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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."
You could probably send volunteers. But sending criminals is pointless. Survival on a mars mission will require an extreme level of technical skill that just isn't plausible to develop in that population. Sending criminals is just a ludicrously expensive way to implement the death penalty (and existing systems are egregiously expensive enough).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
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.
All right! Whom do I have to kill to get a slot?
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.
It's pointless for another reason, given a chance to go to mars, even if ostensibly a "one way trip" NASA would have far more volunteers than they need, including many many fit and technically competent candidates.
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.
we really do need to go to -5.
really.
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.
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.
There's a flaw in your metaphor: timeline.
The European discovery of Australia was in 1606 - this is about equivalent to "sending a small, Apollo-like exploration mission to Mars". More and more exploratory missions went on from various countries, but colonization was effectively unattempted until the late 1700s, nearly two centuries later (and driven, at least in part, by the American Revolution cutting off the outflow of "transported" criminals to America).
In short, sending a large number of unskilled and unmotivated colonists to a new land won't work until at least decades after initial, small-scale exploration is possible. You need at least hundreds (the first British Australian colony was over a thousand settlers) to have a sustainable colony - right now, we can't send tens, much less hundreds or thousands, of people to Mars, even one-way. Sending prisoners, half a dozen at a time, to Mars, at the cost of billions per trip, would get us nothing but a pile of skeletons on a distant planet and a national deficit that will require new fields of mathematics just to calculate.
The Moon might be a more plausible location (and by "more plausible" I mean "slightly closer to physically possible"). But even then, the metaphorical timescale doesn't look to good - we probably won't have a permanent Moon colony until 2150, by your analogy.
do they have lawns on mars?
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.
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.
Or how about Mars big brother
it should be fun to watch the 'astronauts' or contestants slowly lose they're sanity while trapped in a metal can on the way to mars
being watched on camera everywhere they go
of course you'd have to dedicate a large chunk of the craft to the cameras and the big chair
and to keep those supplies coming, we need ratings
send a couple of bots called Huey Dewey And Louie (see Silent running), or for a bit more deranged fun how about that bot from Saturn 3
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.
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.
We call it "mass". Throw enough protons in the way and you've mitigated the radiation problem well enough.
... 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.
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
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.
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.
Ok, that sounds great and all, but we have to be realistic. All we've done so far is send some humans to the Moon to hit some golf balls and drive around in a buggy. Hollowing out a very small moon and spinning it (requiring some massive engines) is well beyond our capabilities at this point. In fact, we'd have a much easier time skipping the moons and sending people straight to Mars and having them build underground living habitats there. At least that wouldn't require some kind of massive engines big enough to spin a large asteroid.
But again, I agree the Moon is the next place to step to, considering our capabilities, and also the materials that will be needed for any farther steps. It's a lot easier to mine the moon for materials to build spacecraft than to mine the earth for them (which causes environmental problems) and then lift all that material into space (Earth's gravity well is much deeper than Luna's). Then, when we build a moon base, we need to rename the moon to "Luna" (which isn't really renaming it, just adopting the Latin name for it, which would be consistent with all the planet names being Latin in origin except Pluto). "The moon" is a really stupid and generic name, and simply calling it "Moon" sounds like you don't know how to use articles.
Are you stupid? We're destroying our environment mining here on Earth. How'd you like to live next to an open-pit mine? You're an absolute moron; you probably think we should spend resources conquering other nations.
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?
you are aware that the recent bank bailout was larger than the entire operational budget of NASA to date?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
It's not that sterilization wouldn't be desirable for human exploration, it's that it's impossible. We are symbiotic with a lot of flora, we cannot survive without them. Any manned mission is, of necessity, not sterile. Mars' surface is so actively hostile, though, that the spreading contagion theory isn't much of a threat. The real reason we sterilize is to help rule out the possibility that we delivered life in the event that we find it in the future.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking