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Plan To Bomb Mars For Signs of Climate Change

Posted by Zonk on from the brute-forces-science dept.

Oliver Harris writes "Scientists are planning on launching huge copper slugs at Mars in the hope that they will reveal signs of climate change. Problem: What happens when the Martians launch their own copper slugs back?" From the article: "'It's neat because it's a brute force way to gain access to the subsurface of Mars,' says David Spencer, a team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US. 'The impactor will be very simple and we'll get our first look at material from that depth.' Christensen says that will provide a crucial test for models of Mars's past climate."

6 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Copper Shortage by Innova · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Scientists are planning on launching huge copper slugs at Mars...

    But where will they find all of that copper?

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  2. Overkill? by redheaded_stepchild · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Couldn't we get more data by drilling cores like we do at the poles and other places around the world? Seems to me that all we would really succeed in doing is throwing the evidence in a million different directions. And have we built a rover that is capable of not getting stuck in a crater?

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  3. Re:Why Copper? by Carnildo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Presumably copper vapor is less visible on whatever instruments they're using than something like iron.

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  4. Re:copper by Vellmont · · Score: 3, Insightful


    We can use all the copper we can get here on earth.


    Replies like this, and the moderations of them really makes me realize that there's a lot of people that really have no sense of scale. The world copper reserves are somewhere around 340 million tonnes (http://www.icsg.org/Factbook/copper_world/sd.htm) . That's about 340,000,000,000 kilograms (340 billion kilograms). The projectile they're talking about sending is 230 kilograms. Expressed as a percentage of our reserves, that's .000000068% of our copper reserves. I wouldn't really worry about losing that much copper.

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  5. Re:copper by Vellmont · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In addition to my other reply which lists 230 kilograms as a percentage of the world copper reserves, I'd like to point out that 230 kilograms of copper is almost exactly a cubic foot. That is a 1x1x1 foot cube of copper. Not exactly a "huge copper slug" that the article summary suggests.

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  6. Re:hmm... by Kelson · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I guess I can kind of see how it's different, as we aren't removing the top ten feet from all of mars

    Not to mention the fact that meteorites do strike the planet from time to time...