Mars (One) Needs Payloads

mbone (558574) writes Mars One has announced that their first, unmanned, lander, targeted for 2018, needs payloads. Along with their 4 experiments, and a University experiment, they have two payloads for hire: "Mars One offers two payload opportunities for paying mission contributors. Proposals can take the form of scientific experiments, technology demonstrations, marketing and publicity campaigns, or any other suggested payload. 'Previously, the only payloads that have landed on Mars are those which NASA has selected,' said Bas Lansdorp, 'We want to open up the opportunity to the entire world to participate in our mission to Mars by sending a certain payload to the surface of Mars.'" The formal Request for Proposals for all of this is out now as well.

Comments

just...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lichens, moss, fertilizer and a dispersal mechanism.

Re:just...

[RockDoctor]

Now that we're reasonably sure Mars is barren

Who is this "we" who are reasonably sure that Mars is barren? It sure doesn't include me. OK, I'm not a specialist biologist emphasising study of the 5 points which we've measured on Mars (and found lacking in life forms which we recognise, I'll grant), but I am a geologist with a better than normal understanding of the variability of rocks and the habitats that they represent to life forms. People I was at university with have worked on (and published) on some very peculiar terrestrial organisms from deep oil wells, and that represents just a few percent of the potentially habitable volume of this planet. And remember : so far we're only looking for life forms that have metabolisms and physiologies which function broadly similarly to ours.

If we had (say) 10 independent OOL (Origin Of Life) events (say, in different stellar systems), and in our couple of decades of experimentation Mars didn't have a trace of any of those systems, then I might agree that a few decades of searching would be sufficient. But since we still really have NO IDEA what the actual range of effective solutions to the questions of metabolism and physiology are, for this initial case I'd vote strongly in favour of waiting for a generation or ten. Say, until we've got a plan to decontaminate the planet which is as achievable (in the next ten human generations) as terraforming the planet.

(Though I'm a fan of SF, when I'm talking about terraforming Mars, I'm talking about a real plan, not a hand-wavey SF-quality plan. For example, it would be nice to know where you plan to get the 4*10^18kg (approx) of water that you'd need to put a 100m of water onto 30% of the surface (assuming you want some sort of vaguely terrestrial climate, and you're going to use a significant amount of water for things like agriculture). More to the point, how are you going to get to that level of space-faring expertise without concluding that living in asteroid belts is just plain easier than terraforming even quite terrestrial planets like Mars? Build the environment that you want, rather than having to tear down an existing environment and then build the environment that you want.)

Payloads to send to Mars?

[cold fjord]

'We want to open up the opportunity to the entire world to participate in our mission to Mars by sending a certain payload to the surface of Mars.'"

Justin Bieber? Miley Cyrus?

Re:Payloads to send to Mars?

[cold fjord]

If it did start a war it would almost certainly be short. I'm inclined to believe that Martians would immediately surrender under a bombardment like that.

Microphones

[Electricity Likes Me]

I would really like to land a couple of microphones on Mars.

Some high bandwidth (beyond human hearing) stuff, and some human hearing range stuff. I'd love to know what Mars sounds like.

Re:Microphones

[Ford Prefect]

A microphone has already been landed on Mars - unfortunately there was a risk of data corruption if the camera hardware it was attached to was turned on, so the microphone itself never got switched on...

I want to send a carved rock

[the_Bionic_lemming]

If I had the money to buy the mission, I'd send a carved rock to be deployed that would indicate that either John Carter or I owned Mars, and that we would have to sword fight for ownership.

My guess is that John Carter never made it to Mars, but if he did and and If I had to I could arrange a meeting place and nuke the entire site from orbit. Itâ(TM)s the only way to be sure. Cause I suck at sword fighting.

Are these people qualified for anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Scanning through the Mars One "About Us" page, I see a bunch of people with MAs and blather about their "boldness" and "entrepreneurial spirit". They even list their concept artist and marketing team. Where are the PhDs in aerospace engineering and physics?

Re:Are these people qualified for anything?

[itzly]

oblig Dilbert reference: http://search.dilbert.com/comi...

Re:A DNA Payload

[Tablizer]

of my semen!

it's already on Uranus

Payloads? Here's what I would like to see.

[wierd_w]

The kinds of payloads I would like to see delivered to mars are exactly the kind that the international planetary society would come out of their skins over.

Waterbears, antarctic algea, and things of that nature.

Those are lifeforms that could concievably survive indefinatly on mars. (waterbears can live, totally exposed, in the vacuum of space.-- Antarctic algeal forms are able to live in extremely saline conditions just within the first few millimeters of moist rocks, in blisteringly cold temperatures, and engage in active photosynthesis. Together, it is concievable for a highly simplistic, but stable biosphere to be cultivated/initiated on mars.)

http://antarcticfacts.weebly.c...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

In terms of scientific aparatus-- I would be interested in seeing how stationary wind turbines fare on the red planet. There is no surface vegitation of any kind to restrict or stop basically constant howling winds there, however the low atmospheric pressure may mean that while the wind is blowing with gusto, it packs little "punch". As far as I know, there is little data on the total energy yeild of wind energy on mars-- For a colony, wind energy would present a very attractive option over solar, which would be significantly less total energy per cubic meter than what is attainable on earth, especially when one considers the inefficiency of solar to begin with. Data on how much energy is reasonably able to be extracted, so that ideally sized generation systems can be designed, and data on rates of wind blown particle erosion on those devices would be of considerable value.

BS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do news sites keep posting these scammers press releases?! This project is such stupid, pandering bullshit.

What lander ?

[itzly]

The Mars One web site is awfully sketchy about the details. If I had a multi million dollar payload, I'd like to see some more details of the design, especially if they're promising to take heavy payloads to the surface.

Attention something something clowns

[tgv]

When are people going to stop paying attention to these clowns? How are they going to launch in 4 years without having working prototypes right now, nor a lot of money? Or are they going to sell 100M mugs in the coming months?

Vote Them Off The Planet

[TheLink]

1) Make a reality TV show: Vote Them Off The Planet
2) Vote people off the planet with one way and return categories. whether for real or not doesn't matter, but if for real you can have the option for people to only do the one way when they want to pay for the return leg.
3) Profit!

Life on Mars

[penguinoid]

I'm somewhat pleasantly surprised at the number of posts suggesting that we send living things to Mars, but also concerned that no one is suggesting some caution. Those who know a little about the history of bacterial discovery should know that it is fiendishly difficult to test for the presence of life, even here on Earth with organisms we are rather familiar with. Some bacteria we only know about because they showed up on DNA fishing expeditions, even though they've been under our feet the whole time. There could be bacteria under our feet we don't know about, if it either wasn't DNA/RNA based, or if it had sufficiently aggressive DNA/RNA hydrolysis enzymes, or had a sufficiently small geographic distribution.

As I understand it, we're still at the point that if Mars can sustain life we can't ascertain whether it has any. (And if it can't sustain life, there's no point in sending some to die.) Even if there's no life on Mars, there's still the fact that we don't know much about what an abiotic planet looks like. Studying a properly dead planet will help us in our future search for life.

Furthermore, I'm not certain we want to send photosynthetic organisms there for terraforming purposes, given that we need to increase greenhouse gasses like CO2 there to warm the place. (Also, we don't think the surface is survivable, and the sub-surface has less light -- so if we want surviving life, we should send chemotrophs).