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NASA Plans Mission To Study Martian Atmosphere

Posted by samzenpus on from the say-hi-to-marvin dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Since the atmospheric blanket of Mars is fast disappearing, NASA is planning a mission to Mars in 2013 to study the Red Planet further. The $400-million plus project named the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) will investigate how Mars lost most of its atmosphere. This will be critical in understanding whether there has been life there or not."

13 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. You may not know this but... by multiben · · Score: 4, Funny

    A fact that not many people know is humans used to live on Mars. We fucked that place up and came to Earth.

    1. Re:You may not know this but... by retech · · Score: 2, Funny

      Wow, and here I thought Tom Cruise only posted on Oprah's website and a Scientology blog. I am honoured to have you here on /.! (Tag that last sentence with sarcasm please.)

    2. Re:You may not know this but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Na we totally were on Venus and global warming went crazy there. We just didn't learn. Are you people ready for crazy high pressures?!?! It's coming! Any century now...

    3. Re:You may not know this but... by RsG · · Score: 4, Informative

      Why are we not seriously trying to Terraform Mars?

      Because we do not have the capability to do so, and aren't likely to in the foreseeable future. Read up on some of the non-fictional assessments of what making Mars livable would entail.

      When and if we do get such capabilities, terraforming will still take a very, very long time. A realistic estimate is at least a century of continuous effort to put a breathable atmosphere in place, and frankly, that's optimistic. We'd need infrastructure in the rest of the solar system in place first, to supply the resources needed, specifically to thicken the Martian atmosphere, add a liquid hydrosphere and make the introduction of life possible. I doubt we can get that infrastructure in place from where we are now without many decades and countless trillions devoted to doing so, and that isn't even stage one of the terraforming process, it's stage zero.

      Put another way, with the resources it would take to make Mars habitable, we could easily fix most of our current problems here on Earth, regarding climate, resource scarcity, energy and ecology. After all, it's the same problems in both cases. And we'll never, ever be able to move a significant portion of our population to Mars even if the planet could support life; a spacecraft carrying a thousand colonists would be an amazing feat of engineering, and ten rounds trips would move less than a hundred thousandth of the current world population.

      --
      Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
    4. Re:You may not know this but... by eyenot · · Score: 2, Insightful

      We haven't terraformed Mars because the exact way to get it done has not been predicted, yet.

      You should grab any hard-sci fi anthology on terraforming and/or Mars and look into it. Some fairly serious scientists write some of these short stories and put a lot of truly scientific effort into it. One guy who works somewhere in the space-related fields wrote a story detailing how it would be more or less truly impossible to build Mars an atmosphere conducive to human life for reasons related to gravity.

      I think we should all be seriously disillusioned about terraforming and all heavy space industry in general. If you'd like a fuller opinion on it, read my essay "Space Travel: Unfit for Humanity". :) http://eyenot.livejournal.com/1009497.html

      --
      "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
    5. Re:You may not know this but... by knarf · · Score: 2, Insightful

      100 years is nothing of course. If the space race had not been about a dick size contest between two political powers but about real scientific progress those rain makers might have been pumping out gases on mars for almost half of that period by now. To a single person it might seem a daunting proposition to put effort into something which is not going to pay of before he or she is dead or gone but nevertheless this is done time and time again - just ask any middle-aged forest owner if he expects to be around to harvest those saplings he just put so much effort into planting last year.

      --
      --frank[at]unternet.org
    6. Re:You may not know this but... by anUnhandledException · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The first country to terraform mars doesn't own it. The country with the biggest guns owns it.

      As to the reason why we haven't tried.
      1) land on earth is still relatively cheap. Maybe when the population on earth is 30 billion, and we are suffering the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange, all fish is vat cloned because oceans are too polluted then maybe the economics is different.

      2) Until we get a space elevator it is prohibitively expensive to put things into even geo transfer orbit much less shooting them all the way to mars, and then landing them. Cost to GTO is about $50K per kg. Cost to mars is hard to quantify but say somewhere in the ballpark of $500K per kg of payload (including cost of lander). 2 tons to bars is about one billion in transit cost. To terraform mars anytime in next 100K years would require thousands of tons of equipment at costs running into the trillions.

      3) Uncertainty and time.
      Even if enough financial resources were devoted it would take thousands more like tens of thousands of years to terraform Mars. Most countries & companies don't last that long. Say the US spends $20 trillion to terraform mars. By the time it is done the US no longer even exists and the people who didn't spend resources on terraforming benefit.

      4) Might makes right. There is no guarantee the country who terraforms mars will claim it. Imagine two countries. One spends $20T on terraforming Mars. The other spends $20T on warfare and just takes Mars (and space elevator, and orbital construction yards) etc.

      Simply put there is no risk vs reward. Someday in 100 years or 1000 years when we are closer to a global govt (maybe somethings like the EU but globally) you could see a situation where global resources are put towards this global goal.

  2. Geothermal energy by turing_m · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's for these sort of reasons that I'm very sceptical about making large scale use of geothermal energy. If we eventually start solidifying magma as a result of the heat extraction and the earth loses its magnetic field as a result, say goodbye to the nice atmosphere and radiation protection we have now.

    --
    If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
  3. Fast disappearing ? by mbone · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fast disappearing ? I think it has a few billion years to go, 100 million years would be a low estimate. Heck, Phobos will crash in only a few million years, and even that .is considerably longer than NASA's time horizon

  4. A better mission by oldhack · · Score: 2, Funny

    We need to rescue Spirit and Opportunity. Loyalty should count for something.

    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
  5. What am I missing? by glwtta · · Score: 2, Funny

    Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission: MAVEN?

    --
    sic transit gloria mundi
    1. Re:What am I missing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      The N comes from the end of "Evolution". Mission is not a part of the acronym.

  6. Re:magnicks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I remember reading a paper a few years back on what it would take to create an artificial magnetic field on earth to replace our own if it were ever to become necessary.

    Basically a dozen superconducting rings around the planet spaced evenly between latitudes would be all that would be needed.

    Each ring requires about 1GW -- the output of a nuclear reactor to power (mostly cooling to keep below transistion temperature). On earth it's obviously a lot of work from an engineering perspective but not impossible to implement if it ever became necessary... God help us if an an entire ring ever decided to quench.

    Doing the same for mars would be a massive logistical undertaking with current technology but perhaps not beyond the realm of possibility as a very long term project. Assuming a breakthru in room temperature superconductivity it would make things much much easier.