insi tu-99c.html
yummy.
...or maybe not.
Does anyone else think (like myself) that maybe we shouldn't teraform Mars?
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Well, according to SPACE NEWS vol.11 no.21 May 29, 2000 pg2
...NASA issued a stop work order on the lander May 12 in a move that coincided with an announcement of two new mission concepts as the front runner for the 2003 mission
"An experiment to extract oxygen from the Martian atmosphere is among three payloads left in limbo following NASA's directive to halt work on a Mars lander originally slated to fly in 2001...
IANAL, but I play one on
They're actually using heated "zirconia" -> "A wafer-thin, solid-oxide ceramic disk made of zirconia, about the size of a small cookie, is sandwiched between two platinum electrodes and heated to 1,380 degrees Fahrenheit (750 degrees Centigrade). When carbon dioxide is fed to this unit, the zirconia cell "cracks" the carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen. Only the oxygen can penetrate through to the other side of the disk; the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide gases are stopped in their tracks." from SpaceDaily
...or maybe not.
Sorry, you're a bit naïve there.
First of all, as another poster pointed out, it's not the proportion of oxygen that counts but the partial pressure. The oxygen partial pressure in the Earth's atmosphere is around 200hPa (hPa = hectopascal: sorry, I use SI units not p.s.i) and it's that figure which matters. Same for burning (even assuming there's anything to burn on Mars, which is dubious).
As for making water out of oxygen and hydrogen, that is not, I repeat emphatically not the way you want to do it. You don't want to use up all your hard-won oxygen to burn hydrogen: reflect upon the fact that a liter of oxygen at the abovementioned 200hPa pressure will, when used to transform the stoichiometric quantity of hydrogen, produce only (scribble, scribble) 0.16 grams of water. A ratio of over 6000 in volume: imagine how much oxygen you'd need to make an ocean of...
Actually, water is probably abundant enough on Mars, even igoring the ice caps. Extracting it might be much more delicate, however. Of course, there's no question of making an ocean either. There's no way you could have an ocean (again?) on Mars.
Even if water were very abundant, you couldn't use it the other way around, either, to produce oxygen. Electrolysis of large enough quantities to fill a whole atmosphere? Calculate the free enthalpy you'd need, and then forget it.
The way I heard it, the main problem was the absence of plate tectonics on Mars. If it certainly had an active core (as shown by the presence of the large volcanoes), this is no longer the case. Plate tectonics is an essential factor in renewing the atmosphere.
This is about having a dense atmosphere. But even then I doubt that Mars ever had a breathable atmosphere. Remember that the primitive Earth's atmosphere was not at all made of oxygen: it was reducing and not oxidizing. It changed from reducing to oxidizing billions of years ago under the action of certain bacteriæ. Unless you positively assume that Mars also had similar bacteriæ, something I find dubious at best, it was probably reducing all along.
As for the part about "keeping it there", please keep the time scale in mind: if all of a sudden Mars had an atmosphere of pure oxygen, 200hPa in pressure, it would take longer than the continued existence of the human species for that atmosphere to disappear (the human species has existed for around 3 million years: this is next to nothing compared to a planet that exists for billions of years).
Finally, the point you make about the balloon is misleading at best: helium rises because it is lighter than dioxygen, and that doesn't depend on the magnitude of the grav pull of the planet.
Hey, go find a post about environmentalism and post there instead of trying to read your inane views into a discussion on wether we should alter another planet's current state.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
There are elements of sulfur, ammonia, and carbon monooxide in way too great of quanities present in the atmosphere. True, all of these elements can be converted to a non-issue, except the sulfur. Not sure how they are going to get rid of that.
Secondly, how are they going to get a breathable atmosphere when the pressure there is nearly negligible. the atmosphere is only half a mile high, we have 14 miles of atmosphere on earth. The reduced biosphere is going to be hard pressed to remove all the cosmic rays.
It takes a lot more than a little oxygen to teraform a planet though.
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
How did you get 20 Hydrogen atoms into one molecule?
Ah yes, the patent that is pending on hydrocarbons. Its so innovative, it doesn't require common manufacturing techniques to make this fossil fuel. Using proprietary techniques, it is pressure formed in the deep safety well below the ground. Guaranteed to produce billions of barrels of such fuel for the entire earth.
You can bet when the patent office grants my patent, the world will be my oyster.
Whether he meant it or not, Mental got the issue just right.
Colonization of space may be inevitable to ensure the species' survival, but "leave things better than you found them" must also be learned -- and sooner!
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
The Evolution of Earth's Atmosphere
- Earth's early atmosphere might have originated from the capture of gases in the solar nebula before dissipation of the latter by the Sun
- the above theory is no longer the accepted one
- rather, we feel that the Earth's early atmosphere was formed from the vapourization of incident comets
- in the accretive atmospheric theory, the early atmosphere would have been rich in hydrogen - H and H2
- in the cometary atmosphere theory, the atmosphere would have been poor in hydrogen
- in either case, the atmosphere would have had water vapour (H2O), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), carbon dioxide (CO2) and carbon monoxide (CO)
- these molecules are still found in the gas giants
- the evolution of the atmosphere is a result of these processes:
- gravitational retention
- volcanic outgassing
- solar ultraviolet radiation
- processing by early life
Gravitational retention- molecules in the atmosphere move about using thermal energy
- energy of motion is called kinetic energy
- we define temperature as being the average kinetic energy of the particles (atoms, molecules) of a substance
- the kinetic energy of a molecule with mass "m" and velocity "v" is a familiar result:
- K.E. = 1/2 mv2
- the average amount of thermal energy for a molecule in a gas is:
- K.E. = 3/2 kBT
- here kB is Boltzmann's constant
- these two expressions represent the same quantity, hence:
- 1/2 mv2 = 3/2 kBT
- solve for v: v=(3 kBT/m)1/2 (1)
- equation (1) tells us the average speed of a given particle with a given mass and given temperature
- hotter particles move more quickly
- lighter particles move more quickly
- example: oxygen gas (O2) at room temperature
- mass= 5.3 10-26 kg
- T = 295 kelvin (= 22 celcius)
- kB = 1.38 10-23 J/K
- implies velocity v = 4800 metres per second
- pretty fast!!!
- molecular speeds in the atmosphere can be compared with the escape velocity for the Earth
- the escape velocity is the velocity required by an object to permanently leave a planet and escape into space
- it is
- vescape = (2GM/R)1/2
- M = mass of the planet
- R = radius of the planet
- G = gravitational constant
Planet --- Escape velocityMercury --- 4,300 m/s
Venus --- 10,300 m/s
Earth --- 11,200 m/s
Mars --- 5,000 m/s
Jupiter --- 59,500 m/s
Saturn --- 35,500 m/s
Earth's Moon --- 2,400 m/s
- to a first approximation, if the speed of an atmospheric molecule exceeds the planet's escape velocity, then that gas will not be retained in the atmosphere
- i.e., escape if vparticle > vescape
- in practice, this equation gives a false result, because for a given temperature gas particles have a range of speeds, from very fast to very slow
- the distribution of particle speeds is given by the Boltzmann distribution
- to retain a given gas in an atmosphere, a planet must have
- vescape > 10 vparticle
- therefore, the Earth lost all of its hydrogen and helium gases early in its history, but kept the heavier gases
Outgassing from volcanic activity- the interior of the Earth is heated by the decay of radioactive elements
- 4.5 billion years ago the surface of the Earth was a few thousand degrees kelvin and was more liquid than solid
- volcanic activity released gases such as water vapour, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen (N2), plus more methane and ammonia
- also released were gases from radioactive decay - argon and helium
- once the Earth had cooled down, heavy rains filled the oceans to their present depth
- water quickly dissolved the atmospheric CO2, where it forms bicarbonate (HCO3-)
- bicarbonate can form solids with calcium, notably limestone and chalk
- the atmosphere went from 80% carbon dioxide 4.5 billion years ago to 10% carbon dioxide 3.5 billion years ago (% by mass)
- at this time, H-C compounds (CH4) formed 80% and nitrogen formed 10%
Solar UV radiation- there was no oxygen (O2) or ozone (O3), so UV light easily penetrated the atmosphere and broke up CH4, NH3 and H2O into their constituent atoms
- hydrogen escapes, and oxygen combines with methane to produce carbon dioxide and water
- nitrogen became the dominant gas roughly 2.5 billion years ago
- in the absence of hydrogen, oxygen and ozone could exist in trace amounts thereby stopping most of the UV light from penetrating deeply into the atmosphere
Processing by early lifeYou can't handle the truth.
This is the first link in a long chain of events that will eventually result in Douglas Quaid having to free the slowly suffocating mutants.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
I believe this is not for terraforming..
The mars reference mission includes sending unmanned craft ahead, including craft that will land and, using solar power & a few stored chemicals, turn carbon dioxide from mars atmosphere and turn it into both oxyjen and some kind of alcohol (rocket fuel). It will store these in large tanks. The idea is that this is much less costly than shipping the required oxygen ahead, as the mass is much lower.
I wonder if we could use a few billion of these to scrub Earth's atmosphere of excess CO2, so that this planet doesn't end up like Mars...
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Is this the same kind of machine described in Robert Zubrin's The Case for mars? I remember that book being kind of interesting and pretty convincing when I read it a couple years ago.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Those in the know all say that it would take an awful long time, though.
Hah! Drop a bucket of Kudzu on the surface of mars, waite 3 weeks, instant terraforming!
Everyone knows Kudzu will live anywhere, in anything, and obscenely fast. Of course, it's impossible to get rid of after it finishes terraforming the place.... Hrmm....
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
...but don't we need a few other components to make usable air? Doesn't seem as exciting if we still have to haul Nitrogen along.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Hey, ya think maybe after we clean up the atmosphere of Mars, we could, I dunno, maybe clean up our OWN damn planet?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
This device is not on the scale to change a planetary atmosphere. This is mainly something designed for either exploration missions or bases.
Some sort of genetically engineered plant or algae would be more realistic for planetary alterations, although mass water supplies would be likely required for this type of operation. If machinery was used, it would most likely have to be constructed from local materials and have a vastly larger scale power source than sunlight (which is weaker there.)
I've never said this before, but please consider modding this up so it make it to 'hot links'. This thread is getting 'old', and few will see this information otherwise
I wish I'd seen this article before, because it seems that *everyone has forgotten the truth about the Viking I and II findings regarding the life on Mars experiments:
In short strokes: Most of the tests were positive as NASA fully admits (but sometimes buries) several researchers associated with the experiments have reported the horror at NASA when the results came in -- "We can't publish this! We'll look like fools." Please remember this was a billion dollar mission planned at a time (70's) when a billion dollars was a lot mpore money than it is today, andthat these experiments were widely peer-reviewed around the world, and considered solid until they yielded positive results
I wish I could provide you with links to why the individual results were disqualified, but the NASA website containing most of my old links is gone or merged. (It shouldn't take more than 10-15 of poking around to find new ones, but if I don't post this comment fast, it will die unseen.) However, here's what Jame s E. Tillman , who was
on the Viking Meteorology Science Team and was Director of the Viking Computer
Facility (at the University of Washington in Seattle) said at a national Prime
Computer Users Group meeting in Orlando FL, 1984:
"The soils will liberate oxygen"? What is the justification for this assumption. None, except for post-facto guesswork. In fact, you'll find the specific chemistry cited to 'dismiss' the experiments is inconsitent with more moderns estimates of Martian soil composition and surface dynamics. Further each of the three positive experiments (deliberately designed to complement one another and prevent error) is dismissed for a very different reason.
Finally, I think that the 'atypical' kinetics that was used to discredit one experiment (positive results as a little water was added, but later tailing off) is *exactly* what we should have expected. Water may be a limiting factor for life on mars (or it may not) but after tens of millions of years, we should expect that microscopic life in a dry part of the surface would find water toxic in excess anounts. Hence - early rapid positive results, followed by a die off.
It is also possible that there are other limiting factors to growth, so the microbes reponded positively until they hit 'the wall' on another substance... like stored short term high energy compound (e.g. ATP in earth life) or even food (quick energy foods like sugars)
I urge you to go to NASA's websites and read for yourself. This is no great 'cover-up' the info is all there for you to consider. The 'embarrassing parts' are harder to find (broken links, disappearing archives, etc,) but they are not conscientiously buried.
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Great. Carbon Monoxide. Even worse than CO2. (I didn't believe the methane equation, anyway - it takes too much energy to create methane from its combustion products.)
For terraforming purposes, it does matter what is done with the carbon. Here on Earth, the carbon goes into making more CO2 respirators: plants. If this device releases even half as much CO as it does O2 (as the balanced equation 2 CO2 - O2 + 2 CO suggests) then it can't be used to terraform Mars. What you need is something that either creates bricks of pure carbon (a la KSR's gigantic mass spectrometer sieves... or was that Greg Bear?) or binds the carbon into a mineral like limestone (a la marine diatoms).
CO is highly poisonous to animals, even in low concentrations, and plants don't handle it well, either. This device is OK for creating an isolated pocket of O2, like a pressurized Martian habitat, but you can't Terraform the planet with it... not for human habitation anyway. And I doubt this was ever proposed, except by underinformed laymen. (Sorry Greenpeace. Find another contrived issue to protest.)
I can see the fnords!
Well, people tend to forget a lot of things -- esp. considering most people know next to nothing about "rocket science".
:-) This kind of device is a heavenly gift to the planetary shipping industry. In effect, manned missions to Mars wouldn't require advanced air filtration and recycling technology (large heavy machines) and they certainly wouldn't have to carry a large supply of oxygen with them (read: more room for M&M's and Dr. Pepper.) This also has applications here on Earth in reducing the amount of CO2 we constantly throw into the atmosphere from fossil fuels.
Allow me to summarize: Mars is not Earth.
Mars is much further away from the sun than we are here on Earth. Mars is smaller and less massive than Earth. The surface conditions are vastly different from Earth -- lower atmospheric pressure, much lower average temperature, very little water, an atmosphere composed of mostly carbon dioxide, oh and vast sand storms than can last years...
Granted, I'm no physicist, but you don't need a PhD to know O2 is lighter than CO2. Translation: Mars doesn't have the gravity to keep an oxygen atmosphere. One must also observe the laws of thermodynamics. Thus, unless this device is based in alchemy, all you'll end up with is an equally thin oxygen atmosphere (which will slowly get thinner and bleed into space) + a huge pile of carbon. As a side effect of removing the CO2, the average surface temperature will decrease as less solar radiation is trapped by the now gone CO2.
SO... let us assume we instantly convert all the CO2 on Mars into O2. You still wouldn't be able to stand out under the stars and breathe easy -- you'd suffocate and "explode".
Now, let's be reasonable; no one is suggesting terraforming Mars
(Hmm, how long before DeBeers outlaws diamond production on Mars?)
Actually, Mars is substantially smaller than Earth (its gravity is .38 compared to Earth's 1). This is theorized to be why Mars has such a thin atmosphere: it's gravity wasn't great enough to hold an atmosphere. This is also why trying this with the entire planet probably won't work. The way the article reads suggests this is for breathing devices and not terraforming.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
The article shows that it would make breathable air for a few people out of the thin CO2 atmosphere. It would I think have to be compressed after conversion however. I believe that mars has a very thin atmosphere, and even if you were breathing pure O2 at that density, I think you would still pass out and die.
Some people are posting regarding terraforming and clearly this device is not it. Even if it could convert the entire atmosphere to O2 there would still be a lack of atmospheric pressure. I think that large volumes of surface matter would have to be converted to gas to provide enough pressure to make the surface livable outside of a biodome.
Heh, never mind the lack of water: Mars --> Arrakis --> Dune, desert planet. Not one drop of rain on Arrakis...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
And in other news, a young second-grader in Arkansas has learned that trees are able to produce oxygen from taking in carbon dioxide as well! A ground-breaking coincidence? The jury is still out for all of the facts :)
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
You don't want to breathe pure oxygen though. One good spark and your whole habitat is gone. Producing the necessary gases to mix with Oxygen (i.e. Nitrogen, some other noble gases) will be much more difficult than the production of oxygen. It may be possible to get nitrogen by mining the regolith (loose sandy topsoil on Mars).
This strikes me more as a way of producing fuel and water than as a production of breathable air, which could be better done by plants, which would also serve as food source.
One more thing... what use can be made of the carbon byproduct?
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
This would appear to depend upon getting water from Mars's surface (unless they've come up with some otehr way of doing it). IIRC, this means they have to land near the North pole.
Of course, if you want to terraform mars you need a huge amount of water - for producing the atmosphere and supporting life. If you have the water, some kind of GM algae would probably be easier than using a massive machine.
The sad things is that with NASA's budget cuts and other problems I am beginning to doubt I will see a manned mission to mars in my lifetime.
I think the significance is that this could lead to a manned mission to Mars with a good surface habitat, and when you think about it, if they didn't have to carry a large quantity of oxygen for the time spent on the surface, that would decrease the payload weight. If you're concerned about some toxins, we're talking about *a* habitat working for at most a few months, the chances that this would "ruin" the atmosphere is negligible. So let's not let those enviro-hippyfreaks stop a mission because it might make some carbon monoxide.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Before we get a lot of half-thought out replies, everybody should go out and read the series of books Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The series deals, as accurately as possible, with the colonization and terraforming of Mars. Mr. Robinson is a stickler for detail; in fact, it gets a little boring at times (I never thought I would read so much about the geology of Mars). On the other hand, he's a stickler for scientific detail, and addresses some key points, such as:
"Can we develop a reasonable atmosphere?" It's tricky--Mars's crust and elemental makeup is different, it has a low gravity, and has greater elevation variation than Earth. A good atmosphere at sea level may mean the majority of the world has an atmosphere similar to the top of Everest.
We've done some nasty stuff to Earth. Is it right to ruin the natural state of ANOTHER planet, too?
Water. Is there water on mars, anyway, and if there's not, what can we do?
Surviving in low gravity.
Lots more. In any case, I'm sure many questions will be raised by people commenting on this story. I'm just as sure that the majority of them are at least mentioned in the RGB Mars books. Go do yourself a favor if you're interested in this story, and check these books out.
Let's not get all excited about going out and colonizing Mars now. Even if we could produce enough oxygen to breathe, it wouldn't do anyone any good. The minute you got out in the open the radiation that makes it through Mars's atmosphere would do a number on you.
Now, if NASA could put something together that would generate a thicker atmosphere for Mars...
Long ago, before humans roamed the earth, and certainly before they had big telescopes and long-range rocket-powered probes, mars had a breathable atmosphere. Unfortunately, it all got baked away. The critical issue for a planet holding an atmosphere is whether or not it has strong enough gravity to hold particles moving at the speed that gas particles travel in their kinetic vibrations. Earth, for example, cannot hold hydrogen or helium gases. If you pop a helium balloon, the helium will eventually drift out of the atmosphere and into outer space.
Fortunately, since O2 molecules are much more massive than He atoms or H2 molecules, the earth can also hold an O2 atmosphere. Mars is also massive enough for this, but there's a problem. Mars is not massive enough to hold oxygen atoms or ions. This is critical because of the UV radiation that the sun emits, which breaks up O2 molecules. On earth, those oxygen ions come together with O2 to form O3 (ozone) which also helps shield the rest of the atmosphere from UV radiation.
Since Mars isn't massive enough to hold oxygen ions, it can't hold them up in the part of the atmosphere where an ozone layer would likely form. Thus, its atmosphere cannot be protected from more radiation, which further ionizes the O2 molecules. This is precisely what happened to the atmosphere on mars, as well as the surface water, and it is what will eventually happen to Mars's polar ice caps. I don't know exactly what the time scale would be for creating a breathable atmosphere, and I don't know how long it would take for it to dissipate, but I think you'd have to be continually working to keep it there, assuming you had the resources to get a planet-wide breathable atmosphere in the first place.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
They're infringing on my patent. I have a working example in my back yard of a much more efficient machine, it is also solar powered, using multiple redundant flexible green solar panels to absorb solar energy, a self-maintainence system that will repair our adapt to compensate for medium scale damage, a robust, flexible physical structure capable of withstanding considerable force by dissipating the energy throughout the structure and bending, and utilises as fuel a small set of chemicals and H20.
It has further advantages over the solar machine exhibited, its components are easily recycled into a number of useful objects, various parts are edible and it aids in topsoil stability. It is also capable of self-reproduction given a requisite amount of available fuel.
It also comes in numerous makes and models suitable for every task, from extremely large to the inconspicuously small.
I call it The Plant, and I would demand royalties on this inferior implementation except that..well..its obviously so inferior no-one would ever buy it.
You can't win a fight.
You also need a lot of relatively inert, large molecule gas, like Nitrogen, to prevent explosions from getting out of control. Titan has a plentiful supply of Nitrogen, but Mars has practically none.
I remember when I was kid playing the old game SimEarth on my Mac (not the Mac SE or the Mac Classic, but the Mac .. The Mac). Despite the game being very primitive and only in black and white, they had a couple of scenarios that were really interesting. One was to take Mars and make it livable and the other was to take Venus and make it livable. The easiest way to do both was to put in these devices that converted the carbon dioxide to oxygen (the hard way was to crash ice comets into the planet, both cooling it off and releasing oxygen .. don't ask me).
.. these sorts of transformations don't happen overnight).
I wouldn't say it's so worrisome. Making other planets livable for humans is going to become a fact of life if we ever decide to permanently leave this world. Mars is another system, but it's a dead system, and adapting it for human needs is not going to make species extinct or ruin our understanding of Martian phenomena (and even if it were alive, we'd have plenty of time to find out
But that's beyond the logistical nightmares of actually getting such a thing to work. Look at how long its taken our planet to register the effects of 150 years of industrial revolution, and the environmental change is a blip, an abnormality barely noticeable on the geological scale that scientists are still debating whether or not we are the cause. You can rest assured that by the time human beings are ready to purposefully alter the state of another planet's environment, they'll have the necessary expertise (and computer/robotics/cybernetic systems) to do it much more exactingly than you or I can imagine.
By the way, in the SimEarth game, the irony of it all is that once you terraform the planet (Mars was easier, Venus was much more difficult), sentient life can rise, become industrialized, and then ruin your environmental masterpiece. Maybe that should be the bigger fear, not what havoc we wreck when we purposefully change the environment, but what terrors we cause when we neglect it.
This machine, as described, does the same exact thing as Dr. Robert Zubrin's oxygen extracting machine, designed nearly a decade ago while he was working at the Martin Marianetta labs (sp?). The idea here isn't terraforming the planet, but providing the Martian explorers with breathable air, as well as propellant for the return to Earth.
All of this is described in his book, The Case for Mars, in great detail. If you're interested in the details of the chemistry involved (ie byproducts, etc, it's explained in the aforementioned book).
Terraforming the planet, by comparison, is much, much grander. As well as a very long way off. First let's concentrate on getting another probe there in one piece, eh?
Uhh, that looks OK. We haven't seen that number yet.
That way ...
*ducks back into the trenches having stirred up a hornets nest of stereotypes* :)
Titan has the largest atmosphere of any rocky planet in the Solar System - in fact despite the fact that Titan is around a fortieth the mass of Earth, its atmospheric pressure at the surface is 1.5 bars - that is, 1.5 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.
Since Titan is about a quarter of the mass of Mars, it is well within the realms of possibility for Mars to have an atmosphere with equivalent pressure to Earth, it just has to be a much larger atmosphere than Earth's.
The problem isn't so much gravity, or even the high percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere. The biggest problems are the atmospheric pressure, and the temperature. Theoretically, there is a way to fix this along with the problem of all of the superoxides in the soil. If NASA were to decide to terraform Mars, the soil could actually be a key. Using their methane producing bacteria, they could raise the temperature. By raising the temperature, it will eventually be enough to break down the super oxides in the soil -- producing two vital allotropes of Oxygen (O2, or then normal oxyger that we breathe, and O3, or ozone, seeing as UV could be a problem with the current atmosphere). Through all of this, it may just be possible to create a thick enough atmosphere, along with enough Oxygen, and even an Ozone layer.
Think --> Think Different --> Think OSS
If it makes 'em breathable, or livable, then you *know* we're going to Mars sooner than we thought.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Does anyone remember those inflatable domes that NASA and the RSA were kicking out a few years back? Rather than terraforming Mars, it might be more economical to put a massive semi-spherical balloon over a land mass, and then just build inside of it.
B.C. Place in Vancouver, B.C. is sort of like this. The roof is inflatable, yet strong enough to walk on. Plus the air pressure inside is greater than outside. (You can actually feel the wind coming out of the doors, it's hard to open them because they have to be so heavy).
I'm all for the dome thing, except radiation is another huge factor. Perhaps silver up one side?
It seems to me that altering an entire ecosystem (even a likely dead one like Mars) could have dire consequences that we may not be foresee. Maybe there would be no detrimental effect of doing such a thing, but plopping some people on a big planet and turning it from a poisonous atmosphere into Yellowstone Park is just too great an alteration to pass without somehow negatively affecting things.
Anyway, if anyone has ideas on how that could be, I'd be interested in reading them. Sure, it's a planet out in space and changing it shouldn't have any effect because, well, it's sort of in a bubble, but I'm still curious...
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Am I the only one who see's this? Breathing pure O2 in itself isn't a problem. The astronauts did it (don't bother replying that it was a 60/40 mix of O2 + N2, because that was just on the ground. once they got into space, the pressure was only 5 psi, and they had to use pure O2. So a spark won't be a problem in itself, as long as the pressure is low enough. At high pressure, however, you have a different problem. If you breathe in too much O2 at a high enough pressure, it can destroy tissues. Oh, and one more thing.... Nitrogen is NOT a noble gas. The noble gases consist of Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and Radon.
Think --> Think Different --> Think OSS
It was downgraded to Flamebait, but obviously other moderators have a sense of humour and don't take their Open Source to *fanatical* levels. Cool- nice to see the moderation system works :) (to my favour anyway :)
My title when I submitted it was a lot less sensational - "NASA machine extracts oxygen on Mars". Theirs was definitely more of an eye-grabber though. And as for the issue of terraforming, algae or bacteria would probably do the trick as long as you set them up to feed off of native material.
The universe being as large as it is, if life exists on Mars, our closest neighbour, life almost certainly exists on billions of planets. (This is of course accepting the fact that recent astronomical discoveries tell us planets are by no means rare. That gas giants are common suggests rocky worlds/moons are common as well. The reason I qualify certainly with almost is because within one solar system, the planets may be able to contaminate each other - remember that Mars meteorite found in Antarctica with bacteria inside.)
I personally believe life is ubiquitous. Intelligent life is another question. It I believe to be common, but nowhere near as much so as life itself. Regardless of the frequency of intelligent life, if life in any form exists on Mars, that life isn't important as it is not the least bit unique. We see nothing on Mars but the possibility for single and possibly multicellular microscopic life. This viewpoint seems to be where we disagree. If there were complex life forms on the planet, I would agree with you in that we should leave it alone. However, there are not.
If extraterrestrial life is everywhere, it doesn't strike me as that great of a loss to perhaps exterminate or at the very least dramatically change the habitat of one planet's native bacteria. Is it that great a price to pay in order to forever alter the current situation of the human species? Right now, we have all our eggs in one basket. One catastrophe of great enough proportions, whether it be accidental or deliberate, could wipe out our entire species. I would like to alleviate that risk in as short a time as possible, whatever the cost.
Once that is done, we can pick and choose as much as the more cautious people desire. Until then though, all it takes is one mistake, one fluke chance, one random event, and we're no longer a living species. We didn't survive this long as a species by taking chances that great.
(To argue that humanity's extinction would be good is just plain silly. We're just as natural and only a couple steps up from monkeys and gorillas. If you believe that human beings are a plague on the universe, help fix the problem and kill yourself. After all... the people with the time and money to spend considering such a thing are almost always among the world's biggest consumers/polluters. When you're starving to death, you have a few more pressing concerns. Note that I don't claim to have ever been in that situation, since some like to jump on things like that.)
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