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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."

3 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 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.
  2. 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