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Russia Planning Double Mission to Mars
dylanduck writes "Apparently Russia has revived a previous plan to send a spacecraft to Phobos, a tiny Martian moon. Turns out it's a cool place to land - much easier than the surface as far less deceleration is needed, it should have plenty of Mars rocks spattered on the surface and it's just 9000km above the surface. Some think it the perfect place for a Mars moonbase." From the article: "A mission devoted to the moons could explain how the satellites are held together - whether they are piles of rubble loosely held together by gravity or solid chunks. Most scientists assume the heavily cratered moons are captured asteroids, Christensen told New Scientist. But it is actually quite hard for a planet to capture an object into its orbit - most things just skim by. 'So how it got there is a bit of an enigma,' Christensen says."
...people should really pay more attention to Robert Zubrin. If you haven't read his book, I suggest you do so. He has shown that it is possible to get a mission to the actual planet (not the moons) relatively safely using the same kind of technology that we used to get to the moon in the 1960s. (Of course, with what we have now, it would be "easier" and safer", and those are in quotes merely because I am appreciative of the difficult and danger.)
We (as humans, not just as specific country-people) need to recapture our pioneering spirit, and get someone to Mars. What we'll learn and accomplish will far outweigh the danger. Imagine if people had been too initimidated to round the horn of Africa, cross the Atlantic ocean, or go to moon! It's time we got that adventurous spirit back, and applied it planet-wide. If we pay attention to our smart people (ie, Zubrin), it's not something that need be far off in the future!
libertarianswag.com
The story in New Scientist is here
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Putting a lander on Phobos should be interesting, since the moonlet is covered by a meter-thick layer of dust. When I imagine a craft making a landing, I picture throwing a rock into a bowl of flour. On the plus side, maybe we'll make the first sizable, intentional man-made crater outside the Earth.
I guess Phobos is better then Deimos... the latter is thought to have a layer of dust several hundred feet thick (or should that be "several dozen meters thick"?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
But you are most likely correct that Phobos will be dead.
.technomancer
The rocks are thrown into space by the impact of meteors. This is how they can hit Phobos or Earth.
If you've ever looked at the Moon through a telescope (recommended, it's beautiful!), you'll see huge lines of material converging on the craters, this is called "ejecta" and it's the debris thrown out from impacts. Some of the lines cross decent fractions of the Moon's surface, so it's pretty easy to imagine that some of the rock made it all the way out of orbit, and that the same process can operate almost as easily on Mars.
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
Slightly off-topic: Also, the mass of the moon isn't evenly distributed. There is a dense area inside it that's off-center that was attracted to earth moreso than the rest of the moon, and over billions of years caused that side to always face earth.
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:)
Now, please turn in your nerd license at the nearest available counter
This is my post. See sig above ^
Take for example, the race to the moon. Did the US go to the moon because the American population wanted to, just for the fun of it? No. The US and the USSR were locked in a cold war, each side vying for superiority on the global stage.
Europe was seen as the battlefield for the Third World War, which seemed like it might begin at any moment during the 1950s and 1960s.
If you were part of the leadership of a European nation during those years, you really would like to be aligned with the victor. Since the war would be fought with rockets, you probably watched the space race with great interest: After all, without an actual war, rockets into space provided a good proxy for actual military prowess.
In this game, the US was doing quite badly:
- The first artificial satellite in orbit around the Earth? The USSR did that first, in 1957.
- Who sent the first living animal (a dog) into space? The USSR, of course, also in 1957.
- The first man in space? The USSR did that first too, in 1961.
- How about the first woman in space? The USSR beat the US there too, sending Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova skywards.
- Which nation launched a man to orbit who then donned a spacesuit and drifted in the emptiness of space by himself? Yet again, the USSR did it first, in 1965.
Time after time after time, the USSR was handing the US its ass on a plate.In the international community, the USSR was winning the propaganda battle against the US.
Without the presence of the USSR, the US would have never sent people to the moon. We would have never seen the earth rise from behind the moon. We would have never seen people bouncing around the surface of the moon, kicking up dust.
So, parent poster, please do not say that nationalism is bad for space. Without it, we would have never escaped the gravity well.