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I sure would like to know if the suggestion I made (two posts back) that phase-synchronization between Earth and a space colony circling the sun would be possible by elongating its orbit to pass both inside and outside Earth's, after tilting it's plane to avoid crossing collisions, in order to maintain the same period as Earth?
This is a very interesting topic, but I'm confused. Is it about space stations orbiting Earth, or space colonies orbiting the sun?
A "shipyard" LEO, for the general purpose of gathering and/or assembling elements of projected interplanetary space expeditions, would be an exclusively near-earth exercise. On the other hand, proposing to place asteroid materials (or the asteroid itself!) in LEO would involve such a risk to the home planet as not to be taken seriously.
The LEO shipyard facilityprobably should comprise the next space platform, made up (say) of inflatable modules launched as needed from Earth. One of the initial "ships" to be assembled might even be become first LEO habitat.
But, to construct a habitat within a hollowed-out asteroid orbiting the sun, would involve interplanetary logistics a level of expertise at least a generation beyond our present capabilities in LEO.
But, what if a suitable asteroid's orbit around the sun could be made phase-synchronous with that of Earth? The trick as I see it, would (1) incline the hypothetical near-Earth asteroid's orbital plane a few degrees above and below Earth's and (2) reshape it to be a bit more eliptical so as to avoid risk of collision but have the same period as Eath's. Once the phase-synchronism has been established, year-round space travel would then be feasible to-and-from the space colony as easily and often as between the moon and Earth.
Okay, here is your suggestion: "One note concerning location. The best location would me the caves. A mobile hab could then be 'driven' underground for radiation protection."
My response: How to access the caves and exploit them unmanned, is the real poser. My own suggestion would be to orbit Mars without landing on the first Mars expedition in order to utilize remotely operated devices configured as necessary to access them in realtime. A second follow-on expedition could then perform the initial landing already prepared for what they will encounter inside the cave or caves.
Tom wrote: "Never mind that we'd have to pay the additional price in oil, all you Democrats can think about is getting George Bush, never mind that he's not running, with you getting George Bush is a fixation and nothing else matters!"
I'd change that to say: all the world can think about is the end of the George Bush administration. What matters is that we survive any further faith-based insanities--not to mention loot--they may still be able to get away with during the remaining time left to them!
Well, when you get right down to it, Mars is where Earthlings of every sort can continue to exist if anything happens to make the home planet uninhabitable. Anything else is window dressing, to be considered and debated after a sustainable foothold has been established on Mars.
Where, elsewhere--this is only a single pager, so far.
I guess it depends upon how the "enhancement" was accomplished. Care to illucidate, niente?
Exactly.
No doubt you're right, Tom. But time's awastin' and the old arguments, like "rewarding them" are out of date. The world is ready now and maybe not next decade ... or is it just that I'm worried I won't live long enought to see a reliable international space transportation system in place, and us safely off Earth? I represent the present generation of space pioneering enthusiasts, at 82, and you're not the spring chicken you may think you are either.
Not without the Russians' contribution between the Shuttle and the Orion interval. Why isn't their input even mentioned? I read that a Russian proposal to be a Moon landing contributor has on been turned down, and that they intend to go it alone as a consequence. Why this lack of vision on our part, when we of Earth are at risk through such shortsightedness? At risk, that is, of being overwhelmed by not-yet-space-aware developing nations' demands for equity (in the terrestrial sense) before the next stages you are predicting with such confidence have a chance to even "get off the ground!"
I have been sort of wondering about the food shelf life and why we are not bringing up greater quantities as a means to test out whether it will still be viable for consumpsion along the duration of a mars mission.
Food science is very mature, such tests would be done on the ground far more cheaply. If samples did need to be in space to check for the effects of increased radiation etc etc, then only small quantities would be used.
I would argue that microgravity-grown food science is anything but mature!
Ain't 20/20 hind vision grand?
I would object to Mars sample return missions which don't first involve investigation of the black hole(s) on Mars, which may make mere scratching on the surface a foolish waste of time and effort. The surface is already open at the sites of the black holes, for us to investigate in depth, without "scratching." What we find down there, may indeed change our entire approach to current Mars mission planning.
How about: when the dirigible aerostat approaches the black hole, it drags a line with a grapple on the end which falls down into the cavern to serve as a sort of anchor? The aerostat can then switch off power to its maneuvering propellers, and winch itself down to the opening. The payload instrumentation, including a solar mirror to provide passive illumination inside the black hole, could then be directed into the cavern to see what's in there. The "grapple" would include instrumention itself, which could be released to descend further into the cavern from the overhang while sending multispectral video imagery up the tether (as it twists and turns all the way to the bottom if it appers safe to do so) to the captive aerostat for transmission to the orbiting mother probe ,whenever line-of-sight occurs, and on then to Earth for our necessarily-offline interpretation, at leasure. The aerostat itself could have solarcell arrays, onboard batteries, send/receive antennas all within the protective envelope which, once down, need not carry lifting gas but only pressurized Martian air to maintain its shape, blimp-wise.
Moving right along with my growing obsession with caverns on Mars: here are some biographical notes that bear upon the Themis infrared black-hole magery, which match my own ideas about the subject. (The bold-faced text near the end is what attracted my attention, since this is what I suggested a few posts back, although admittedly tongue-in-cheek.):
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Growing up in caves
R.D. "Gus" Frederick, an explorer of dark places in the Pacific Northwest, is a fitting person to extol the benefits of martian cave dwelling.
By trade, Frederick is an instructional technologist at the Oregon Public Education Network, but his passion is clearly caves. He has been prowling in them since he was a kid.
Skylight Cave near Sisters, Oregon is a lava-flow cave with a hole in the top that lets the sun shine in.
Frederick has explored lava tubes in Oregon, Washington and elsewhere. He first brought up living in martian lava-tubes in 1996, and he presented the idea at the annual Mars Society convention last year. He describes one way the potential human homes form:
Like wax from a candle, flowing lava freezes in place. A crust forms over the top, insulating the liquid underneath, which continues flowing.
When the source of magma is exhausted, the remaining liquid lava drains out, leaving the crust and a hollow interior. Frederick says some terrestrial caves resemble subways, with ceilings more than 20 feet (6.1 meters) tall.
Where the crust is thin, a portion sometimes collapses and creates a skylight. Such holes, Frederick says, not only provide a way into a cave but could also serve as a place through which to direct sunlight.
Frederick says photos of Mars show lava-flow landforms that are similar to those on Earth, indicating the possibility of caves, which he says are probably larger than earthly caves.
Skylights on martian terrain indicate possible caves below.
"The obvious disadvantage is that you cannot choose where to put your lava-tube cave, like you can with a traditional surface habitat," Frederick says. "So any initial habitats will most likely be on the surface."
NASA and others have mocked up various overgrown canisters intended to serve this purpose.
But caves don't need to be hauled Mars-ward, proponents point out. And caves could provide protection against the harsh radiation there, which occurs because the thin atmosphere barely filters the sun. Some researchers have speculated that martian caves might hold stores of water ice.
A martian biosphere
Frederick goes further than some proponents of cave dwelling by suggesting that a translucent, inflatable balloon could be used to seal openings while still allowing light in. Settlers might then fill the cave with oxygen. Add a little water and an entire ecosystem might be possible.
"In some way it could be seen as a very primal experience," Frederick says. "Leaving the womb of Mother Earth to live within Mars."
[Unquote]
Hi, and welcome! While the Space Shuttle system and the three remaining orbiters exist they should be utilized the way they are now that the safety procedures needed from the start have at last become routine. Lots of hard lessons learned, and sacrifices made, shouldn't be put aside at the whim of politicians. There's lots of transportation work that can be imagined once the ISS science labs are in place. Populating them optimally and ferrying the personnel, equipment, tools, and instruments devised for ongoing experiments under microgravity conditions, to and from the space station rutinely--while better and more practicable shuttle systems are being developed--requires that the existing Space Shuttle system be maintained operational. But ,for habitats beyond low Earth orbit, I look to and anticipate inflatable enclosures, such as Bigelow has under development, boosted in collapsed form and subsequently assembled in space where and as needed for cis-Lunar missions and beyond.
Why are all of these holes so circular? Lava tubes are generally parallel with the terrain, so localized cave-ins would be elongated, or at least oval rather than circular. And the crustal edges of the hole selected for magnification (called "Jeanne") shows uniform thickness all the way around, inferring a dome-roofed cavern curving symetrically away in all directions beneath the crust. And, since the point of view must have been from directly overhead, the jagged edges appear to be slanted slightly inward from the outer to the inner edges. Given the roughly 100 meter diameter and assuming a slope of 60-70 degrees, say, a good approximation of the thickness of the crust at the edges might be calculated to determine the tensile strength of the overburden in the region of the hole. Notice also the distinctl lighter colored material extending from entire breadth of the hole, in the northerly direction. Now, what could possibly be the cause of that?
I find hard to imagine any "risks" to unmanned missions due to ancient tectonics in probing the depths of these black holes on Mars, but since the question has come up the most recent data on Google (10.12.05) establishes the probable existence of plate tectonics on Mars:
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New Map Provides More Evidence Mars Once Like Earth
NASA scientists have discovered additional evidence that Mars once underwent plate tectonics, slow movement of the planet's crust, like the present-day Earth. A new map of Mars' magnetic field made by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft reveals a world whose history was shaped by great crustal plates being pulled apart or smashed together.
Scientists first found evidence of plate tectonics on Mars in 1999. Those initial observations, also done with the Mars Global Surveyor’s magnetometer, covered only one region in the Southern Hemisphere. The data was taken while the spacecraft performed an aerobraking maneuver, and so came from differing heights above the crust.
This high resolution magnetic field map, the first of its kind, covers the entire surface of Mars. The new map is based on four years of data taken in a constant orbit. Each region on the surface has been sampled many times. “The more measurements we obtain, the more accuracy, and spatial resolution, we achieve," said Dr. Jack Connerney, co-investigator for the Mars Global Surveyor magnetic filed investigation at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
"This map lends support to and expands on the 1999 results," said Dr. Norman Ness of the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware, Newark. “Where the earlier data showed a "striping" of the magnetic field in one region, the new map finds striping elsewhere. More importantly, the new map shows evidence of features, transform faults, that are a "tell-tale" of plate tectonics on Earth." Each stripe represents a magnetic field pointed in one directionpositive or negativeand the alternating stripes indicate a "flipping" of the direction of the magnetic field from one stripe to another.
[Unquote]
You know, I can't understand why no more replies to these so-called "black holes" on Mars have been submitted since the initial disclosure. I made above cockeyed suggestions just to start some discussion, but ... nothing. You'd think such readymade access points to whatever may lie beneath the surface would've galvanized mission planners into alternative actions--both the professionals at JPL as well as the armchair ones of the Mars Society. Come on! There's got to be "gold" in them thar holes--things of a kind that planetary geologists would kill for, if they only had a clue as to the interior sizes, shapes, and if these presumed caverns exist elsewhere on the Red Planet. We were beginning to think we knew enough from the recent flood of high resolution pictures from orbit, how to plan an expedition, but not any more. Not, that is, until we've investigated these holes first to the best of our ability, unmanned.
Here are a couple of thoughts, arising from the recent discovery of round black holes which are suggested as offering ready-made direct access to possible deep caverns beneath the surface of Mars, in certain locations....
(1) Immediate, unmanned mission: if a beachball-like enclosure smaller in diameter than the hole could be landed and inflated nearby, it might then be propelled--by rolling-- over to the hole and plopped into the cavern below. Cushioned, automated instrument packages inside could then position themselves to observe and/or deploy robots to explore the interior of the cavern in various ways, and transmit their findings up through the hole to the passing polar orbiting mother ship for retransmission to Earth. Ideally, the ball might be reinflated with lifting gas afterwards, causing it to rise up through the hole to the surface again, for better communications, and even for reuse in other holes nearby.
(2) Future, manned mission, taking the above idea a little further: by inflating a more advanced "beachball" larger than the diameter of a particular hole, it would be the "stopper," blocking the hole to the presumed cavern beneath, with airlocks top and bottom to retain breathable air inside, and become the first colonists' initial habit, with inflatable chambers inside to form living quarters. The colonists could then descend into the cavern to excavate permanent living quarters underground, returning after each shift to the comfort of proper living quarters inside the ball-dome stopper.
Right on, samy! When you consider the so-called Earthlike planets being discovered orbiting other stars, they appear to be considerably less inviting than Venus. But they're being considered as potential objectives for interstellar expeditions. We'll settle wherever we can in space: on or about planets, moons, and rotating space-colonies habitats ... so long as resources are accessible.
Darwin was crazy and his ideas on evolution are wrong. Everying you need to know is in the bible. May Darwin burn in Hell fires forever.
Sorry, Earthfirst--but your expressions of extreme ill will towards Darwin and his ideas on evolution should have been submitted in Chat, instead of Science and Technology, under Religious Claptrap.
I have experienced the same indifference, nay ignorance willfully maintained, by by acquaintances here in rural Nova Scotia, but I couldn't help pulling your leg for being so ... so Canadian .. or in my case, Scandinavian, at this time of year: Midsommar tiden!
Access to the interior of Mars is what it's all about, isn't it? So, here we are with ready-made access to the interior handed to us on a platter, so to speak, and all we have to do is figure out how to drop our instrumentation down into the holes--not dig piddling little holes to scrape dirt from, etc.
Thinking further, how about installing a lidar tight-beam line scanner to determine depth of these holes below the surface of Mars, and the shape of the bottoms directly beneath their openings, by successivly line-scanning the terrain from orbit from a suitably equipped satellite payload? It shouldn't add much to the cost of an already in-the-works orbiter, I should think. More elaborate schemes can be developed in the interim, to examine the extent and sides of these so-called caverns.
I'd chuck the whole dry soils sample-and-return schemes as a waste of time, and potentially dangerous through contamination to the health of the only home planet we've got.
The challenge of missions involving unmanned drilling into the surface of Mars is daunting to the extent of near impossibility, for a variety of reasons: chiefly bulky drill-rig, and shallowness of penetration possible with such flimsy rigs. The newly discovered "black hole caverns of Mars" would seem to sidestep that challenge, in favour of (say) lowering multipurpose instrument packages into the 100-metre diameter black holes to depths still unknown. The means of accessing these depths could include any number of automated rig discriptions. We need a whole raft of ingenious ideas from the clever Mars Society contributors who haunt these forums.
For starters, consider acquiring depth data--anything from sonically steered, autonomous balloon-borne sensor packages that sink down into a hole and out again,to self-erecting cranes straddling the opening to lower various ensor packages in and out of the hole by winching. Forget the sample/return missions carrying surface dirt,which in my opinion would be an unnecessary waste of valuable time.