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Robots To Go Spelunking In Martian Caves?
astroengine writes "Scientists are beginning to sketch out plans for NASA's new Mars rover Curiosity to climb Mount Sharp, but future robots may have a more direct way to access the planet's history books. Recent discoveries of 'skylights' and lava tubes on the surface of Mars, as well as the moon, are sparking the development of robotic probes that can descend into caves and explore tunnels. 'Geology works in layers, so how many layers can you see? Well, we know there are sinkholes on Mars. Those sinkholes expose potentially hundreds of feet of layers, so if you could lower something down and examine those layers and explore a tunnel underneath, or anything of that sort, the science that can be done with that is just phenomenal,' Jason Derleth, senior technology analyst with NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, told Discovery News."
Pie in the sky, if budget slashers come into power in a couple months. Heck, they'll probably put Houston, Edwards and Cape Canaveral on the block - "Private industry can do it more better!"
Yuh.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I saw this earlier and this thought immediately came to mind: Why send probes on dangerous cave missions when a machine that bores holes and analyses the sample could be built instead?
I'd love to see what's in Martian caves. That said, I'm realistic enough to know a waste of money when I see one. Look, even if we find the caves inhabited by gentle, intelligent, naked mole rats, it's not going to help us a whit. Or them, for that matter.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Communications are going to be a major issue. Gets a lot harder to send a signal out when you have 20+ meters of solid rock overhead. And even if you go down a sink-hole with a direct line of sight upwards, you'd have to send the signal straight up. Only solution I can see would be a repeater at the surface, possibly with a physical cable going down. It's pretty challenging overall.
All that would be tremendously simplified if we just sent a manned mission. Then a person could just climb down with an actual rope. With reduced gravity, it'd be quite easy (they may even be able to simply jump down and back up again, depending on how deep the hole is.)
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/quotes
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power."
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"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000417/bio
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George Carlin:
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big clu
... when they outfitted them with bulletproof armour.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Just have it lob a tethered camera with wings if needed to fly around into the hole, the same way a submersible can send a smaller unit into a ship wreck without risking the mothership.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why do I get this picture of a little green man with a fur loin cloth and a club?
As usual, sexual activity will drive innovation of spelunking robots.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"That's no cave"
I recently completed an aerospace engineering degree and presented a system to explore caves on Mars at JPL, using their criteria. They included things like exploring and taking core samples from walls and ceilings, which is very difficult to do. If they ever get around to that mission, I'll be curious to see how close their design comes up to what I came up with.
Very large caves...cavernous spaces. The radiation from Solar flares, Cosmic Rays, etc. means humans need a lot of shielding and that really only comes from a lot of mass between you and the vacuum. If we live on mars, moon or somewhere else, it will have to mean living underground. Earth has a magnetic field and an atmosphere that traps, deflects and degrades most high energy particles (==radiation) before they get to the ground. Other problems solved by caverns include: The moon and Mars change temperature 100C or more between day and night. Micrometeors that make a nice glow as trails at night on Earth act as a 30,000 kph BB gun on the moon. Living outside is very bad for your health.
I really want to see what a 100 meter wide, kilometer long cavern looks like from inside. The roof is 100 meters or more thick and has survived for billions of years. It should not be too hard to seal and pressurize it. The first images from a camera lowered into such a huge cavern, with the right lighting. will be stunning and will change the way we view living in space.
I was thinking along the same lines, what a perfect habitat! You could always build observation towers that extended up beyond the caves to get your fix of looking out the window.
I only hope that in the next few decades we do see a manned mission, although I suspect the effort will be private rather than funded by a government.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... so how come they get to do the coolest stuff?
The real interest here is biological. Caves will protect whatever is inside from UV radiation and cosmic rays, and will also trap water (and may even be warm, due to geothermal heating). That makes them of high biological interest. The geology would just be an added bonus. (Note that the geology may not even be super compelling - the lava tube I have personally seen was just one unit of lava, with no layers or anything very revealing. I think that's pretty common for lava tubes, and who knows if there are any erosional caves on Mars.)
Nobody has linked to earlier articles on Lunar and Martian Caves, so here goes. Nasa Science News Rabbit Holes , Caves in Copernicus Crater , Mars cave entrance .
Nothing like a good cave adventure... Remember to bring the lamp!
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
So, we're going all the way to another planet, just so we can live in the basement again.
Normally, I am opposed to doing the moon as a 'test-bed' for mars. They are totally different areas. Small atmosphere vs. next to none. Likewise, the moon has some of the wildest temp extremes going in the solar system. So, normally, the moon is NOT a good testbed. But caves are a different issue. Deep caves on the moon will have a much higher and more constant temperature due to the moderation of the ground. As such, it makes good sense to start this on the moon first. This will allow communication, temperature and even chemical analysis to be tested before sending it out.
Interestingly, this approach might even allow for multiple robots to go in a cave. It would be useful to have multiple walkers with different capabilities running around in one. It would also be nice to be able to seal one and see what happens.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.