The driving range of future rovers, manned and unmanned, must be increased to double or triple digit miles per day.
Ron Carlson
]]>A long time ago I wrote a message about using fuel cells on Mars and Shaun and Byron brought up the point that you'll need a good power source for splitting the water into its constituents in order to get power out of a fuel cell. I'm no expert on fuel cells and probably misunderstood something, but how will you generate the energy for splitting the water? Would solar panels be up to the job? Maybe you could burn the methane fuel in an electric generator or charge the fuel cells with the nuclear reactor that powers the hab.
Is there any reason why you can't have a Mars rover that is powered directly by a nuclear power plant? Why do you need to go through the intermediate step of having the nuclear power plant generate fuel? Nuclear fuel is much more compact and long lasting. Why not make a hab that is a Pressurized Mars Rover instead of having a seperate stationary hab? You could just leave the Earth Return Vehicle behind ready to be used.
]]>We wouldn't need to drag an atmospheric processing plant around with us. We could stop off every hundred Kilometres and refuel. That cuts the mass of the mobile hab by half.
That in turn greatly reduces the energy used to move your mobile habitat. The less energy used, the more we can do between stops.
What do you guys think?
]]>Why not just use rechargable batteries? They would have a limited range, but how far do you need to go?
]]>For these reasons I would stick with an internal combustion engine powered by methane or better yet ethelyne. On Mars this would be a perfectly environmentally friendly car since the exhaust is CO2.
]]>In the news reals, notice how the flames burn quickly down and around the skin of the airship, in a sparkling fireworks type flame. Hydrogen gas alone would burn upwards and has a colorless flame.
Experts therefore believe that the Hydrogen fuel was not the cause of the disaster.
]]>I believe at least some of the R&D which went into designing the new US Marine AAAV would be quite valuable in designing a rugged Mars rover.
Supposedly this new vehicle will have a substantial and robust local area network as well as sensors for detecting bio-chem warfare agents, internal air supplies, and external cameras including infra-red and night vision. The communications suite can integrate with other vehicles to create a larger data sharing network composed of several vehicles.
Obviously we lose the armor and weapons, convert to all electric drive and probably switch from tracks to oversized wheels with independent drive and suspension for each wheel but thats just engineering, right?
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