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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.
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!
So how much do I get if I'm the last one left?
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
If it's comfortable then you have other people and lots more flora and fauna around. Desolate and uncomfortable sort of go hand in hand. Plains may be flat, but lots of stuff still lives there. For instance look at the savannah in Africa. If you want isolation and emptiness, then you really have to choose somewhere that most earth-born life doesn't want to be.
Sadly, the opinion of most at JSC is that we are at the sunset of manned space travel. The astronaut program has all but finished (no new astronaut selection). The ISS is effectively atrophying (it's basically just Mir 2 at the moment).
Fortunately, companies like Xcor Aerospace are developing reusable propulsion technology at a fraction of the price that governments do - so maybe there's a chance that space exploration will continue once NASA throws in the towel and reverts to being NACA.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
--- 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?
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.
They'll need a high-bandwidth data link, and I imagine that low-bandwidth internet access would be considered a good investment in morale. Sure, the lag would be a killer, but it would still be good.
'High Bandwidth' in space terms is nothing like what would be considered such dirtside. (Think 56.6 modem *at best*, with a lot of demands on the channel, even considering it'll be as close to 24/7 as can practically be managed.) Ditto for 'lag', round trip time will be generally in the vicinity of at least an hour, usually worse.
I dunno about you, but for all I know, I might have been on my way to Mars for the last week. I think there are lots of people now who wouldn't be bothered by the isolation much.
I really doubt most of those who think they "wouldn't be bothered much" really have a clue. When I was in the Submarine Service new guys were constantly astonished by what the close quarters and lack of communication with the outside world really meant. It's not like anything you've likely ever encountered before. It's almost impossible to describe it to someone who has not encountered it.
From another poster:
Lots of explorers, some of whom weren't particularly sane, managed to survive extended periods of similar isolation and once they went out they didn't have *any* contact with others outside their own party for months or even years. Or, to take another example, what about the crews of WWII U-Boats? From all reports, most of them stayed sane, under conditions that seem to me to be similar (but harsher) than those faced by a hypothetical Mars mission.
I submit that those explorers, and WWII Submariners of all nations, came from a time when extended periods without communications were the norm, not the exception. In the last twenty years personal communication and connecticity have become so pervasive that again it's hard to communicate the differences to someone under thirty or so.
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.