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NASA Wants To Bring Back Hunks of Mars In Future Unmanned Mission
coondoggie writes "The space missions to Mars have so far been one way — satellites and robotic rovers have all gone there to stay. NASA, as part a of a new, ambitious Mars visit, wants to change that by sending a rover to the surface of the Red Planet which can dig up chunks of the surface and send them back to Earth for highly detailed examination. These plans were laid out in a lengthy report outlining mission plans for Mars that will be acted upon over the next decade. It says a retrieval mission 'could occur as early as the mid-2020s or wait until the 2030s.'"
Whaka Whaka
You can have your god back when you are old enough to handle the responsibility.
An instructional video.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's not a bad plan. NASA could send food and stuff and then the people on Mars could fill the rocket with rocks to send back. Could be the first example of interplanetary commerce.
Bringing back material from Mars's moons may be an easier first step.
It's a shame, however, that the load of rocks on board will have to be removed so that Val Kilmer can make it safely off Mars so he can get some sweet, sweet Trinity action. And remember, never send any military surplus drones to Mars!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There is still risk of Martian microbes that Earth life has no immunity too. Sure, it's a very small chance, but one that has potentially apocalyptic consequences if it happens.
Perhaps the samples should be baked at an intermediate station.
Naw, just build a sampling lab on the Moon and process them there. Hell, you could even teloperate it, it's only a 3 second lag, wouldn't even need to send any people up there, which would make the Congresscritters happy..
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
How about the cost of building a ship that can escape not just one, but *two* gravity wells.
Launching a ship with enough fuel to get there is already expensive as fuck... but to also carry the fuel needed to also launch the ship from there back to here..
I'm thinking tens of billions of dollars easy... probably more in the range of hundreds of billions..
"His name was James Damore."
Almost zero. Mars rocks have been hitting earth for some time and in any case microbes have to evolve to infect humans, it is not something likely to happen for a mars microbe. In any case they will use the same quarantine process they used for the moon rocks and in that case the microbes would have had to have been very hardy to survive vacuum and solar radiation, yet they still quarantined them. So you can be sure the risk is close to zero.
On the other hand we have enough risks here on earth that we don't jump up and down enough about. Still, the power of the unknown risk freaks people out more.
I prefer a mission to Europa that includes a submarine to go into the water below the ice to take pics of the little fishies (if any). Yes, Europa is ****far more difficult**** than Mars. But a Mars sample would be cool, will provide excellent comparison to Martian meteoroids from Antartica. Now if we can also send somebody beyond LEO, then we can say (in the words of one of controllers at Houston MOCR after Apollo 8 TLI), "Finally we get to go someplace!"
mfwright@batnet.com
We could instead send small robots that can build anything on site when arrive, even self replicate themselves. We would call them 'replicators'.
What could go wrong?
"I think this line is mostly filler"
There is a very, very slim chance that we may all be descendants of martian microbes. Mars would have cooled a lot earlier than earth, favorable conditions may have manifested earlier, and something could have evolved there and gotten stuck in a rock that was later ejected from mars by some collision and made its way to earth, ultimately landing in earths primordial soup and seeding the planet.
Very slim chance, but I like the thought that we may all be martians.
I am convinced there are microbes in Mars soil, but they are adapted to a very specific biotope, and are not likely to thrive at 37C, so there is no danger IMO. We already have the case of extermophiles on earth, able to live in almost boiling water, but unable to live in a human being.
There is risk which is why they quarantine, but it is not something to lose much sleep over.
So if you are concerned about a risks as low as 1 in 10,000, which btw, i think is much lower than that, then you think we should invest in much higher risk items that are more certain to kill lots of us off. Threats such as Global Warming (almost 1 in 1 risk), Major Pandemics from earth based diseases (possibly 1 in 10 to 1 in 100), declining fresh water, energy, overpopulation and many other threats that are much higher risk and likely to happen if we don't do anything about them.
It is fine to imagine threats that might come from a Mars rock but in practice you would need to postulate how such a threat would work. If you are using magical threats then unfortunately throw science out the window. But using science show how a microbe could not only survive but somehow be a threat to DNA it has not grown up around. Or if it is going to magically live off earth rocks or metals, then you need to show that Mars lacks the same rocks and metals, given that Mars is formed from the same raw material as the earth.
Yes, it might be something new but DNA has survived on earth for a few billion years so the odds of there being such a scenario seems a little low.