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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."
Some think it the perfect place for a Mars moonbase.
;)
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here, besides the "shock and awe" of getting to the moon, why isn't there a drive for the practicality of a base on our own moon?
I think it's time that more of our space exploration gets practical, and not HR fodder. "Hey we're technologically superior! We got to mars!"
How about "Hey, we're technologically superior! We have colonized space and use those colonies as jumping points for marsian missions!"
Too hopeful?
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The two moons of Mars are not very big and although their gravitation is minimal, they don't present very big targets either. In order to land on one, you have to match the speed almost perfectly, then slightly chnage yours and then just as you get there match it again, hopefully you can then latch on.
While that may not sound like much, for a probe with no help from Earth (Mars is on average 8 light, hence radio minutes away) this is a difficult task.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
When Earth takes the next dinosaur killer on the chin and everything more complicated than a paramecium gets destroyed, it would be nice to have some folks on Luna, Mars, maybe Ceres and Vesta as well, still alive to listen to that good old rock and roll music...that's why we need manned space flight, to colonize against the time that this greasy old blue marble won't support human life.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
I also don't think that we'll ever colonise space/other planets/etc. Earth is where humans evolved, and we'll never find a place as well suited for human life.
Human beings evolved in Africa.
Siberia is not nearly as well suited to human life.
It's so poorly suited to human life, in fact, that unitl relatively recently (definetly less than 20,000 years)
noone lived there. It was only with the aid of new technology (needle and
thread to make snug parkas, pants, and mittens)that human beings were able to
colonize the area.
For many generations now, Eskimos, etc. have been living on frozen, treeless, utterly
inhospitable wastelands, erecting domed shelters made of local materials (ice), and walking
around in the low-tech equivalent of space suits.
The colonization of inhospitable environments by means of advanced technology has already begun
and I see no reason to beleive that it won't or shouldn't continue.