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THIS SITE reports the discovery inside a Martian meteorite of egg-shaped globules rich in carbon and oxygen.
http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/arch … 98197a.jpg
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe said the globule from the rock named Tissint is rich in carbon and oxygen and insisted they could only have been produced by living organisms.
... The meteorite was named after the village where it came down in the Sahara desert in Morocco last July.
It was probably blasted from Mars when it was hit by an asteroid millions of years ago.... PhD student Jamie Wallis, who was working with Dr Wickramasinghe, said: "All the indications are that structures such as we have found are evidence of life on Mars.
“The spheres are probably remnants of polysaccharide shells surrounding algal type cells."... Earlier this month, another group of scientists claimed that the first two Viking probes that NASA landed on Mars in 1976 discovered life but failed to recognise it.
You do realise that the Sun is not a credible source?
20 ppm reduced carbon is at the lower end of the range found in magmatic rocks on the Moon and Earth
These factors no longer apply to Robotic landers especially ones of the Curiosity size/power class, they are equipped with spectrometers, lasers, drills etc and can analyze any sample they collect in a myriad of ways. Likewise they are directed by a skilled team of geologists that is not under much immediate time pressure. This is not to say that robots are better then human explorers, that's not the relevant comparison. The question is will a Sample return mission, of which most scenarios return tiny amounts of rock that can't be analyzed much when on Mars to determine its worth anything, be more or less informative then a big rover? Unless we really expect to see fossil microbes (exceedingly unlikely) it not worth the risk that we end up with a hunk of uninformative basalt.
Which is better, sample return or a big rover, is the wrong question to ask. Both have their complementary roles, and they can even be part of a larger over arching mission, where the large rover characterises and collects samples for return.
Terrestrial laboratories can carry out many more analyses, with much greater accuracy and precision than even the most sophisticated rovers. In addition many more types of analyses can be performed, in many different laboraties. The sample can be archieved and rexamined years or decades later with tools that had not been invented at the time the samples were collected.
A good example of this is the famous SNC meteorite ALH84001. Massing 2.9 kg, this is perhaps three times what we would get with a large sample return mission (up to 1 kg). Some 2800 papers have been published on this meteorite over the past 24 years. Remember ALH84001 (like all Mars meteorites) is a single random sample of Mars - we have no context and no idea of how representative or significant it is. In fact we have can be fairly sure it is not particularly representative or significant.
In contrast samples returned from Mars would consist of multiple types materials, even when collected from a single site, their context would be known and docuented. Sample return is by far and away the most productive type of mission than can be done, short of sending people. It is also the most expensive.
Well, I think Dragon certainly is a step towards space colonisation, since it will lower the cost of getting people to orbit, which will help in building the Lunar infrastructure. If they can get launch costs down to $2000/kg, that's certainly going to help.
It's not yet proven that Dragon will reduce the cost of getting people into space, especially as the manned version has not even flown.
The most that can be said is that it increases the diversity of ways of hauling cargo to the ISS. Which is quite enough of a step forward at this stage.
I actually agree totally with the spirit of what you are saying, but there is a point of it on which I believe you are wrong, specifically the part about "there are not been a vast rush of commerical contracts". If you look at their current published manifest, they have 14 flights booked for 2015, 13 of them Falcon 9's, and only 5 of those are for NASA. That seems significant contracted business for me. Like, more tonnage than China is lifting this year, for example, and comparable to the rest of the US launch industry, combined.
Rune. They are doing extremely well on sales, I'd say.
I have checked their launch mainfest, and you are right abou the number of flights they list. I find it hard to believe though. More than thirty flights in the next 5 years? From an organisation that has flown only seven times in the past six years (three of them failures)? Forteen flights in a year compared the record with less than one a year is an increase of moe than 1400% in two years time?
I wonder how many of them are firm orders (like the COTS flights) and how many are options?
Note too that the table is already obsolete - COTS 2/3 did not fly in 2012, Bigelow has liad off half its staff and may well be in no position to fly anything.
It would not be the first time that SpaceX has been creative with the truth! And it probably won't be the last....
IMHO they will be doing well to meet COTS.
But as I said, this is my last statement on this subject in this thread with you, which isn't really about SpaceX.
This is like saying a child who can't read at three will never read. Space X's development from a standing start as a non-state organisation was nothing short of phenomenal. Once they have the capability of (medium to) heavy lifting, orbital assembly and a manned capsule, there will be nothing holding them back.
A standing start covering very well covered ground, using technology that is mostly 50 years old.
Heavy lift? Orbitl assembly? Manned capsule? Counting your chickens before they have hatch (again). He has no money for heavy lift. He has no money for a manned capsule. He has no money for orbital assembly, or even anything to assemble. He might have one day, but only if someone else, almost certainly NASA or the military or intelligence agencies, pay him.
They have had only seven launches so far and three of those have failed. They have only had two flights of their medium launcher, their uncrewed capsule has not finished its test program. This is very early days for them.
The difference between Musk's dedication (I used the word advisedly) to reaching Mars and the formal, distant objective of a national Space Agency (with many competing short term, medium and long term goals) couldn't be wider.
He can be as dedicated as he likes but less those national agencies pay him he is not going anywhere. He is ju stanother contractor.
Musk for me embodies the idea of something I have always called for: a separate Mars and Lunar Settlement Agency. He's kind of doing it by himself.
Th reality falls far short of this.
I think you will be amazed at the speed with which Musk advances towards Mars as the commercial money starts flowing in and as the company's capability increases. It will be eventually a case of NASA coming along for the ride.
I have been amazed at how quickly he has fallen behind schedule.
NASA won't "be along for the ride" on any Mars mission with SpaceX, it will specify the mission, provide the payload, and pay the bills. SpaceX is just a trucking company. I don't know why this is so hard for you to understand.
However we are way off topic for this thread. Start your own if you want to indulge in wishful thinking regarding SpaceX. I won't discuss this further here with you.
The significance of Space X is (a) that their founder and prime mover is dedicated to the objective of getting humans to Mars to settle the planet as quickly as possible and (b) they are cutting the price per kg to escape our gravity well substantially. So for me that's how Space X developments are more relevant to Mars colonisaiton that other earlier rocket developments.
Pretty much every space agency as a goal of getting people to Mars and to reduce the cost of egtting to space.
Musk may well want to do this "quickly" but SpaceX are still years behind schedule simply to get Dragon operational as a basic cargo carrier. Their rockets have a very spotty reliability record,and there are not been a vast rush of commerical contracts. Nearly all their income is from the US government.
Don't get me wrong, they have done well for themselves, but we are kidding ourselves if we think this is a massive step forward on the road to Mars. It's not.
Went to a fantastic talk last night by the forner Korean astronaut Soyeon Yi. She is a great speaker talking about her own joruney into space, the reaction of her colleagues and family to her selection, what it was like to be the only asian and one of the few women undergoing spaceflight trainong and, of course her actual flight to the ISS. Well worth hearing her if you get the chance.
we are several steps closer to humans on Mars
This is all very good for SpaceX but how is this more significant that the first HTV, ATV or, for that matter, Shenzhou 8 and Tiangong?
I do not know the upper limit for velocity for an asteroid to remain intact. Besides impact velocity, there are other factors: size and shape of asteroid, structural strength, impact angle, etc.
I think we can safely meteorite fagments of any size, for several reasons. None have been found in over 130 km of traverse, despite several examples being found in much shorter taverses on Mars (where aerobraking does occur). No meteorite fragments more than a few 10s of microns have been found in any lunar regolith material. Even on Earth, individual meteorites never mass more than 100 tonnes, despite aerobraking. Even small impacts
(oh, and by the way, you just morphed 1/12 into 12%).
Thanks for picking that up.
JonClarke wrote:Even if they did, what makes you think they will be ores?
Potential ores. If a lunar base whose revenues exceed operating costs is achieved, growth is inevitable. This would create economic pressure to use ISRU materials rather than supplying the base with earthly materials. Metallic asteroids have lots of nickel and iron as well PGMs.
Nickel, iron and PGEs are readily available on Earth in large amounts for a fraction of the cost of finding them on the Moon.
Potential ores are not ores. If we are going to talk about the economics of lunar mining we need to use the terms correctly.
"The words ‘ore’ and ‘reserves’ must not be used in describing Mineral Resource estimates as the terms imply technical feasibility and economic viability and are only appropriate when all relevant Modifying Factors have been considered." (JORC http://www.jorc.org/pdf/jorc2004web_v2.pdf)
Since we know neither technical feasibilty or the economic vaibility of any lunar mining then they are not ores. Nor are they mostly even Resouces. JORC again:
"A ‘Mineral Resource’ is a concentration or occurrence of material of intrinsic economic interest in or on the Earth’s crust in such form, quality and quantity that there are reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction. The location, quantity, grade, geological characteristics and continuity of a Mineral Resource are known, estimated or interpreted from specific geological evidence and knowledge."
For most commodities of interest we don't have the required knowledge of location, quantity, grade, geological characteristics and continuity to define a resource - with the possible exception of titanium and aluminium.
Even these commodities are available in vast quantities on Earth for a fraction of the cost they would be on the Moon.
In the near term I believe the ice has the greatest potential for becoming ore. Propellant high on the slopes of earth's gravity well would break the exponent in Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation. Given one export, other local resources would become attractive for a lunar base seeking to reduce costly imports from earth.
You might be right, eventually. But at present we do not have the knowledge to justfy anything more than experimental ISRU. A lot has to happen before we can even define an ice resource to support a station, let alone an ore reserve for an explort industry.
And, given reduced transportation expense, PGMs and other lunar resources might eventually be profitably sold to earth markets.
How much will transport costs have to fall for lunar PGEs to complete with PGEs (produced essentially free) from the mining of nickel ores or from places like the Bushveld?
I've seen discussion of using the Falcon Heavy and the Dragon for a Mars sample return mission. Could the Falcon 9 perform such a mission with a smaller capsule than the Dragon?
Consider two different architectures: 1.)the propellant for the return is carried from Earth,
and
2.)the propellant for the return is produced on Mars. For this, note that orbital observations of Mars show there are locations that have high concentrations both of methane and water vapor. Then those locations could be targeted for the lander. These would also be good locations to search for life. Zubrin's Mars Direct proposal was of taking Mars resources either of the surface or the ground to produce propellant.
For our proposal, there would be a few options for making the propellant. You could take the methane from the atmosphere in the high concentration region, or you could make it by hydrolyzing the water vapor to get hydrogen and reacting it with the CO2 in Mars atmosphere to get methane.
A chemistry question: if you supply an electricity source, could you create methane directly from water vapor and CO2 in the Martian atmosphere?
You would need a power source. For Zubrins proposal he suggested nuclear power. But that was for a large manned lander. For our much smaller lander solar power may suffice.
A three tonne surface payload makes lots of things possible.
If you are a retailer who benefits from holiday shopping, December isn't an inconsequential month. And December is only 1/12 (8.33%) of the year.
Correct. How significant that is depends on the context.
If only 1/12 of the metallic asteroids remain intact, there could be substantial ore bodies on the moon.
What make you think that 12% of metallic asteroids will remain intact?
Even if they did, what makes you think they will be ores?
The small number of Apollo samples is a lot less than 9%. Yet from these vanishingly minute data points you seem convinced there are no lunar ore bodies.
You are conflating things here.
1) We can use Apollo geochemical data to draw conclusions about crustal scale evolution because geochemistry allows you to do that. We can test the conclusions against remotely sensed data, which show that the conclusions are generally correct. This is first year geology.
2) I have never said there are no lunar mineral accumulations of potenial economic interest. I have mentioned aluminium and titanium and of course the polar ice. These we know about. There may be others.
3) None of these accumulations are strictly speaking ore because they cannot be profitably mined (at present). Ore is an economic term, not a scientific one.
Thanks!
I am trying to find the dimensions of the larger payload shrouds currently in use - Delta IV, Atlas 5, H-II, Proton, Ariane 5, Soyuz 2, etc. A Google search does not immediately help. I am after both length and diameter, preferably also the length of the conical and cylindrical sections as well.
Thanks
Jon
No, we don't.
I don't agree 9% = virtually no impacts.
Depends on your perspective. If you are flying airliners 9% failure is an appallingly large number. If you are testing geophysical models 9% is an unbelievably small number.
The post-VSE mission designs were not published in DRM format. These Constellation-based mission (which looks more like the 90-day report than Mars [Semi-]Direct) is now the "official" plan. It's the one the Augustine commission used to cost (and reject) a Mars mission.
Yes it is, e.g: Human Exploration of Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0 Addendum. NASA/SP–2009–566-ADD
Mars Direct is simpler, safer, and easier to pull off than DRM 3.0. The DRM was in response to MD, but added the complexity of a transfer vehicle left in Mars orbit. IIRC Zubrin spends a section in the Case for Mars discussing the problems of this approach that I won't reiterate here, but another big one that Rune didn't mention is the lack of artificial gravity on the way out. One can only speculate as to why.
Zubrin came up with MSD in response to a number of criticisms of MD. The main disadvantage of MSD as opposed to MD overal is more launches and mission critical rendezvous in Mars orbit. The main advantage is much less propellant needs to be manufactured. Not mentioned by Zubrin is the fact that, as conceived, the ERV in MD was too small by a factor of two or three. lso, as originally written, MSD had less optomistic assumptions about mission masses. Overall there are good easons why almost all subsequent mission studies have used MSD. Including Zubrins latest concept (too sketchy to be called a proposal) for a two person mission based on Dragon.
It is just as feasible to use spin gravity with MSD as with MD. Whether it is needed is a different story. I am inclined to think not.
It's all moot though as they way this works is that every few years some engineers working under political pressure at JSC come up with a reference mission, and then anyone within the agency or government has to use this mission as the bible for what a minimum human-to-Mars programme would look like. The current DRM is unpublished Constellation-era framework that called for multiple (!!) Ares V launches per mission, with some crazy number like 300-400 tonnes to LEO, and all for just a few weeks at a single spot on the surface. Unfortunately it's unpublished (unfinished?), but of course being the JSC-approved reference mission, it was taken at face value the only design considered by the Augustine commission, who of course said it was ridiculously expensive and put Mars off the table for the foreseeable future.
There have been five DRMs, two are (2.0 and 4.0) unpublished as separate studies, but the details are available in other published report reports, including 5.0. None are "minimum" misions. None involved 300-400 tonne launches to LEO. None spent only a few weeks on Mars, all were 500-600 stay missions.
I am not a fan of DRM 5.0 either, as it basically scaled 4.0 up to 5.0 rather than taking advnatage of a large booster (130 tonnes vs 90 tonnes) to reduce the number of launches. But it still contained useful information and is well worth reading.
Nope I'm looking for platinum and the like.
Why PGEs?
What price would PGEs have to be to make mining the Moon feasible?
The abundance of Pt groups in normal regolith means little. What interests me are foreign objects like chunks of asteroid. Even if only one in a million large impacts leave big enough chunks behind to mine there is still that one in a million.
It means a great deal. The bulk of the impactor even in the base of small bodies is melted and dispersed. We know this from theoretical studies of impact processes, from observations from terrestrial impacts, and direct observations on the Moon. We have data from more than 130 km of lunar traverses on foot, by robot, and in vehicles. Not one meteorite was found. Compare with the number found on Mars over much shorter distances. That is the difference an atmosphere makes to meteorite preservation.
The regolith PGE concentration is of the order of 10 ppb, this is consistent with about 1% meteroitic iron at about 1 ppm.
I am not saying there are no larger meteoric fragments, but they are going to be extrenely rare. Why bother?
Before you could mine you'd have to locate your resources. Knowing the 3d structure of craters should help you determine the size speed and angle of the impactor. Ground penetrating radar may be able to identify the location depth and size of any remnants as well as its dielectric constant which will give clues to its composition. When a promising site is located you send a small lander (perhaps a dragon) to preform a test drill and more accurately analyse its composition.
What makes you think there will be enough fragments to be worth collecting?
What makes you think that fragments will be located inside craters when we know from Earth that they don't occur there?
What's the point of large fragments anyway?
Velocity of a hyperbola is sqrt(Vesc^2 + Vinf^2). For most asteroids, Vinf is quite high and this is the quantity that dominates. But there are are number of asteroids with low Vinf, some have a Vinf of nearly zero. Hence I said lunar impacts can be as slow as 2.4 km/s. Which is entirely correct.
Somehow you have morphed this into slow impacts are the norm, a position I've never taken.
In that case we agree.
However the majority are much faster than this, with most about 17 km/s.
Even 2.4 km/s is still substantial, meteorites with masses of less than a few hundred tonnes hit the Earth at less than 100 m/s.
It is a pity Jon Clarke is away as I was hoping he could answer this question of mine. The question is with the Moons history not that we have not found evidence of PGMs and Iron but why we cannot.
We know that the Moon is constantly being hit by meteorites etc we see the transient light and we estimate that meteorites of a mass of 1kg+ impacts the Moon at least 260 times a year. The nature of asteroids is that the majority are C class chondrites but a good minority are structurally stronger M class asteroids.
With all these impacts why is that we cannot find more evidence of the M class asteroidal impacts.
From Apollo we have the idea that the Moons regolith is a very impacted surface, loose regolith is on top of compacted regolith but that a real layer of solid rock may well be very deep under the surface.
The strong structure of M class asteroids may well be strong enough that without atmospheric heating that they will survive relatively intact hitting the Moon. Could this be why we are not seeing them. If they are such concentrated and buried then our sensors would struggle to see them. What would it take to actually test this idea.
I am back, it is a good question. There is certainly dispersed meteoritic iron globules throughout the lunar regolith (about 1.5%, I think). Iron metorites are be strong, but they are not strong enough to survive hypervelocity impacts.
I can't find an overall PGE content of the regolith offhand, but Ir appears to be at the ppb level.
Mars Society Australia member Steve Hobbs is a noted photographer and space artist whose work has been used by NASA, the National Geographic Channel, Science Magazine, Design Graphics and The New Sky & Space Magazine. He is currently studying for a PhD on the topic of Mars gullies and their terrestrial analogues, and has published papers on the Pathfinder landing site and Gale Crater.
Steve's copyrighted artwork (including Mars art) may be viewed at http://www.stevenhobbsphoto.com.au/ and is available for purchase in poster form. Proceeds from art sales will be used to fund a small rover development project.
Mars direct has been long superceded. Most mission architectures these days are a variant of Mars semi-direct. The next advance might be from people developing water based ISRU.
Jon I would like to thank you for providing a strong critical viewpoint. If someone where to say 'we should do this' and everyone just said 'yup, tha'd be cool' we would quickly go back to scratching our rears stop thinking about it.
Glad you like it! :-)
JonClarke wrote:Secondly, as I said before, UV spectoscopy is not a reliable tool for measuring heavy elements. To draw far reaching conclusions, as is happening here, based on one quite possibly spurious reading from an unreliable instrument, completely unwarranted.
There are only a few things that could cause bad results from an experiment like LCROSS. There could have been interment malfunction in which case the data from those interments should be discarded. It could be noise in the instrumentation and a margin of error should be determined and hopefully published. Or the analysis of the data was flawed, in which case the error should be found and corrected. You assert that Ultraviolet Spectroscopy cant accurately classify heavy elements that there was only one set of data collected and the interment itself is unreliable; I have a hard time beliving all of your assertions. You may have forgotten that LCROSS took spectra data from infrared trough ultraviolet and spectra data at various wavelengths including infrared was collected from many different observatories around the world and good corroborating results where collected. I think we can at least rule out interment failure and I believe the LCROSS team is as competent as anyone to analyse and interpret the data.
Obviously I did not make myself clear - my fault. LCROSS was a great mission and the UV spectrometer a great instrument that delivered what it was design for - the composition of the gas plume. The team were doubtless very good people.
However it was not designed for heavy elements. I have never even heard of people using UV spectroscopy to detect heavy elements, and I am familar with most geological and spectral analytical techniques. If I am wrong, then somebody should to link to a site that shows this. UV spectroscopy is used to determine compositions of gases in space. It can't be trusted to give heavy elements. The UV spectometer paper on the LCROSS missions did not discuss the percent values of heavy elements - if the authors had thought they were significant, I would thought they would have discussed them. Percent Au in that quantity is unprecedented. But they didn't, until I have evidence to the contray I must assume that the instrument team did not believe them.
Sorry I was unable to locate my source on the static gold concentration. Its something I read a few months back probably on nasaspaceflight.com It was just something I was throwing out as a possible explanation for the concentration.
I saw that there too. I only lurk so did not object.....
As for the mercury the rate of decomposition and sublimation from compounds can be extremely slow and still have a profound effect simply due to the time scale we are dealing with.
Agreed. But first we need to establish that it is there.
I completely agree with you about governance, the best thing we could do for the commercial development of space would be to create strong property laws. Businesses need to be assured there investments in an area will be protected and should be granted exclusive access to areas they are actively developing and mining.
I have seen what lawless places are like. Not nice.
JonClarke wrote:...For the cost of a single large lunar orbiter like LRO you can find, prove up and bring to production a world class orebody in just about any commodity you like. It does not matter if Musk is a miracle worker and can reduce costs to a 10th of what they are at present, it will take a lot more than an orbiter to prove up an orebody. Hundreds of drill holes, ground geophysics, thousands of assays, months of test work, getechnical surveys. It will always be easier to do this on Earth.
The cost of space hardware will decrease like everything. They build this stuff extremely inefficiently, each spacecraft is designed from the ground up and manufactured one at a time. Imagine how many hundreds of millions of dollars there is in designing your cell phone and necessary components, how much would it cost if they just built one. I hope access to LEO get down to $100/kg and have reusable solar powered ion tugs pull you to lunar orbit for $15/kg so the transportation cost of freight on the lunar surface might be around $300/kg. It wont take too many billions to start a mine.
One would hope so. But a two orders of mgntitude decrease isn't going to happen soon. Even when it does to prove up a large lunar ore body would be a bigger effort than all missions to the Moon combined. It won't be cheap, and still more costly than finding such a deposit on Earth. Even if you increase the cost of the commoidty by ten that just makes lower grade terrestrial deposits economic. Remember that terrestrial mining costs are decreasing all the too.
Space mining makes sense in two areas - a commodity that is essentially nonexistent on Earth (He3 would be an example) - or for local use where it is cheaper than bringing it from Earth.
Other than volatiles, the most obvious lunar raw materials are Ti and Al, which exist at high grades (even my terrestrial standards), and are useful even for basic manufacturing. And some Fe of course. Forget about Au and PGEs.
Anyway I am off on by 30th wedding anniversary for the next four days, so this is my last post here.
Likewise, the global composition of the moon is irrelevant to this discussion. By that logic I have news for you: the Earth's crust has a poor abundance of precious and heavy metals! Too bad we can't extract the resources we need from it.
Quite the opposite. Go to this web site http://www.chemicool.com/ and check the solar system vs terrestrial crustal abundances for elements of economic interest. Almost all are strongly enriched in the Earth's crusts. PGEs are among the few that are depleted. Which is why there are very rare. Other previous metals like Au and Au are enriched.
From this we can conclude, even without knowing about deposits, that the Earth's crust is well endowed. Comparing the crustal values with those of the Moon (or Mars for that matter) we see that these bodies are much less endowed.
We're talking about locally concentrated ores and volatile deposits, and the mechanisms which might create and/or protect them on or near the lunar surface. Due to vast differences in geology, impactor speed, and weathering, those mechanisms will be different than on Earth.
Unless less you talk about specific processes the above is too general to be useful. Magmatism and impact processes are very similar on the Earth and the Moon. Impact velocities on the Moon are not that different to those on Earth. Weathering is different for the earth and Moon, agreed, but what is the relevance of the difference to ore genesis?
Volatiles are a different story, they are there is large amounts, although the quantities are still rubbery by any ore reserve standard.
