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NASA Looking For Ideas To Explore Mars
ZeroExistenZ writes "NASA plans to make another trip to Mars in 2018 for which they want to devise a plan by this summer. To come up with ideas for this mission, they turn to the public to tackle a few challenge areas. Participants must submit a brief abstract (no more than two pages) outlining the idea, and indicating in which of the topical areas the idea belongs. Abstracts are due no later than 5:00 p.m. U.S. Central Daylight Time May 10, 2012."
Send criminals, the way the British used Australia. Either they make it or they don't, but you don't have to worry about packing fuel for the return trip. Ship them supplies and see what happens.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This stuff barely qualifies as noise in the national budget. If you care about cutting government spending, the only meaningful choices are health insurance for the elderly, retirement insurance for the elderly, and the military.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
... they need to stop thinking in a round-trip paradigm. We would be able to get a lot more accomplished, a lot quicker, if we drew upon the pool of astronauts and possible-astronauts who are willing to do a long-term mission in the name of science.
Pour as much money as they can into psychological screenings and legal documents making sure that they are absolutely not liable, and send them off. The real reason we've stayed on Earth and its orbiting bodies is that we've concentrated too much on packing enough fuel with them for a round-trip, and not enough on finding ways to allow Humans to live indefinitely in enclosed Martian settlements. The current model of "go to star, get data, come home, instant hero" is just not feasible for meaningful space travel beyond what we have today.
Given that they only recently pulled funding for ExoMars, nearly screwing over a lot of people in Europe (thanks, Russia, by the way) it's a bit hard to believe they're just saying "eh, we want to do our own thing again".
Sort it out, NASA.
That way we'll get a short period of actual usefulness out of them for once.
#DeleteChrome
Quite frankly, I like Gingrich's idea of mining the moon. With some industry on the moon, several heavily shielded space stations could be sent into orbits within the inner solar system. It will take some time for the ion thrusters to get the orbits right, but I think it is a more cost effective solution than NASA's current plans.
It should be a minimum of a 6 year trip to justify the expense. They can send supplies on a regular schedule and the containers can be utilized on site. A regular base could be built and people could be rotated out after their 6 year stay or they could stay on if they wanted to. Imagine the exploration and discovery possible with a long term team on the ground.
Cutting spending isn't as important for politicians as the appearance of cutting spending. If they want to stay in office, it's a good idea to find something to cut. The typical voter doesn't have much of a head for numbers, and sees just $X million saved. Millions of dollars always sounds like a lot, even when it really isn't.
The future of manned space exploration may belong to China for just this reason.
get out, walk around.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Send the elderly to Mars?
1. A cheap way to launch supplies into Earth orbit. No people will be shipped this way so even a huge cannon would be good.
2. Prep the supplies from #1 in orbit (need a space station or shuttle for this) and use cheap, slow engines to get them to Mars.
3. The supplies enter Mars orbit and stay there until they are signalled from the ground to come down.
Keep up a steady stream and roll any improvements into the system and you should be able to supply a mission for however long you want to keep them alive.
Getting them back to Earth will be a problem.
Are there any volunteers for a one-way mission?
At least until they can assemble their own launch pad to get their people back into orbit.
Well, it's going to be a minimum of a 3 year triip. 8-9 months to get there, and the next launch opportunity to return is about 18 months later, then 8-9 months to get home. That's assuming the seasons on Mars line up ok against your landing and launch windows with respect to things like dust storms and summer vs winter for temperature control (assuming we're going nuclear power for electricity.)
And, of course, some magic technology so the kiloRads of radiation dose during the trips don't kill the astronauts. 1-2 kRad/year in round numbers.. 600 Rad is a fairly quick death, 300 Rad lets you linger in pain a bit.
instead of a bunch of administrative bureaucrats? Well... neither do I. But at least the engineers used to get to help.
It's a good idea, but in terms of price per euthanasia it's just not cost effective.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
we really do need to go to -5.
really.
They need to look for direct evidence of life and not gases and such that they can later claim are caused by geological processes. Strap a microscope onto a lander and take soil samples at the surface, 1", 1' and 3' depths and subject them to several conditions that should stimulate growth. Do a pass over each sample with a microscope before and after and look for biological action. Until they see actual cell division happening the debate will go on. Apparently there's no higher lifeforms so you have to look for bacteria or other simple lifeforms. We're talk about what amounts to petri dishes and a basic microscope and we may have an answer. They are spending billions to go to Mars and seem to be making an effort to no look for life. Want more funding? Find life!
May 10, 2012???? Where were you a month ago smokin the bong??? Slashdot = fail
It's a good idea, but in terms of price per euthanasia it's just not cost effective.
Aside from that, the elderly could be great astronauts. It'll be a long voyage to Mars and back and the elderly would have the wisdom and the coping skills for such a long, monotonous, and boring trip. And logistically, they're a better pick: they need as much food to support their bodies.
And considering the danger involved, well I think most elderly people I know have come to peace with the idea that they don't have much longer. In addition, I think we don't give old people enough credit and in turn it creates a self fulfilling prophecy of decline. Why should one keep oneself up if you're going to be cast away? We're no longer a hunter gatherer or agrarian or industrialized society where a strong back is needed most of all.
Patience and wisdom would be quite a value on a long monotonous space mission.
Only if we can mine unobtanium without getting our asses kicked by blue aliens.
Really, they just need to RTFM (and cough up a metric shitload of money).
Easy peasy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Fuel for a return trip is mostly an excuse. You just need to do the return trip in two hops: bring enough fuel in the lander to get yourself to orbit, then dock with a giant tanker that carries enough fuel for the rest of the trip. Mars gravity is only about twice that of the Moon, and we got a lander into lunar orbit over fifty years ago, so I can't imagine a Mars ascent being that much of a leap.
The harder part is actually landing a pod big enough to provide long-term living quarters. You could probably do it with inflatable buildings and large air compressors, but you'd still need a supplemental oxygen supply and either a steady supply of food and oxygen or a means of producing your own.
The ideal solution would require landing somewhere with water ice. Water can provide oxygen by electrolysis. Sure, there are other ways to get oxygen (using CO2 electrolysis, for example), but that won't provide them with the water they'll need for other things like cooking, bathing, etc., so landing somewhere with an ample supply of water would be a big plus.
So combine some very powerful air compressors with oxygen generators, lots of heating coils, some inflatable buildings, some disassembled airtight greenhouses, two or three shipments containing large, rolled-up solar panel sheets, etc. and it might actually be feasible to create a long-term habitat on Mars for not a lot more than the cost of a few rover missions. Remember to provide at least three of everything so that they won't be screwed if one of them doesn't work, preferably in separate bundles within reasonable walking distance of a single drop zone. Then provide a small lander with enough reserve oxygen and power to last them a month or two just in case it takes them longer than expected to get things set up.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You realize they're not actually talking about sending any person to Mars, right? We're just going to send another dumb RC toy, like we've done the last fifteen years.
Obviously whatever they plan, it won't happen by 2018. So be generous with their adherence to their timeline and say 2020. That means that only 51 years after man landed on the moon and some 20 years after man landed an RC toy on Mars, we will finally . . . land another RC toy on Mars. Gosh, that's some real high dreaming, right there. That should sure inspire the masses. Fifty years to go from riding horses to landing a human on the moon and only another 50+ years to landing . . . a toy on Mars. Boy, we should be sooooo proud of ourselves and our piddling accomplishments. Why, at this rate, we might even get a man on Mars in the next three hundred years!
And spare me the Spacex stuff. Unless they are immune from liability, and bankruptcy. A few mishaps, some dead space tourists, and we're permanently grounded.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I read the challenge areas, basically it's all the things that the guys working at NASA should be doing, if the Federal Government hadn't slashed their already inadequate budget to the point where it is now nothing more than a bunch of bureaucrats doing time.... So now some organization called the "Lunar and Planetary Institute" a division of "Universities Space Research Association" - to quote: "USRA engages the creativity and authoritative expertise of the research community to develop and deliver sophisticated, forward-looking solutions to Federal agencies and other customers - on schedule and within budget." ... wants free ideas - must not be getting any good ones from their "authoritative experts in the research community....lol
As much as I am for human exploration, and agree send people who are willing if they are willing, heres an idea for a cheaper probe. Design a cube, or tetrahedron, or some shape that you could attach inflatable balloons to the face of to make an inflatable sphere. Let the wind throw it where it may, and you can deflate the sphere section by section to make sure each instrument or experiment package is where it needs to be. If you get stuck somewhere or thrown into a canyon, hey, you could even use tacticly inflating sections to move it. Build a bunch of them, drop them all over.
do they have lawns on mars?
Pour as much money as they can into psychological screenings and legal documents making sure that they are absolutely not liable, and send them off.
There is no legal contract in existence to make this happen. The place with the equipment available has to be proven theoretically habitable first and to get the volunteers there has to be a significant incentive. Almost all possible incentives are bounded by the resources of the Earth, or defined in terms of them so the incentive might have to be an ideological, a religious or relating to the very survival of those colonists or the entire human race.
Mars is a dead planet in terms of its magnetic field and the lack of plate tectonics so resource excavation will be hard and perilous. The technology going there can't be dependent of much if the colony wishes to be ultimately self-sufficient as it will have to be and there would have to be a method for manufacturing water from the resources available, or importing it from the nearby.
The current model of "go to star, get data, come home, instant hero" is just not feasible for meaningful space travel beyond what we have today.
It's a good thing there is the concept of interplanetary internet in existence already, as the concepts of "data", "home" and "instant hero" have evolved accordingly. ;)
Why should anyone waste their time sending NASA anything? We already have enough goddamn ideas already. What we need now is someone to put them into action, not more meetings to plan more meetings.
Build 5 Modified Saturn Vs
Build NERVA/Ion Drive Hybrid
Build Martian Excursion Module
Launch Saturn Vs
Build Martian Command Ship
Go to Mars
Mr. Crusher, Engage.
Metric value for a shitload. Is that by weight or volume?
Surface and sub-surface mapping is easy. LADAR gives you the surface map, thermal imaging (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13518143 and http://thermal-imaging-blog.com/index.php/2011/06/06/finding-pyramids/#.T4tWe9Xe4tY) gives you subsurface structures and a good idea of what the composition is.
Triage is more complex but doable. Different materials allow radio through at different velocities and refract at different angles, so a simple system is to use a GPR setup with multiple receivers. If you know the difference in time it takes to transmit a signal from A to B through one medium versus another, plus what appears to be behind what when you look at one point versus another, then you know enough. (This is because we can reproduce the minerals we do know are on Mars and can therefore know what those look like using such technology in advance. The stuff you'd want to triage is stuff that doesn't fit with behaviours we'd expect to see.)
But GPR is energy-intensive. No big deal - if it's a triage, you know the general area, you're wanting specifics. Since moving to a location is going to take days by rover, you can afford to triage by any process that consumes as much power as your solar cells can gather in that time. You can afford for it to be wasteful, because you don't have to carry more than one target area's worth of power at any one time and can recharge the batteries between runs.
The original scans have to be a lot more conservative, since you need to perform an unknown amount of surveying and therefore cannot use more power than you can gather in the same amount of time, but isolating a point out of a fixed, small area is going to be a brief, infrequent task. The quality therefore matters far more than the power requirements, when you're working that way round.
Identifying organics will be hard without some sort of spectral analysis. The detection of methane in the past is only significant if that methane was produced by biochemical process rather than an inorganic process, and that is currently unknown. Further, it's only important if the organic found is ALSO an organic relating to such methane production. Terrestrial biochemistry is highly diverse, so there's no such guarantee. Assuming you were looking for those specific organisms, however, life operates with a negative feedback system. Thus, if a process produces X then as the concentration of X increases the production must decrease. X will eventually become toxic to the process. Since we've seen methane and the Viking landers saw CO2 production, you might want to take methane and CO2 along. By repeating the Viking experiment with differing, controlled levels of initial CO2 and methane, you should determine if a negative feedback loop exists. If you saturate, run the experiment then return to a known previous unsaturated state an inorganic system -might- produce the same response as it did in that same state previously. An organic system is guaranteed not to, since you created an environment that was toxic.
There's one catch. This requires spectral analysis and the requirement said you can't do that. True, all chemical responses (organic or inorganic) will also produce a heat signature (2nd Law of Thermodynamics) but ALL the chemistry will be producing heat and you will have NO idea what fraction might be biochemical and therefore NO means of predicting what level of reduction in activity is significant. (If 1% of the activity might be biochemical, you're looking at a very different level of difference being significant than if 90% might be biochemical.) If you can't construct a hypothesis H1 in the first place, you cannot establish how likely it is if what you are seeing is H1 or H0.
There are techniques for extracting proteins in biochemistry. IIRC, you need them to be in a solution, you add various solvents and reagents and then you filter. Then you're just measuring the mass of that part of the filter vs. the expected
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...some obstacles need to be dealt with:
- Energy: The theory is there, as is a practically unlimited supply of helium-3 on the Moon. That's a stopover just to refuel and the ready technology for controlled nuclear fusion. Step n-1: permanent lunar base.
- Food/water: OK, the water bit is easy: pretty much the simplest polyatomic compound in existence, it has many uses including oxygen generation (photoelectrics/hydroponics?), and it can be recycled to an infinite degree. It's also pretty dense, so storage isn't much of a problem. Food is a simple matter of growing your own, for which a garden needs to be built and the necessary skills present to maintain it to the point where it is a constantly replenishable source of chemical energy and other essential nutrients. Such gardens can be located on the lunar colony, in orbit around Earth, the Moon or Mars (better yet, all three), with a limited supply onboard to be replenished during stopovers during the trip.
- Psychological studies: impacts on long-term enclosure in tin can environments (ask the Russians), in small groups of less than half a dozen (ask the Russians or any political prisoner), and application of these studies to determine the suitability of any candidate for the mission as to their likely responses to such conditions and steps that can be taken to mitigate any negative effects such as cabin fever - wouldn't do the mission any good to have someone suddenly decide they're going for a walk without a spacesuit on. Strike that, it'd be an End-Of-Mission event.
- Damage control. We're talking about micrometeoroid strikes, radiation surges, orbital anomalies, structural failures, electronic failures, and the training required to recover from those.
There's just a few. There's a lot more, probably even more that I wouldn't think of if I wrote a thousand pages on it, never mind two. I think the eggheads are talking about a robotic mission here. For which I would suggest a small, semi-autonomous probe with the ability to cover large distances rapidly (neutrally buoyant craft with fan engines?) and the ability to take and analyse samples with the equipment it has onboard. So, some serious miniaturisation technology, probably some endlessly renewable power source (printed PV array?), redundant systems (or more than one probe)... it could be done with technology we have now, the question is how to utilise what we have, or how to adapt what we have to do what we want?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Plunk down an incubator bursting with embryos and see what happens...
its all around a winner ... we get people on mars, clean house, and I doubt anyone would bitch about the cost
My suggestion is cheapest: Spend the money on improving technology. Until it's cheap enough to
visit Mars. What are we loosing by waiting a few years, or even a decade?
I doubt they've even finished analyzing the data collected so far.
Seriously, send a small robotic greenhouse. Have water available. Add soil from mars. Add some organic material. Mix. Put in the seeds. Also, in another small greenhouse, have regular sterilized earthsoil with same plants for a control. Add same amount of water, etc. Lets see what happens.
Windbourne
And there in lays the problem. The elderly vote in large numbers and they care about retirement, health care and defense. Until young voters vote in numbers greater than the elderly don't expect change.
We've already proven we can send robots there and get some data back. Let's start sending the pieces needed to actually build something there so there's little chance of sending a person who could end up stranded with no working supplies. In the mean time, these resources could act as shelter and analysis stations for future robots.
Historically, exploration has been round trip. And given that we don't have experience with creating settlements on other bodies, I don't see the case for one way trips.
(1) sex
(2) oil
(3) lower taxes
(4) god
(5) fighting terrorism
No accompanying explanations, rational arguments will only blunt the force of these compelling interests.
As long as your district gets enough pork you can cut as much as you want.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
... they need to stop thinking in a round-trip paradigm.
Agreed, but an unmanned mission will accomplish much more than wasting time and resources trying to keep a person alive. Of all the fantastic space exploration that has happened over the years, the one that impressed me the most was when Huygens landed on Saturn's moon Titan. That was the most unworldly thing I've ever seen.
If I understand, they're talking about the sample return mission. That IMHO would be on the short list of necessary activities before a manned mission. This "RC toy" mission would go a long ways to telling us what sort of world we would be landing a manned mission on.
Send flying drones
NASA already have a plan to go to Mars. Project Orion.
http://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_on_project_orion.html
Then we'll have the money to go to mars. Oh, wait! I forgot. I'm freaking elderly!
Keep yer filthy Govmnt hands off'n my Medicare!
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
until the next tool gains office, puts in a new lap-dog and claims that visiting mars is against gods will, but we should pour billions into state lobbied pork funds for it anyway
I think we should send life to Mars as well. Plants, bacteria, insects. Finding life on Mars will prove little, if anything, as life could still have originated here on Earth and been jettisoned to Mars millenia ago via asteroid impacts. If life on Earth is the only life in the universe, then it's our job to spread it.
Let's think of a realistic plan and what its purpose is. I submit the purpose should be meaningful exploration toward expansion of the human race to the stars in order to:
- understand our environment,
- increase survivability of catastrophes, and
- grow our technical capabilities to a scale necessary to meet the challenges this endeavor presents.
The purpose is not to waste human lives, or waste time, or make political basketball.
We gain the hearts of the populace by making solid progress on the timescales of everyday lives, building momentum, and teaching science so that the populace understands why space is important.
Incidentally nobody wants to go die on Mars or to make a mission that will require dying so let's just stop talking about getting volunteers.
If we try to make a manned mission to Mars in the near future, it is going to be extremely risky and in the best case will end up like the manned moon mission: a success after many years but then a long hiatus of no exploration after that, since we have "gone there". I recommend we do not waste resources on manned travel to Mars yet, at least not without a much faster engine, and proceed with the following:
First of all we need funded projects immediately covering:
- develop a robust, automated, semi-intelligent manufacturing capability able to mine, create parallel worker bots, build smelter and factory, develop energy sources such as solar and heat gradient, etc.
- develop an ultra-high velocity launcher
- develop high speed space engines, whether this is nuclear or ion-based remains to be seen
- develop micro-size exploration craft
The manufacturing technology will be built for use on our own planet and perfect here for many uses and climes. It will work underwater, on arid mountain slopes, in antarctica, in the steamy tropics. It will survive attacks by wild animals, tornadoes, floods and monsoons. This project will revolutionize the human realities and economies of Africa and will turn our deserts into solar energy farms. It can be approached as if an alien space exploration and exploitation mission to Earth, which will might help its promotion.
The high-speed space engine will allow us to explore moon, asteroids and Mars on a time-scale that allows many missions during our lifetimes. Do it in months and years not decades.
The launcher will launch seed of this technology to the moon and will be perfected there with astronauts going there for a specific purpose, not just "to go" and make everyone feel good. In other words, the next time we go to the Moon we will take with us a superior technology and feel we can easily set up shop anywhere on the Moon we want.
The exploration craft will be useable on the Earth, Moon, Mars and anywhere else we want to go. Ultimately we want to be able to add capabilities so these semi-autonomous agents can roll, jump, fly, swim, climb etc. as needed and take advantage of local energy sources. Use on the Moon, Mars, Europa and the asteroid belt will be the goals. Before we get there, we can use them on Earth for exploration underwater or in jungles, and for search and rescue, and response to natural disasters like forest fires and tsunamis. Certainly such a capability would have been useful in the Fukushima disaster.
Realistically, our current technology is not high enough at the present moment to sustain a human presence on Mars or the Moon. Ideally from the perspective of someone going there, we would like to have an intelligent, autonomous nanotechnology that could somehow go there ahead of us and build us an entire self-contained, self-repairing station while allowing us to decide what we want to do with the planet. For example whether to leave it as-is, bombard it with ice, seed it with hardy lifeforms, etc.
However an advanced semi-automated manufacturing technology that can slash at the costs and time scales required to develop and maintain this machinery would be very useful, both on Earth and on Mars. If we can better marshal our resources through superior technology it will make life better on Earth as well as bring us a step closer to meaningful exploitation of space.
Put together a satellite that consists of thousands to millions of small durable networked sensor systems that that would be dropped and spread around an area or maybe even the entire planet and communicate images, temperature, and on and on. If needed, vary them, a few with better sensors or different ones for specific purposes. Instead of just one, or a few really expensive pieces.
This would provide some nice data about weather.
"...you could attach inflatable balloons..."
Yep, those are way better than uninflatable ones.
with money and a steady vision (not changing every few years), it should be a straight forward
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Like using coupons at a grocery store versus cancelling your cable subscription (but no one wants to give up their TV!!).
Volume of course, you can tell because of the load part.
Yes, because that makes much more sense than spending hundreds of times more on fuel and boosters to send enough material for them to build a settlement. Plus the tens of times more on fuel and boosters per year to keep the settlement running. Plus the increase in budget by a couple of zeros to develop the technology to merely allow them to live right on the edge of disaster while being utterly dependent on those annual shipments....
I'd like to see a robotic automaton sew several hectares of candidate plants over an area, testing the growth of a variety of different plants, analyzing their growth/mutation or lack thereof. We know there is some water vapor on Mars that could be extracted by reverse osmosis and used to provide water for irrigation of these farms.
Also, Co2 is heavy so I'd like to see some blimps in the air roaming around scanning for signs of H2Oin the ground as a source for future farms.
I also think it would be an opportunity to test several mini pilot resource projects - such as different reverse osmosis, and electrolysis projects, mini genetic engineering projects - for example genetically engineered plants that survive from co2 and only miniscule water and and provide energy.
Overall, I really feel that genetic engineering is vital to any long-term sustainable mission on Mars (which is the only thing worth doing)
I'd like to see organisms that can proliferate on Mars even in the freezing -50 Marsian weather and provide life sustaining amino acids/heat/water/fuel.
Honestly, I don't know why NASA doesn't just borrow the Stargate from the Secret Military Space Program
This stuff barely qualifies as noise in the national budget. If you care about cutting government spending, the only meaningful choices are health insurance for the elderly, retirement insurance for the elderly, and the military.
And of course, morons like the guy above complaining about too much spending will say that the military shouldn't be cut at all.
Yeah, he'd be a good candidate. He's always wanted to go to MAAHRZ
we will need a well structured financial and legal system in place before we can ever go there!
I think you would find an abundant supply of volunteers that would not remotely care about wanted legal comeback, even if there was a very high risk of loss of life. Don't underestimate peoples willingness to risk everything simply to be the first pioneer and go down in history. Hell I would volunteer even with a maybe a 25% chance of death and I am sure many would go with much higher odds of death.
Strange timing on this one. They should at least wait for the Mars Science Lab to touchdown - it won't even be too long until it does, since it's already on its way. That way, media attention on Mars and public awareness/interest in Mars missions will be far greater.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Exactly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay.
Unfortunately, apparently NASA are looking for input for *new* ideas for Mars exploration, and this idea has been looked at already, I presume.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Summary of above post: "The problem is we're packing enough food and supplies for a round trip. We should instead pack enough food and supplies to live there forever, which I assume would be less."
Because it would be ironic.
Change yours solar panels to some RTGs. No problems with dust, energy day and night and very reliable. And the plus of "free" heah to heating the habitat
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Idea's place. " To come to idea's for the mission"
Silly rabbit, ideas can't explore mars, We can send monkeys, they're expendible. Failing that we have far more politicians than we can handle. Expendible as well. They may even have compatible genes, so colonization isn't out of the question. I'd do something about that atmosphere first or it will only be a MOSTLY good idea. Well, either way...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Must be Crohns disease, I've been hemorrhaging money out my ass.
1. Smash a large asteroid into Mars (mostly just for the hell of it). I've read lots of articles on how to deflect them away from earth, it should be doable to find one to push into Mars. They could have something in orbit to look at the dust cloud and then drop a rover as close as possible to ground zero.
2. Expensive to be sure, but if they put about 2 or so small satalites in geo orbit around mars (simples) and a third or more in an eliptical orbit, some sort of crude intermitant localised positioning system could be realised . Maybe the low orbit one is redundant and 2 in GEO would be enough to aproimate a position, I dunno.
3. A single satalite in geo orbit could be used to light up a path using overlapping radio signals. Signals would be divided into bands, signal 1hits everthing in line of sight of the satalite, signal 2 has a tighter focus etc etc. detecting signals over time could be used to approximate position. (probably with a practical accuracy of somewhere on MARS)
4. Harry potter can just transport stuff from Mars back to a vacuum chamber here on Earth.
Well it's worse than that. You make a comment that get's voted up, and now I'm wondering what you replied to that got you voted up, so now I am forced to read the parent who'd been filtered out at -1.
Thanks for ruining my lunch.
Not to mention free radiation... how healthy is it to be that close to RTGs for extended periods of time? How much shielding do you need?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If we are talking manned-exploration of Mars, we need to focus on building a colony there. However, that is still jumping the gun. We need a colony on the Moon first.
Correction: CO2 elctrolysis is called 'Plants' back here on terra. And they are extremely cheap, and frequently tasty.
Build a Mars Space Station. Humans have the know-how (infrastructure, psychological) to survive in a space station. From Mars orbit, control robots/vehicles to remotely build a ground station safely. It is also easier to bring human beings back to Earth.
~ We'll sail 'round the Horn and return with spices and silk, the likes of which ye have never seen!
~ We're looking for plans for a trip to Mars...
~ Arrrr....Could you give me five minutes?
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I work at NASA Goddard. I can assure you of this: "engineers" at NASA are looked down upon. At NASA you are nothing unless you are "scientist."
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Pretty much correct. Can I give you a star?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/ernsts-ions-week-concludes-nerva-ion-mars-mission-1966/
25% chance of death
That would certainly be a theoretically habitable place in my opinion. There are more dangerous places on Earth already.
Doesn't NASA already have a great idea for a Mars exploration mission? ARES?
Sounds like Howard Wolowitz syndrome.. engineers, the little oompa loompas of science!
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Why not do a toolkit mission - Make a workshop, send some makers, make some power generators out of those
wheel motors. Use the camera arm as a small robotic manipulator. Melt, cut, reform the metals of curiosity to
build small flying sensor bots and other science tools. make stuff from the local materials... Build a large
dish to send signals back to earth, line it with metals from curiosity... Make the dish structure and load
carrying elements from Mars materials...
How much more work could be done that way?
The power is on Mars to manipulate the environment and it's materials....
George MacDonald
For a Pu-238 powered RTG? None. The RTG chassi is already enough to block the alpha radiation emitted by plutonium-238 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium). And anyway, you could simply mount them outside the ship, where you need to have thicker shells because of the normal radiation of space.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Electrolysis means splitting using electricity, so no, they don't. More to the point, plants don't convert CO2 to O2 at all. The oxygen released by plants comes from the water that they consume, not the carbon dioxide (source: HowPlantsWork.com).
Also, using plants to produce oxygen is a good idea in theory, but would likely require a relatively large enclosure relative to the number of people who live in it. It might be feasible once you have established a temporary base, but until you have built/assembled/inflated a few large, airtight structures on the planet's surface, it probably is not. A normal (but sealed) greenhouse might produce enough food for a handful of people, but it is unlikely to produce enough oxygen. Also, it would suck if you accidentally put something that plants don't like in your water supply and killed off half the plants. It's easy to store up enough dried emergency rations to last you until a supply mission arrives in a year or more. It's not so easy to store up that much oxygen.
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You need to be able to handle a temperature gradient of almost three hundred degrees between the outdoors and the indoors, and if you're using inflatable housing, I doubt it will insulate particularly well. You think your power bill in the winter is high.... I think it might be pushing the limits of at least the RTGs that are readily available.
Now my quick back-of-the-envelope math says that with resistance heat, some of the larger RTGs could readily handle heating a decent size structure, but that's before you factor in lighting, melting of super-cooled ice for water and oxygen, electrolysis of oxygen, powering communication gear and science gear, etc. It might be doable, but I'd want to have solar backup. It doesn't take that much space for a rolled-up solar panel.
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You can have more than one RTG. Or if you need more power, why not a small, self-contained full fleged nuclear reactor? Solar panels are nice but Mars have a lot of problems with dust, remember the Phoenix mission and the rovers
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Would it be possible to use rail gun technology to launch supplies into space? That would be cool.