Orbiters Study Effect of Giant Comet-Caused Meteor Shower On Mars

An anonymous reader writes According to observations made by NASA and ESA orbiters, the extremely close flyby of comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring to Mars was accompanied by a meteor shower larger than any seen on Earth. NASA said that dust from Comet Siding Spring vaporized high up in the Martian atmosphere, producing "an impressive meteor shower." An observer on Mars surface might have seen thousands of shooting stars per hour. "This historic event allowed us to observe the details of this fast-moving Oort Cloud comet in a way never before possible using our existing Mars missions," Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division at the agency's Headquarters in Washington, said in the statement.

Comments

Effects on Martian atmosphere

[TWX]

I'm curious as to what effects, if any, were measurable in the Martian atmosphere. Science fiction authors have speculated on the possibility of continually crashing comets into Mars as a way of increasing the water content and thickening the atmosphere of the planet. In some ways it's far-fetched, but on the other hand it's probably the cheapest way to add water to Mars..

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

MAVEN detected large spectrometry spikes for several metallic elements, and several non-metallic ones as well, which persisted for hours after the comet passed by.

Hang on, I will dig up a source.

http://www.universetoday.com/1...

Bam. There you go.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[Anonymous Coward]

In some ways it's far-fetched

It's not just a far-fetched idea, it's absurd. The energy required to change a comet's orbit would be enormous, far beyond the value of the water.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

Not with an 80 million year transit period it isn't.

A series of radiative heaters stuck to the surface with a computer control system would do the trick. (assuming some long lived power source, like a suitably large RTG)

The real trick then is getting probes into the oort cloud and attaching them to the nearest candidate objects at a human-sensible timetable. Without FTL of some sort, or at the very least, a significant improvement in thruster technology, this is a non-starter.

kuiper belt objects on the other hand, could theoretically be harvested within human timetables, and asteroid belt objects most certainly could.

Stone type asteroids contain a significant amount of bound elemental hydrogen and oxygen. That makes them attractive candidates.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[tomhath]

You need to quit reading fiction and read up on orbital mechanics. Science fiction skips over minor details like reality.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

Enlighten me-- what feature of your professed "reality" did I miss?

Oort cloud objects are so far away, that it takes them literally millions of years for them to reach our part of the solar system after they get nudged from their orbits by passing stars perturbing their orbits.

Rather than rely on stellar interaction, a mission to purposefully send robot drones into the oort cloud is theoretically possible, but as I pointed out, would require either FTL or a radical improvement in thrust technology to accomplish on human timetables. It took 70 years for voyager to reach the heliopause, AFTER it was gravitationally accellerated by several gas giants. The voyager probe was pretty small too, in comparison to what would need to be sent to the oort cloud to commence a mission of the magnitude the OP suggests. Getting something that heavy out that far before it's mission creators die of old age is a pretty significant bump. That's why I covered that bit by saying it would require, at the very least, a radical improvement in thruster technology.

Once out there though, all it would take is slow, but constant thrust on an object to dislodge its orbit. There would be considerable time for these objects to pick up momentum from their inward plunge. Again, a radiative heater aimed at the surface of the comet at strategic points, controlled by a computer guidance system, would allow for the comet to be steered into the appropriate entry window for mars collision.

It would just take a very, very, very long time. Last I checked, "Very long time" != "Can't be done".

Then we come to the latter point I made-- objects in the asteroid belt between mars and jupiter. Objects in this area are much easier to get to, and could realistically be sent on collision courses with mars regularly with a fleet of automated vehicles. Ion thrusters are more than adequate for this latter kind of planetary engineering. Objects in the asteroid belt range from dust particles to things the size of mountains, to those the size of small moons. You dont need nor want the collossally huge ones. You dont want to destroy the target planet with a massive collision, after all. Sending objects the size of dump trucks or so to mars using controlled, vectored ion engine thrust over long timetables of several years is perfectly plausible.

Since I am telling you how it COULD be done, and you are insisting that it cannot, "because orbital mechanics", the onus of proof is on you.

No, calling me a "Space nutter" or other ad-hominem does not absolve you of this obligation.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[Forty Two Tenfold]

If you start manipulating the comet's orbit early enough (say around the orbit of Saturn), it's more cost-effective. You can add some slingshot (braking) maneouvers far enough from Earth and with an Olympus Mons of luck you could land an ocean on Mars.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[TWX]

That's along the lines of what I was thinking too; don't bother trying to change an orbit that's almost circular and out past Pluto in order to send it to Mars, that's crazy. Instead analyze the orbits of things that are coming relatively close, and divert those things to Mars. If Phobos and Deimos are captured asteroids that are destined to fall from orbit and strike Mars, then perhaps this isn't as far-fetched as some want to argue.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[tomhath]

The amount of energy it would take to launch from Earth (accelerate), rendezvous with an object (accelerate again), and provide enough energy to accelerate that object into a different orbit is more than we know how to engineer. If you really want a few gallons of water on Mars, send a cargo ship. Forget about steering an object with hand waving technologies like ion engines or heaters.

Here's a real world calculation for you:

CONCLUSION: A meteor has 100 times as much energy per gram as does TNT!

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[Tablizer]

Leverage the butterfly effect. You use a small object to gradually change the orbit of a progressively bigger one on up to a big comet. Sure, it takes a while, but cheaper. Tradeoffs.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

*Yawn*

The part where you invoke dozens of improbabilities and outright impossibilities?

And it's not a "professed" reality (nice religious term there), it IS reality.

Oh, so things like this simply can't ever work huh?

Nevermind that it is fully mathematically sound, and the only reason why it was never used was because of anti-nuke hysteria. No no-- your "reality" says things like this are simply not possible! (Since you seem to be so thick, I am using the scare quotes to point out that what you consider to be reality is a fiction of your own manufacture, which does not in any way hold with what is actually possible.)

"Since I am telling you how it COULD be done, and you are insisting that it cannot, "because orbital mechanics", the onus of proof is on you."

Nope, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Waving sci-fi around while yelling about "could be"s is not good enough, sorry. That's a religion.

No one's going anywhere, there won't be any robotic mining missions to the Oort cloud, no Mars colonies, no weekend cottages on the Moon, no jungle resorts on Venus either.

Funny how Venus isn't part of the Space Nutter repertoire anymore, eh?

Where's your blind trust in technology getting better and impossible physics breakthroughs when it's about Venus?

Hmmm???

You mean, like this post I made last year?

Synthetic biology is closer than you realize sir.

Aramid plastic has a thermal decomposition temperature of 500c, which also happens to be the mean surface temperature of venus.

Aramid plastic

Venusian climate and atmospheric composition

There is a sufficiently high concentration of suitable sulfur compounds in the upper venusian atmosphere, where it is a nice balmly 70 degrees Fahrenheit, for sulfur-cycle microbes to live perfectly happy, carefree lives-- shitting out aramid plastic non-stop should they be engineered to do so. Given that that the feedstock used to produce aramid plastic is an amine group and a carboxyl-halide group, this is a perfectly reasonable material to biosynthesize. (Biogenic amines are a staple of most terrestrial lifeforms in fact, and there is sufficient carbon dioxide and hard sulfuric acid vapor in the venusian atmosphere to allow sulfur cycle energy production, with carboxylic acid biproducts of celluar activity. Combined, it is not hard at all to imagine aramid being biologically synthesized, and falling to the venusian surface as the microbes die. This would result in accretion of a carbon-rich material that is thermo-stable at venus's existing surface temperature, which would puncture the greenouse effect of the planet.)

But of course, I TOTALLY never made posts about that in the past-- No sir-- that would fly in the face of your "reality", where "Space nutters" dont have interesting proposals about venus at all!

We couldnt let the actual reality that this is not true intrude at all. No sir.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

Issues with your calculation:

1) it's cherry picked. The premise stated by the calculation is that the object is in or near earth's orbital vicinity. To avoid being drawn into the sun, it will require a considerable inertial energy statistic. Items in the very deep solar system? Not so much, since gravity falls off with the inverse cube of distance between the center of mass of the two gravitating bodies.

That means that the object the OP referenced, an oort cloud object, need not have the orbital energy that the object referenced by your sample calculation requires to avoid falling into the sun.

EPIC FAIL.

2) Due to the rather profound difference in gravitational attraction with the sun at these two orbits, and the very large travel distance that the oort cloud object has before it reaches the inner solar system, (and the "free" velocity change the object will get as the gravitational influence of the sun increases as this distance is reduced), the total energy required to de-orbit an oort cloud object will be considerably less than that needed to de-orbit an object of identical mass in the inner solar system.

EPIC FAIL AGAIN.

Now, if you would be so kind, show me an orbital computation that isnt a fucking orange when we are discussing apples, and I will happily relent.

Otherwise, quit making false equivalence based arguments.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[tomhath]

Since you know so much about this, let's see your calculations. You haven't provided anything yet.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[tomhath]

You use a small object to gradually change the orbit of a progressively bigger one on up to a big comet

Butterfly Effect? Does that somehow trump Newton's Laws of Motion? Because that's what you are suggesting.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[tomhath]

? Not so much, since gravity falls off with the inverse cube of distance between the center of mass of the two gravitating bodies.

By the way, that statement displays a fundamental lack of understanding of orbital mechanics. Read up on a little something called "angular momentum"

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

Using kepler's third law, an object weighing 1 gram, at a distance of 100,000 AU (the oort cloud), orbiting a star with 1 solar mass, will have an orbital period of 316174 CENTURIES. (Or, 9.97786e+14 seconds)

We then need to know the total distance of the orbit, in order to determine the orbital velocity of this object.

Best current estimates for the location of the oort cloud is between 5,000 AU and 100,000 AU. We can use these as the semiminor and semimajor axes of the orbital elipse. This gives us a circumference of the orbital elipse of 222421.65 AU.

One AU is equal to 149,597,870,700 meters. This means the circumference of the orbit is 33,274,027,659,230,655 meters.

We can now use the page you linked to to get the kinetic energy of this 1g object at that distance, after we get its orbital velocity.

33274027659230655 meters / 9.97786e+14 seconds == 33.347859820874070191403767942224 meters/second

The page you cited states that the formula for determining kinetic energy is as follows:

E = (1/2) m v^2

We will simplify a bit, and say the 1 gram object is moving at 33.35 meters per second. Let's fill in some blanks.

E = (1/2)*(.001)*(33.35)^2

Simplifies to:

E = (.5) * (.001) * (1112.2225)

Which works out to
0.55611125 Joules

As you can see, this is RADICALLY different from the 450000 joules the same 1g object has in earth orbit!

APPLES are NOT ORANGES.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

I know what angular momentum is.

In this case, the value of thrust applied does not change with the difference in the size of the circumference of the rotating body. While the same thrust applied at one circumference may not be suitable to cause significant delta of the object, it may well be at a different circumference, because the same energy is conserved over a longer period. Several years of constant low level thrust would be functionally equal to moments of very high thrust, when the full system energy is calculated.

But that goes against your preconceived notions that just because 1 newton of thrust/sec is insufficient to perceptibly alter the orbit of a moon sized object at earth orbit, that it would likewise be incapable of perceptibly altering the orbit of the same sized object at an oort cloud radiused orbit.

The total angle of momentum change is conserved, and there are more total seconds over which the 1 newton/sec thrust can be delivered at the larger orbit's angle slice than in the smaller orbit's angle slice. (To get the same change with the smaller orbit, the thrust would have to be increased!)

Now, show me your math that disproves this. I already filled in the blanks with your previous false equivalency shpeel, showing how the orbital energy of a 1g mass at oort cloud distance is considerably less.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

For the combined costs of 1 sandra bullock movie, and the tuition of 5 college students, what I proposed can be done.

We have biotech scientists working on making artificial ribisomes, artificial cell walls, and fully synthetic genomes *RIGHT NOW*.

See your problem?

One of us is discounting the current reality, in favor of a preconceived world view. The other is not.

Designer microbes aren't nearly as expensive as you believe them to be, and the costs of sending a vehicle capable of interplanetary flight is less than you claim.

But I bet you would rather have the sandra bullock movie, because it has boobies.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

The indian mars orbiter, a vehicle with a lander module, and designed for interplanetary flight, cost less to manufacture and launch than the sandra bullock movie Gravity.

Source
http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/2...

So, there's the cost of a suitable vehicle. About 74 million dollars.

Then we have the designer microbe end. Most designer microbes are intended for biofuel production, using fully synthetic biological pathways, designed by humans.
http://www.hindawi.com/journal...

Other sources of interest are the biodegredation of toxic agents:
http://www.nature.com/nchembio...

And of course, Plastics.
http://garj.org/garjm/pdf/2013...

Feel free to order some of those researcher's samples!

Perhaps you would want some that are sporting a fully 100% human created genome?
http://www.jcvi.org/cms/press/...

Microbes are tenacious things. Once cultured in the lab, and loaded into a delivery system, sending them to venus would cost about 80 million dollars.

Cost of R&D of modifying a suitable sulfur cycle microbe for venusian atmospheric conditions would cost around 100 to 200 million.

So, for around the 300 million dollar mark, we could be initiating the end of the hellish environment on venus-- OR-- we could pay for a few military airplanes.

You are a delusional moron.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[tomhath]

But the question is how much energy does it take to accelerate that object to Mars? (and you can't ignore the fact that you need to get out there with some kind of thruster and rendezvous with it, because that's what you suggest doing). You could use a gravitational slingshot to get there, but then you need to accelerate into that object's orbit. Voyager 1 is traveling roughly 17,000 meters per second, you would need to stop that velocity somehow.

Or take your simpler problem, a roughly one meter diameter rock from the Asteroid Belt. Consider the Rosetta spacecraft, it took an Ariane 5 rocket to get off Earth before you even think of getting to the asteroid.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

To accellerate it toward mars? Not much-- you just need to slow it down a little, so that solar gravity can better work on it, causing it to spiral into the gravity well. The total transit distance will be very large, so a small thrust applied over the duration will be sufficient to control its descent into the well. (The energy exerted against the object does not "Go away"-- it is conserved in the momentum of the object.)

Getting there is the real problem. That's why I said it would require a radical departure from currently available thruster tech to get there, and specifically pointed out that the voyager probe is traveling too slowly, DESPITE being sped up by gravitational interactions by MULTIPLE gas giant encounters. You would need something really radical, like an orion thruster. Good luck getting the world's governments to let you put something like that into space though. :D

For the second scenario, you need something akin to a multi-warhead ICBM, just aimed into space, not on a ballistic re-entry tradjectory. You fire the vehicles into orbit, where the delivery stage decouples, and the payloads go different directions after an oberth type manouver.

Sadly, that would make many interests on earth's buttholes pucker, as the launch would have to account for possible launch failures of multiple devices, which could imperil many LEO satellites, which were not cheap to orbit, and any remaining debris from a failure would contribute to the growing problem with such debris in LEO.

The more practical platform from which to launch such a mission is actually the moon-- not earth. More vehicles can be launched from there in a sensible way, and privatized space vehicle manufacturing companies have already expressed long term goals of developing manufacturing and launch systems on earth's natural satellite.

Using a "long haul" design, intended to make multiple payload deliveries to mars before retirement (Possibly using dust as a fuel to restock in-flight) launched from the moon, it may be possible to pull something crazy off like the OP suggests. But I doubt it would ever be considered fiscally responsible.

!Fiscally responsible != impossible, though.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, wonderful, we are getting better at making cameras on wheels. That's a far cry from mining the Oort cloud or bouncing around on Mars in your Speedos, or seeding Venus.

Wow.

You're a nutcase. I'd rather be an honest moron than the kind of delusional fruitcake you need to be to build your life around fantasies.

Nothing will happen in space. Ever. Deal with it.

Not next year.

Not next decade.

Not EVER.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

Don't worry. The rest of reality is not beholden to your views of it.

The real world will just move on without you. You can be as obstinate and stupid about it as you like.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

10 years? Probably not, no.

SpaceX has only been in BUSINESS for 12! While it has made extraordinary leaps in progress, it has been borrowing very heavily from already proven rocket technologies.

In 10 years, I would expect spaceX and pals to be at the level of service required to successfully ferry people to and from the ISS with reusable and inexpensive modules as a regular "ho hum" occurrence.

Wouldnt be for another 30 or so by my estimations that we would have significant interest in lunar based manufacturing. By then, economies of scale for orbital payload deliveries would have cut the costs of such a mission sufficiently that enough payload could be delivered to a target site to commence such a project.

It would then take another 10 years to have the site up to speed for anything other than a space curio.

Your assumption is that I think this could happen within my lifetime. I am not so naive. What I take exception to, is that you claim it will never happen at all. That's a pretty extraordinary claim in the face of prevailing events.

Even seeding venus with microbes would not make venus useful overnight. Fuck no. It would take hundreds of thousands of years, at least, for the process to pick up speed, and re-stabilize in a new thermal equilibrium. Look how long the oxygen catastrophe took to make critical mass in earth's fossil record-- We are talking something on THAT kind of geological timetable. Compare that with the current age of venus-- say, some 3+ billion years old -- and even that is a drop in the bucket, cosmologically speaking. Not a small accomplishment at all. (and the best part is that you wouldnt have to worry about it at all after the successful deployment of the germs into the atmosphere-- as opposed to a martian terraforming operation, which would have to add 1/3 of an earth in mass to the damned thing to get tectonic activity churning away in its core, to drive a global magnetic field. Venus, by comparison, appears to already have sufficient mass, but is simply too hot for convection currents to drive the core geomagnetic dynamo needed for one. Simply cooling the planet would make it happen though.)

Would a cooled down venus ever be more than a horrible desert world though? Fuck no. Not nearly enough hydrogen is left in the atmosphere, and the oceans that would result from the biological action on the world would be a thick syrup of complex hydrocarbons and sulfuric acid. Fun for the whole fucking family!

No, I am afraid you are proceeding from a faulted precondition:

1) Thinking that I believe that these things are even remotely possible within my lifetime

2) Believing that I am a programmer. I know how to program, but that is not my career.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[musicon]

It took 70 years for voyager to reach the heliopause

Um, actually the Voyager probes were launched in the late 70s, so it's been less than 40 years.

A return trip would certainly take a while longer due to slowing down, sample gathering, and then managing to accelerate back home. But this wouldn't be the first time that projects have begun that are longer than a typical human lifespan.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why invest so much energy into things that you don't believe are remotely possible in your lifetime? Do you see why I compare this space crap to a religion? Because don't kid yourself, "crap" is exactly what it is.

Nothing is going to happen in space beyond what we've already done. So sorry you believed the hype from the Space Age, but it was all a dream.

Ain't gonna happen. Ever. Anywhere. Until there's a Big Crunch and rebound with new physical laws.

Sorry. There's a reason there's a Fermi Paradox. It's because "they" can't get here any more than we can go there.

"a faulted precondition"

Only a programmer can't count past one.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

Such pearls of wisdom, from a guy who cant look past his own lifetime to find value in doing something.

Having a living biosphere on venus, where currently there is none, would be one hell of an accomplishment. It does not matter if the resulting biosphere is incapable of supporting human life.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice religion you have there. How many astronauts can dance on the head of a comet?

I mean your line of reasoning can be applied to anything at all. So what?

I wish for a leisure society within the carrying limits of the real, actual resources that exist on this planet right here. That would also be a hell of an accomplishment, with the added bonus that it *does* support human life.

BTW, who gave you the right to decide how events will unfold on other (never mind this one) planets on those timescales?

And if you have that right, do I have the right to want to extend the human lifespan?

Or are you perfectly happy to make cosmic-scale plans with a lifeform that dies faster than a turtle or a tree?

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

All life on earth, including you, came from single celled microbial life.

A biosphere in its infancy on another world, ripe for scientific analysis as it evolves (Which it would, VERY quickly. Microbes evolve terrifyingly fast!) would be a boon in ways your philosophy cannot even begin to comprehend.

As for "The right"-- What right do you have, as a human, to justify mass extinctions of far more complex lifeforms and whole biospheres, just so you can have a flatscreen TV?

Be careful there kettle. It's not wise to call the pot black bottomed.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[Anonymous Coward]

"All life on earth, including you, came from single celled microbial life."

So?

"A biosphere in its infancy on another world, ripe for scientific analysis as it evolves (Which it would, VERY quickly. Microbes evolve terrifyingly fast!) would be a boon in ways your philosophy cannot even begin to comprehend."

Um, Miller Urey. The laws of physics are the same across the entire universe, yes? So what's the point in engaging in some monstrous odyssey to go to some dead rock out there, when we can make perfectly dead rocks here too?

And what does microbes evolving fast have to do with how they got there in the first place?

Your florid language points to something on the schizophrenic spectrum.

"As for "The right"-- What right do you have, as a human, to justify mass extinctions of far more complex lifeforms and whole biospheres, just so you can have a flatscreen TV?"

Care to provide some citations of these mass-extinctions so I can have a TV? (I don't even have a TV BTW).

"Be careful there kettle. It's not wise to call the pot black bottomed."

Your grasp of English idiom is lacking.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[wierd_w]

The cost of said odyssey is around 300 million dollars, and is a one-time cost, with dividends for your leisure society. Specifically, biologically synthesized aramid fibers on the cheap would enable the construction of better buildings for humans to live in, better clothing for humans to wear in hazardous situations, and possible medical applications as suture material. It's something you can get almost for free, when you consider that the scientific trajectory of your leisure society objective also encompasses many of the same goals. The question is not "Why do this", it is 'Why overlook doing this?"

So far, the reason you have given amounts to "because it makes my butt hurt to see other people's dreams come true and not mine!"

Your florid language points to something on the schizophrenic spectrum.

Your own language suggests somebody that is borderline sociopathic. Does everything other people choose to do have to result in your getting something to be considered of value to you?

Care to provide some citations of these mass-extinctions so I can have a TV? (I don't even have a TV BTW).

Sure. The industrialization of china has resulted in the destruction of many species in the yantze river due to overfishing and poorly managed industrial effluent discharging. Further inland, the processing of rare earth metals required to sustain many modern high tech industrial products being manufactured there has caused tremendous loss of biodiversity, and terrible problems for human inhabitants. That's not even counting the consequences of the petro-chemical processing needed to turn crude oil into the plastics necessary to produce the TV, which is having profound and measurable consequences on many animal forms globally. And of course, there's the highly critically acclaimed and "Controversial" issue with fossil fuel use, and the entering of the "anthropocene era", which I dont think really needs a citation, since slashdot covers it basically 5 times a day now.

"Be careful there kettle. It's not wise to call the pot black bottomed."

Your grasp of English idiom is lacking.

Care to elaborate on how I used it incorrectly? That particular epithet is used to discourage people from engaging in hypocrisy. The kettle is being a hypocrite by calling the pot "Black bottomed".

As I have just demonstrated, your "Leisure society" is just as guilty of mass ecosystem tampering for poorly justified reasons as my purposeful creation of a biosphere on a world that currently has none is. I was pointing out that I have just as much "Right" to do so, as you do here on earth.

But please, elaborate on how I misused the idiom.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[cusco]

It's all a matter of priorities, and most of these fools feel as though theirs are the only priorities that matter. India's mission to Mars cost less than the wedding of the daughter of one of its industrialists a couple of years ago. The wealth of the Walton heirs alone could come close to funding a sustainable Lunar colony,

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[donaldm]

I don't think crashing icy comets into Mars is going to really help thicken the atmosphere instead that technique would only make for much larger ice sheets since Mars is much more colder in comparison to our planet. Of course it could increase the mass of the planet and that alone could make for some interesting occurrences. Making Mars like our planet (ie. Terra-forming) is still the stuff of Science Fiction and is probably not going to happen, if ever for hundreds or even thousands of years. Sure we can send people to Mars and probably mine it in the fairly foreseeable future, but in the long term space colonies are more practical since we have to take into account protection from solar radiation and even the gravitation requirements of our species just to name a few of the hazards.

Mars and space are very hostile to our species and any manned missions will require a considerable amount of foresight and preparation. Travelling to Mars and living there is many orders of magnitude greater than what the first Explorers travelling from Europe to the Americas would have experienced. This not to say don't send manned missions but we have to be practical as well.

Re:Effects on Martian atmosphere

[RockDoctor]

You sound appropriately sceptical of terraforming Mars. Very appropriately. To increase the mass of Mars sufficiently to generate enough magnetic field to protect the atmosphere from solar wind stripping, you'd need to double it at least. Adding every asteroid in the asteroid belt will get you about 1% of the way there. Adding Pluto and Charon would get you another couple of percent of the way there. You're going to have to strip the Solar System of asteroids, minor planets and many satellites to get the mass there.

Then you need to add in the volatiles that you need to make an atmosphere ... oh no, you've already added them already, because you've stripped the Solar System of everything that's not at the bottom of a gravitational hole. (On which consideration, you may have to count the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn as being too deep in their gravitational wells to extract. More material problems.)

But let's say that : you terraform Mars as best as possible, with the available material. Wait a couple of million years to let the impact debris solidify. What, you want to do this in a millennium or ten, because we're shitting in our own environment? Oh, sorry, but you're going to have to deal with your environmental crises on your own planet while we build a new one for you.

Wait, what was the reason for the terrraforming in the first place?

It just doesn't work, to me.

My next objection was to be that once you've got your planet terraformed, and the population moved, the atmosphere is still going to decay. So you then need to replace atmosphere with the population still on-planet. Good luck with that one! But I think the project is dead already, before getting to that point.

I want pics.

[meerling]

I wish they'd have posted pics taken of the shower from both ground probes and orbital ones.

Re:I want pics.

[RockDoctor]

I don't think that they've got sufficiently fast lenses to capture transient atmospheric events like this.

Likely the evidence comes from radio observation of the echoes from the impacts i nthe upper atmosphere. That's a popular rate measure on Earth too, because it doesn't depend on (absence of) sunlight, cloud cover, etc.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

a) Who told you that?
b) What's that got to do with this?

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because climate change on mars. duh.

Larger than any on Earth?

[Mister Liberty]

I am told that the Leonids in 1833 estimated between 24,000 and 100,000 meteors per hour.

Maybe it is Fallout from Galaxy Quest?

[tmjva]

"Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! ..."

"It's the simple things in life you treasure."

Mars don't need 2 MOONS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a damn shame that that comet didn't smack into Deimos sending it hurtling away from Mars. Mars only needs one moon. Not two. Mars needs one moon to stabilize its axis rotation. (Just like Earth) Once you've gotten rid of the smaller moon, Deimos, then the larger moon, Phobos, will start to pull that axis tighter with its one single gravitational pull. This action will prolly clear up a lot of those chaotic planet wide dust storms which frequent Mars. Of couse, any future comets smacking into Mars would be optimum. Comets contain water. (Thickens the atmosphere) For more info on the "One Moon Theory", research this theory by Dr. Robin Canyup :)