New Mars Forums

SpaceX will get to Mars before any other governmental agency.

Yeah, a Mars Direct style mission with artificial gravity, you can walk around and maybe jog a bit, but again that's like ISS, they're not bathing on the ISS daily, they wipe down after exercise, but it's minimal at best. It doesn't get rid of the odor. Apparently the ISS is really stinky but once you get used to the human vapor smell you forget about it. A Mars Direct style mission, you'd get on a clean smelling ship, and while someone not accustomed to the smell would be repulsed, you'd be very much used to it and it maybe wouldn't even register. Perhaps after getting a clean shower on Mars and re-entering the pod you'd notice the stench, but not while traveling.

Anywhere north of +45 or south of -45 or in Hellas Planitia has water ice as much as constituting half the soil. Mars has a lot of water, it's just frozen in the soil. You will likely land in the lower areas because you want access to that water and the meager protection from cosmic rays. Phoenix proved this subsurface water ice when it dug down just a few inches and found it.

I know this is a late response, but be sure you are coming to http://newmars.com/forums/ not http://www.newmars.com/forums/

Since New Mars migrated there has been this tiny problem (and I experienced it myself for a time when upgrading accounts), so change your bookmarks appropriately. The 'cookie' your computer saves is "domain specific" and the 'www' matters a lot.

Sorry for being in hiding, as another of my favorite mods said, I am just sort of not lately invested in Mars. We'll colonize it one day, but today is not that day, maybe once SpaceX is launching 9H I'll start posting more. I really feel bad for neglecting posting so much!

For some reason the non-posting members' profiles are public, and I can't turn it off, I'll look for a solution. I just deleted 3k spammers, manually, but then I did the math, and it would take me weeks to get rid of them all. I'll see if I can't get the admin to delete them with one simple SQL entry. (I have to get the fluxbb folks to help me with that first though.)

Just be assured that no spammer can post here, though they can register, it is futile. Sorry if the userlist is misleading in any way. It is not an indictment on the forum. They can register with their spam addresses, but no one can post without my permission (and I've allowed posters every week for awhile now, the email method works).

Josh notified me, I contacted the admin but Google is still showing it. Not sure what's up. I can't find the malware in the HTML code, it must be somewhere deeper than I have access to. No idea when it will be resolved. Traffic seemed to be picking back up too...

ronondexfan, more sails definitely gives you more benefit. The photon pressure equation is just flux / c (speed of light). So optimizing to one end of the spectrum won't do much good, you want to absorb the whole spectrum as much as you can. It may turn out that sails that are optimized to one end are lighter and therefore more efficient than sails that absorb more spectrum, though.

As far as adding a magnetic sail there's a wonderful concept called Dusty M2P2 that may be of interest. It uses a plasma to inflate the mag sail and if you put in little particles that reflect light it may be a successful propulsion method.

Google search for it: https://www.google.com/search?q=Dusty+M2P2

I don't understand how that happened, I don't even think I did it because I remember your name and email and posts. It could have been me though and I apologize profusely for the error.

There shouldn't be any more spam messages now since posters must be approved by me before they can post. This way we don't have a flood of spammers like last time.

omg Koeng! I deleted you? how many posts had you made?

I checked your email and I don't see how I could've possibly deleted you

Hey jburk, I believe in that email exchange I wound up making it the way it was before. If you look at the layout it looks basically like that though we moved The First Hundred above Underhill.

jmknapp over at UMSF set up a wonderful scraper for MSL images: http://curiositymsl.com/table/view/

Wow, look at those dunes!

From http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/

edit: someone over at UMSF made this, omfg: http://www.nivnac.co.uk/mer/index.php/msl0002

Incredible!