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The Real Mission to Mars
The Mars Society is looking for "anyone in good physical condition between 18 and 60 years of age... Scientific, engineering, practical mechanical, wilderness, and literary skills are all considered a plus." Only the passionate need apply: "conditions are likely to be tough and the job will be very trying." And that's before the robot switches into hunter-killer mode.
If you prefer roasting to freezing, there's a mission somewhere in the Australian Outback next year as well. Either way, go visit the Mars Society homepage and check it out.
I spoke with a friend of mine, Daniel Slosberg, who coordinated Mission Support for the Michigan Mars Society during two similar, less-audacious experiments this year. His was the easy job of sitting at home, coordinating communications (chiefly email, with simulated 20-minute round-trip delay), answering questions from the field, and giving advice.
Daniel happens to be working on an idea for distributed mission support; if you're interested in being part of the ground crew, drop him a line.
For the team that actually goes into the wilderness and lives in the "hab," you'll be simulating Mars isolation as accurately as possible. You'll be brutally far north, for one thing. You'll wear a mock-spacesuit every time you go outside, which will help identify where the problems are in e.g. mobility or hygiene. You'll also spend an hour in the airlock when you enter or leave, which will help remind you not to forget your hammer.
The excursions get more sophisticated each year: next year will be the first with an already-completed hab and the first with more than one mock-suit. Your chance to be part of history.
In related news, Odyssey continues aerobraking, and its mission looks good -- if you've read Robinson's Red Mars series, you know how delicate orbital insertion is. Great work, JPL.
And just for kicks, here's a New Scientist article about synthesizing fuel from the Martian atmosphere to power a "hopper"-lander. If you find the practical chemistry of planetary travel interesting, go read Robert Zubrin who is just all about using whatever resources already exist outside Earth's gravity well.
Hey, it had to be asked!
Slashdot, the site where everything's made up and the points don't matter
I know this isn't technically in the co-op program, but I'm thinking the dean would approve of this.
I was joking when I wrote that. I think I'm starting to get serious.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
With this experiment is it going to be real isolation, I mean on Mars your not going to be able to hop onto the internet or call someone when you get bored, I think the psycological testing is more important than the physical aspects, granted that does need to be addressed as well.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
face it nasa hasn't sent people to another "world" since the late 70s.
Carpe meam simiam!
Tha's odd, the US Army is trying to ask for the same demographic for Afghanistan. The land is about the same: baren and dry.
You know who I think is crazy? All my ex-girlfriends!
Hey, if there's a free trip to Mars in it when we start going, sign me up first!
I don't know anything about the Utah mission, but I've read a bit about the Devon Island mission. Seems very interesting; however, the "hab" they use has problems that your average house doesn't, including leaky pipes. But it's cold as the opposite of hell up there; no reasonable person would subject themselves to the cold and the shoddy equipment unless they REALLY cared about Mars exploration; too bad NASA and the US gov't doesn't share the exctiement.
So how much do I get if I'm the last one left?
"OK, for your first task we need you to convert meters to feet.
You don't get anything for it...We just don't know how."
I already get that with my server room and the air conditioning on too cold! Why would I want to be in the blue room and have the same thing? I never thought of wearing a suit, but then again I wanna wear a t-shirt and shorts!
Karma whorin' since 1999
I've wanted to go to Mars ever since I read The Case for Mars, by the aforementioned Robert Zubrin. Check it out- a little dated, but still exciting.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
All in a days work!
forma3
There is already an eyewitness, first-hand account of what is on Mars
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This would be a wonderful opportunity for a college student. They pay for your travel costs and you can probably work out a way to get credit for it.
How cool is that? Beats the hell out of reading "Walden" again.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
If you have a month free next summer and you'd like to spend it freezing your ass off, read on.
On the other hand, if you have a week free next winter (and money coming out the wahzoo), and you'd really really like to freeze your ass off, try out the Ice Hotel.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Why would it take the airlock on Mars a full hour to open? Pressure should make little difference, since people are wearing spacesuits. Is it for decontamination? Quarantine? Fun?
In any case, they need to build game consoles into the airlocks, or a DVD player so you can watch movies while you wait for the door to open. Movies are perfect - you watch the first hour on the way out, which will encourage you do work quickly so you can go back in and see the happy ending. Or maybe a pr0nStation. Otherwise people will just take naps in the airlock and not wake up when the door opens.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Those are brave souls. A couple of weeks in those conditions and I would be half looney. I guess thats why they only take volunteers. I would like to see the waiver though, (ie: legal prose for injury, insanity, canibalism, etc..)
Cold In summer? Hardly. Try winter north of 49th (And East of the rockies).
It won't be your idea of a hot summer, but it won't be that cold. Although, it will be quite sunny...
In space, but more importantly, here on the earth too.
The Mars Society are alternatively hailed as heroes or decried as demagogues. Mars Society president Robert Zubrin is especially vulnerable, being labeled no less than a "messianic" "cult" leader by Robert Park in his acclaimed book Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud, remarks for which Zubrin supposedly pursued legal action against Park.
The attacks are somewhat ad-hominem, but Park raises an important concern. Whatever the merits of the science the Society is pursuing, it does us no good if the work is blemished by association with individuals of dubious social qualities. If the Society is dominated by demagogues, then their work will be dismissed as just another fancy of another crackpot institution, and civilian space research will be set back for untold years.
The Mars Society has a lot riding on the line. Let's hope they don't fumble the ball this time.
Have they decided whether to use metric or imperial measurments yet ?
Amateurs.
Then I'll be in a clean, white cylinder with a lot of hot women scientists in suspended animation beds who will wake up 6 months later with no knowledge of what I was doing to them while they were asleep... muahaha...
Where do I sign up?
...there are perks to being the navigator who has to stay awake and go stir-crazy during the trip...
-Kasreyn
moderators: learn to appreciate my sense of humor! Or... er... mod me down. Yeah, or that, too!
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Nowhere better than Canada to do that!
What I don't understand about this "mission" is what it's supposed to accomplish. It's a great publicity stunt, but it's surely expensive (even if the Mars Society does have Discovery Channel and some company called Flashline sponsoring it). The science and technology are fairly lacking (is there anything about testing a "space suit" that can't be done in a lab, as opposed to hauling it to the middle of nowhere - I mean, Canada, at much less cost?)
One would think that developing cheaper ways to send rockets to Mars and the like would have a lot more long term benefit considering the Mars Society's goals.
OTOH, riding around on ATVs carrying shotguns (in case of polar bears) for a month sounds like fun.
Maybe they ought to leave the real research to NASA rather than some bizarre cult.
Is your company running tools written by ma
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
...since the Law Of Gravity expires soon. Congress is working around the clock to draft a new law, but with their record, we'll need Mars as a back up.
...reach for the stars? Right, it's been too many years and too little real progess.
C'mon...Nasa has overpromised and underdelivered for many, many years. They know how to get the public pumped up so there will be fewer complaints when they need to refill the budget, that's all.
Beyond the Nasa publicity campaigns, we're not going anywhere soon. That's all this latest 'news' is...keep feeding the public outer space romance stories, and no one will notice we're still Earth bound. We're chumps and we deserve all the disrespect we get.
do we have to hope for real problems? cant we just hope all the astronauts will have a good time?
________________________________________________
Out of curiosity, why can't this be held in a more moderate temperature? I understand the need for desolate conditions... but aren't there plains or fields or something that isn't extremely uncomfortable? I would so do it if it weren't in the worst temperature range ever. That and my completely lack of any possible skills to offer. :)
Why bother with building expensive habs? I know tons of OSS programmers who haven't seen the light of day in aeons!
Or perhaps this is targeted advertising...
Is your company running tools written by ma
So let me get this right. They have not 1 but 2 stations, but no photocopier in the office...
your average Joe Blow-next-door neighbour won't be missed if he gets lost in the Arctic and gets eaten by polar bears and never comes home (which is why we'd want to send him to Mars), unlike Larry Ellison, who would be sorely mis... well, maybe not. Ahh, forget it. Do they have national ID cards on Mars?
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
The article:
... two crucial pieces of construction equipment badly damaged when cargo dropped from a U.S. military transport plane smashed into the ground "without assistance" from a parachute.
:)
Well, at least the NASA methods for delivering payloads to Mars (smashing them into the rock) are being realistically simulated
Maybe I should start one of my own survival camps like this. Call it 'Magical Dangerland'. Take a group of hapless Americans to Tehran and put them in Mickey Mouse costumes and tell them this will teach them how to survive in 'Magical Dangerland'.
Or consider the contestants on Big Brother - the producers choose them specifically because they believe that they'll be entertaining on television when mixed in with the other contestants, not for mental stability. They don't allow them any contact with their family and friends while they're in the house. They don't provide them with any news of the outside world. They *do* spy on them 24 hours a day. They ply them with alcohol in attempts to get them to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. And yet the overwhelming majority of contestants on the various versions around the world came out sane and (publically at least) claim to have enjoyed the experience.
Now, I'm not claiming that being a member of a Mars crew wouldn't be challenging, stressful, and lonely at times. I find it hard to believe that it's beyond the efforts of a specially-selected, well-trained team.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm a team member for the Mars Desert Research Station, which is about to begin assembly on site in Utah. Just wanted to clarify some things...
First, MDRS, here in the U.S., will be the next simulation to begin, not the one in Australia. They are still looking for sites in Oz.
The first field season of a Mars Society hab (this past summer in the Arctic) featured a completed hab and at least three mock suits.
Also, several teams are developing pressurized rovers to test engineering designs. Some of these rovers will be tested as part of the mission simulations.
I was on the site selection committee for the MDRS and I was also a field scout. The Mars Society uses a combination of satellite and aerial reconnaisance, GIS data, and on-site scouting to locate potential sites. This is the phase Mars Society Australia is currently in.
The field season for Utah will be focused primarily on the cooler seasons, but it will be equipped with air conditioning.
From the website: "The Mars Society is requesting volunteers to participate as members of the crew of the Mars Desert Research Station in southern Utah and Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island
Let's hope any martians that real astronauts might encounter are more like polar bears than mormons.
:)
Exploration and Discovery
We fight and spend to discover the earth around us, and ourselves. And yes, we fight and spend also to discover what is beyond our puny world. We have spent billons of dollars exploring the wonder that is ourselves, and the world around us. We have spent billions of dollars on space exploration. But space exploration has not yet gained a momentum that makes the world comfortable, and I find this very sad. Just as our own DNA is still a mystery unfolding, so also is the Universe that surrounds us. If we don't bother to set up groups to prepare for space missions, if our scientists didn't run simulation after simulation, how are we to succeed at this momentous, and necessary task?
And why do we care anyway? Some don't, it's obvious by the comments made by users here. But what about those of us who don't care about how it's done, or how long it takes. We care because, like medical research and hi-tech research, space exploration is just another form of exploration and discovery that we, as humans, are driven to do.
Just because this type of research doesn't include a box lunch and a dedicated T1 connection doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. So please...let's have a little respect for the groups of people devoting their time and resources to something that has not yet gained the momentum we need for results,.
As usual, the people here on Slashdot are more inclined to nitpick at the smallest detail, then they to indicate any actual serious interest in our space program. And my god, yes there are so many millions of details about any space mission. So go ahead, nitpick as many as you can. But as I'm starting to realize, my voice on Slashdot has never been one of detail. It's an emotional voice that usually fades away in the background, as thousands of Slashdot users post details that were missed in the original post, arguments about who is right or wrong, and the usual lower threshold posts involving sexual innuendo. So feel free to mod me down, or flame me. I really could care less.
Hey, I live at Foster, about 12 miles north of 49th Street, and today it reached 60.
Middle of february, now that's a different story.
Chicago is Heaven.
My father is a blogger.
The Trolls of SlashDot Swamp don't eat their young...they are their young. The only thing mature about /. Swamp is the PH factor.
/. Editorial staff), and try to throw something out before the fetid water becomes cloudy with feeding action.
/. Swamp Troll thinking...their attention span, and why it is how it is....short. (think Caffine and shaved lab rats...)
Any attempt at profiling puts one at risk of chasing shadows. But even Black Holes mask out the background, so it is possible to provide a grayscale template that can be used to identify SDS T's.
The Trolls of SlashDot Swamp always gather at one spot. And while most anything can be used for chum, the 'torge de la day is obviously 'tech'...geek trolls love tech....baby trolls love tech and mean fat ugly trolls especially lovvvvve tech. Hi-tech...lo-tech...any thing and everything tech, from talking toasters to vapor ware, if it's tech related it's bait. Start by watching recent topics (frequently called 'news' by the hapless
Remember, it's always easier to hold on to a troll than it is to catch another, so once you get a bite, drop your net and ignore any trolls that are out of reach. It's better to clean them right after capture, so make sure you have a scaling board and nail ready. Ignore the squealing and blood...they're small and powerless once you clamp their jaws.
Next we will talk about the key to
For the team that actually goes into the wilderness and lives in the "hab," you'll be simulating Mars isolation as accurately as possible.
Not really... There's frequent contact with support staff not living in the hab, and many other differences that render the usefulness of the Hab 'simulation' questionable.
The project suffers continuously from poor planning and communication. (This summer when a generator, known to fail in cold conditions, was sent to Devon, and failed, it was replaced with the exact same model.) Much of the 'science' is done the same way, haphazardly, and with little forethought. They routinely fail to practice protocols and procedures until they are tried in the field.
With the short length of the field season at Devon Island, this is very wasteful. There is concern among many that when it's discovered that the emperor has no clothes, it will hurt the funding of future endeavors of this type. The Mars Society has (rightfully) come under fire in many quarters as portraying this publicity stunt as real science. Like Biosphere II, the Hab is more show than go.
For those interested, this topic (the validity of the simulation and the usefulness of the science) is a routine topic of discussion on the sci.space.policy newsgroup.
Personally, I think the entire Internet community has been in training for long-duration space missions. How long can you stay in an enclosed space with nothing but a computer, food, water and sanitary facilities? I don't know about you, but I've done it for days on end, and only stopped because I had to go to work. And I'm getting better at it all the time.
Aren't we all a bit less dependent on interpersonal contact thanks to the ability to drown ourselves in information at the click of a mouse?
Or is it just me?
Come on, you can be honest...
If you wanted to do the December run, you're too late; deadline was Nov. 10 for applications. Thanks for posting it five days late, slashdot...
--- mars.nasa.gov ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/mdev = 94276.251/140136.303/132759.960/98834.596 ms
[elroy@mars elroy]$ ping mars.nasa.gov
PING mars.nasa.gov (209.67.50.203) from 192.168.0.99 : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from mars.nasa.gov (209.67.50.203): icmp_seq=0 ttl=4238 time=7108.837 msec
Did you just grab my ass?
On of the local rags up here in Australia is reporting that three possible sites have been identified.
e /0,5478,3258422%255E662,00.html
Link Here: http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_pag
I would've thought a far more appropriate place for a simulated Mars mission would've been one of the Antarctic Dry Valleys, and for a lot longer than the month they suggest.
... go figure!
I mean, get real - Mars is going to be out of touch for a good nine or more months, except for the radio communications. Or much longer - how many flights/cruises/tours of duty will be able to be sent in such a short space of time?
Kind of like Antarctica, I would've thought.
I'd jump if they were offering it in Antarctica, cause that's right next door to where I'm living - NZ itself - but I suspect Deep Freeze would have fits
"I his bow, and spun and wove, likes you." Vere de Vere out of my mould's mouth dragged me of the voluntary apes.
Gosh, geeks...maybe it was too long ago for most of you, but there was this high $$ project out in the desert, where several individuals were supposedly sealed inside a habitat as a prototype for space colonies and the like. It went bust after they were caught sneaking fresh air and twinkies thru a secret airlock...never learn, now do we?
Biosphere 2...
http://www.myuniverse.f2s.com/bio2.html
Check out this link to learn more about the Russian Mars-project. Remeber: These are the same guys who have gotten Gagarin in space.
I have a sabbatical scheduled for next summer anyway, and my original plans have already fallen through, so this could be an interesting alternative. It would certainly be unlike any other "summer vacation" I've ever had!
No Laughing Allowed!
For the time being anyway, I believe that human exploration of space is a waste of money.
Thirty years ago man walked on the moon and the whole world watched in awe. It was a great accomplishment, both in its sheer difficulty and its scientific value. Making goals and managing the missions of NASA is a complicated task. It is a government organization with no income, and no clear objective, yet 14 billion dollars of the entire federal budget is dedicated to it each year1. Although sending a man to the moon was an appropriate goal in the 1960's, I believe that because of many conditions that have changed in the past thirty years all human space travel should be suspended for the time being in light of other, equally exciting robotic missions.
Missions to space can have many positive outcomes besides the immediate and direct objectives of the mission and all of these must be considered when determining the value of a mission. In the 1960's there was a huge race for the first nation to land a man on the moon. When the Russians beat the United states to launching a satellite, "it seemed that everyone[In the United States] from school children to newspaper reporters to politicians was bemoaning national failure."2 The space race was a huge unifying force within the nation and so space missions to land on a moon had huge political purpose as well as their scientific purpose. In the 1960's not very much was known about the surface of the moon and human observation and collection of samples, including 384 kg of moon rocks3 provided a great deal of scientific data. There was also a lot of discovery about the effects of space on humans. In that era of time, human exploration of the local space around the Earth and of the moon provided huge amounts of scientific information while also having large political uses.
It is thirty years later and NASA has come a long way in its scientific discovery of the moon and its superiority over other nations in space travel. The United States is now the predominant force in space, and after twelve men on the moon and thirty years of humans living in space the human race has discovered huge amounts of information about the moon and living in space. Instruments have been placed on the moon, we have maps of its complete surface and we are still doing analysis on samples of its rocks. National pride, although still an aspect of the space mission is not nearly as huge an aspect as it was in the 1960's and there is no longer a race with any other nation. Because of changes in our understanding of space and the technology available to us today's space missions have the opportunity to make new discoveries about the many other planets in our solar system and many other things about the expansive space beyond it. We should be focussing our energy on exploring other planets as we have the moon, as well as performing experiments on the nature of the universe and on how the Earth is changing. Missions along these lines are the exploration of Mars, advanced biological and physical experiments in microgravity situations, the satellites and space telescopes which collect information about outerspace as well as many other missions that have not yet come to light. NASA is in a situation in which they have a huge potential that is currently not being utilized.
Currently NASA is making some progress in the exploration of mars with robots but they are spending huge amounts of money and time on the International Space Station (ISS) which is an orbiting laboratory designed to perform experiments in low gravity conditions.4 Performing these kinds of experiments is a good idea, but due to advances in robotic technology, this mission does not need to be performed by humans.
In the 1960's robots were very primitive, basically non-existent. The computer brains that powered them were only a fraction as powerful as today's computers. If any dynamic task were to be achieved it had to be done by a human, so sending humans to space was a given for planetary exploration and in space experiments. Today humans have the exact same capabilities as they did in the 60's, but their robotic colleagues have matured greatly. Robots are good in space because they do not need life support systems and they can detect many more things than humans. A robot can have 10 different kinds of cameras detecting 10 different kinds of information and recording it all perfectly whereas a human can only see one kind of information, visible light, and has no perfect memory of the encounter. A robot is also reproducible and it would be feasible to design one robot and then send 20 to a planet instead of just sending one human. Quote on success of mars pathfinder mission. The robots of today are different than the robots of the 60's, and are much better suited to space travel.
When sending a human into space there is a large amount of effort spent on life support systems. The cost and design time to provide a human with oxygen, food, water, heat and to return the human to Earth is incredibly huge compared to the cost of installing a solar panel on a robot which can meet all of its needs, and if the robot mission fails, no lives are lost so the amount of safety precautions and over-engineering is greatly reduced. The cost of the ISS is being estimated to run over $100 billion5, whereas the cost of the mars pathfinder mission was only $264 million6.
In the 1960's due to the hype surrounding the space race, the US government was giving basically unlimited funds to NASA to sponsor the space race 7 This gave the huge amount of monetary resources required for the development and deployment of many manned missions. Whatever was needed to get a man on the moon was given to NASA.
In the beginning of the 21st century the budget for NASA is much tighter, less than 1% of the federal budget or about $14 B. The developments of new technologies have opened the possibilities for many new kinds of missions so the reduced funding is spread more thinly and the full potential of the space program is not being realized. The best way for NASA to deal with this is to take funding away from very inefficient missions such as human space flight, which can not compete with robotics for the amount of scientific discovery per dollar spent, and to spend that money on the robotic and electronic discovery sectors. The human space flight division currently uses up $5.5 billion of the $14 billion in the NASA budget. That would be enough money for 21 complete Mars Pathfinder missions, each year or if applied to a robotic ISS the number of experiments could increase.
Due to shifts in the goals of space exploration, the monetary resources available, and the technical resources available, a dramatic shift towards robotic exploration in space should be made. In the future the variables will shift again and we will be faced with this question again, but if the program is to remain successful it must be able to adapt to these changing conditions.
Watch as 10 contestants fight against low temperatures, little oxygen, uncomfortable space suits and _EACH_OTHER_ for a 20 Million dollar jackpot and a place in history...
Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.
No, seriously, I just come here for the articles.
January 28, 1986 (so mid-eighties)
Space shuttle Challenger
Seven crew members "sent to another world".
We still don't know whether Nasa or Morton-Thiokol caused the accident (through neglect, or otherwise), but is was definitely Nasa who sent them.
Loads of info here
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
That may be a high price to pay for a cool laptop, but then so is my current job.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
"Mars Society president Robert Zubrin is especially vulnerable, being labeled no less than a "messianic" "cult" leader by Robert Park."
I've met Bob Zubrin. The guy is a strong advocate and sometimes exudes a little bit of a used car salesman vibe... but that aside, the guy is as sharp as a tack and really knows what he's talking about. Calling Zubrin a crackpot is totally unfair. He has written many papers and journal articles that are widely referenced.
Zubrin is very strongly focused on the goal of putting humans on Mars and he has very strong opinions on how that goal ought to be reached. Sure, he is very aggressive in pursuing his agenda -- but he needs to be if he is to see people on Mars in his lifetime.
If Robert Park thinks what Zubrin's talking about is voodoo science, Park doesn't know anything about aerospace engineering. Ask any professor or engineer who actually knows about rocket science and they'll tell you that Zubrin's Mars Direct scheme is currently one of the best ideas out there for sending humans to Mars.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Hello.
This is just another goddamn adequacy.org troll. Mod it down!
I submitted this story a full 7 hours before jaime did, and it was rejected.
*walks away shaking his head*
did the m-dog come out to play?
Blaze a trail to the New World