New Mars Forums

Well thanks for giving a reply.

supposition:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/supposition
Noun 1. supposition - a message expressing an opinion based on incomplete evidence
guess, speculation, surmisal, surmise, conjecture, hypothesis
opinion, view - a message expressing a belief about something; the expression of a belief that is held with confidence but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proof; "his opinions appeared frequently on the editorial page"

Yes, I did.  Aside from having all the complete set of information, trying to define what is the additional information you should be looking for can be supported with the use of "guess, speculation, surmisal, surmise, conjecture, hypothesis".  It might even be used in science, I am suppositioning.

Seriously, I am grateful that you have tried to improve my thinking process.

Quotes:

I would prefer being refered to as ignorant, but yes at times I use poor judgement.

"A man who calls his brother a fool is in danger of going to hell".  Don't throw it about so freely.  Call me ignorant please.  I am ignorant.  Thats what happens before you go to school. 

I will try to rephrase what I was getting at:

Mars appears to have had the capacity to support life at times, and may still have it in certain locations such as aquifers, and perhaps in the near surface of cracks in rocks, and salt pans.  Mars also has climatic periods even now (Last 200 Million years) where a stronger axial tilt could allow a ambient pressure of 11 mb, and snowfall/water ice from other condensation in the equatorial regions.  Mix salt with ice with a somewhat below freezing temperature (Fresh Water Freezing), and you can likely get a salt water seep, puddle, or even a lake.  If the environment were occasionally like that of the dry valleys of Antarctica (A big stretch), then solar heated salt water covered with less salty water, covered with transparent/translucent ice.

So, if panspermia/transpermia can work, it might have.

I agree that no conculsive evidence for life exists and certaintly not lichen.  (Not completely ruling it out though).

The German experiment suggests that if lichen were transplanted to certain microenvironments on Mars it could persist for at least 30 days.  The same for Cyanobacteria.

I like you would prefer that there were no life on Mars, especially now that I understand how close Mars is in capability to adopt certain Earth life forms.

I am deeply curious as to why it would not have life.

I have to supposition that there are reasons, and I would like to find them out or find life.

I will offer what I have.  These deviate from your original query to the others and yourself.

The only way I would ever think of a shell world surrounding a gravitational mass and supported against gravity by atmospheric pressure, would be if a collapse could be survived by the population, and if they could quickly rebuild it at a reasonable cost.  I suppose if they had safety measures such as early warning and deep bunkers where they could survive the crash, or a means to depart to an orbital shelter, and if they had a vast army of robot servants to do the rebuilding, then it might be considered for small bodies as you have yourself restricted the idea to.

It is obvious that vacuum floats above air in a gravitational field, and that air floats above water, and that water floats above soil and rock.  So far, we can only violate that using stiff tensile and/or compressive structures.  We fill a tire with air, but from time to time we get a flat tire and in that case we can replace or patch it and refil it.

I would think that Vesta would be fun to try the idea on, it turns out that it's soil is impregnated with Hydrogen, and it is smaller than Ceres.  I would make the "Supports" as verticle closed cylinders shaped like an elongated soup cans filled with air.
I would link each cylinder with pressurized passageway ducts running horizontally.  Then I would cover the whole thing with a common enclosure, a roof to catch gasses leaking from the ducts, and cylinders and their airlocks.  Artificial gravitation would be from a torroid spinning structure inside of the bottom (perhaps) of each cylinder, supported with magnatism or air pressure as in a hover craft like the method suggested in the saucer section of the imaginary starship enterprise of the sci-fi "Star Trek".

Deviating even further;
-Cover Ceres with a worldwide ocean protected by mechanical means, with ice sheets as floats and solar domes enclosing "Windows".  In some cases the "Lakes" under the windows could be ice water, and in some cases with extra means they could be tropical.  Ceres is close enough to the sun where this could be worthwhile.  Going further out in the solar system, I suppose you would not bother with windows, but would rely on some unspecified energy source.

-Make a shell without a gravitational body.  I think it would be quite worthwhile to have a hollow shell world built to orbit Ceres or some other such body.  It may be only slightly pressurized (Near vacuum) to catch the leakage gasses from the artificial worlds it would enclose.  Those artifical worlds could be like the clasic torroids that early on were suggested.   They could be moved about within the parent body, repositioned, docked to a network of ducts.  Smaller non spinning worlds could also be present, sufficient to hold a group of working persons for a period of weeks or months.  I suppose I see this as each small world working with others to construct something, with robotic manipulator arms with hands.  I suppose they would work with material objects, to provide goods.  I think that this could be quite a good method for the Jupiter system.  The outer shell could be a radiation barrier.  Raw materials from Callisto, and later the other moons could be brought in.  But this is quite deviated from your original query about shell worlds.

As for energy, such shell worlds might be able to capture energy from the solar wind, perhaps quite far out.  Or in the case of the Jupiter system by entering a harmonic orbit with one of the moons and essentially converting the spin of Jupiter into energy.  They would use the magnetic field of Jupiter to generate power, and the momentum of the moon they have a harmonic orbit with to maintain orbital position.  The tides of Jupiter would replace the momentum taken from the moon with spin energy taken from Jupiter.

Such a scheme would work for otherwise uninhabitable star systems, such as small red dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and yellow stars without a reasonable "Earth", but with a significant planet with a significant moon.

So, by this method at least you could consider that solar systems inhabited would not have to be ideal ones.  So this could be a method to achive what was desired.

Good for the imagination, but I do believe it will be a long time, if ever comming.

Yes, perhaps you will.

I respect all opinions on this, but if such engines are actually 5-10 times cheaper to use, it has to be attractive.

Oh, I don't plan to burn paraffin to heat the structure Louis.  It is a fluid that retains heat well, and can be melted with solar heat, pumped into the tanks as warm, and retain heat overnight.  Maybe the people would sleep on the tanks, with a blanket above them.

So after the humans arrive, they load up the pariffin tanks with the stuff strewn about outside, and start melting it with solar heat.  Later when the mission is over, it is fuel, for the burn up to orbit.

And by the way the plastic bags that would hold the paraffin would then be recycled to 3D printers to make stuff.

My concern is that I constantly hear how hard it is to land a big payload.  Well, if you dump off "Ballast" in the form of useful materials, then you lighten the payload before the thump-down, allowing additional slowing with the engines. So, maybe you get to have your cake and eat it to.  Not bad from my thinking.

I agree that getting stuff from the locality is a nice plan, but you won't be getting beef jerky right away.  I wonder how hard a stick of beef jerky can hit the Martian surface and still be food?

Now, if your beef jerky were in the form of a chain, including plant fiber and also a digestable glue, you could go drag it back to the camp, cut pieces off, put them in a sealed pot of water, and dump that into a hot paraffin bath, and go out to work.  I get the idea that you might want your people to eat something more basic, but still, for moral, heated food might be better some times.  I might be a little concerned on how you do the dishes however.  How do you prevent food poisioning?  Maybe it can be solved.

As for Steel, yes you might collect iron, but before you do that you need tools, Steel slammed hard to the surface from a high drop may or may not survive as chain.  Parts might be good and parts might be broken and mangled.  Well join the good parts to make such an amount of chain as you need (Not that much I expect), and take the other pieces, and heat them in a solar focus, and shape it into tools you will need to gather ISRU materials and to process them.  You cannot start with rocks and expect to make goods, you have to have some starter tools, and some raw materials you bring to make more tools with those tools. It is not necessary to soft land the processed materials such as chain and beef jerky (Or some other food with similar properties), it does make sense that they must be retrievable, so I think dropping them from one of the main delivery vehicles is the best, since that way they will not be miles away (I hope).

I see it as a cone of provision.  Soft land the starter tools, hard drop the materials for the second wave of tools, gather local materials for the third wave of tools.

I also wonder if it would be possible to manufacture Paraffin from Phobos and Demos?  Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen?  And then eventually manufacture it on Mars.

It does make sense to me that that material can be easily stockpiled.  I am not sure about easily manufactured however.

I actually hope I am not exasperating you Rocket Man. 

Some times I just have to do what I do, until an imovable object stops me, such as reality.

For your intentions, yes that is also an option.

However, I have no intention to susspend anything from the chain but chain.

The chain if it is metal or even perhaps plastic is a tool.

The chain if it is food, is a collection of food joined, so that it can be extracted from the dirt and dusted off.  Perhaps it would a soluable so that it could be immersed in water to make a soup of some kind, and yet build with a bit of strength.  Perhaps beef jerky and a glue of soup dried soup broth?

The chain if it is plastic can serve as a tool, but could be fed into a 3D printer to make items required and desired.

The Metal, if it were brass would be useful, a brass chain can be of use,  otherwise it can be melted and processed into tools or construction materials.

Steel chain would be of some value, otherwise, perhaps it could be forged into tools, using solar concentrated focus, and blacksmith methods.

Cable is useful, but when it gets screwed up it is screwed up.  Chain can be cut with a cutter, and can be joined with a new forged link, or a specially built one that will mechanically join together.

The point would be to slow it to a speed where impact would not render it useless or unrecoverable.  That way less fuel used to deliver it.  The rocket engines used to slow it are immediatly put to a new task as soon as the chain either is stopped from pulling the assembly down when it strikes the ground, or is simply released from the assembly to fall on it's own.  The engines which previously were used to slow down the chain then are reused to soft land or hard land the engine assembly, to protect the engine assembly or a further cargo, or to just protect the cargo, such as an inflatable shelter.

If the engine assembly is protected, then while the mission is occuring refueling from Martian atmosphere could be occurring at the same time, so that it can deliver the people back up to orbit.  So it gets used 3 times.

Actually I only said hover to indicate that after the chain load was expelled, the engines would have enough power to hover, povided they had fuel.  Of course landing the engine assembly ASAP, before the fuel ran out would be the preference.

For example if the engines had enough power to hover a one ton assembly, and the total weight with chain was 5 tons, then without releasing the chain the speed of descent would be enormous.  The timing of the disconnection of the upper end of the chain would be critical.  It would have to happen soon enough that the "Lander" could overcome it's inertia, and also be close enough to the ground as to not linger in hover mode.  Certainly not a "Personed" process, but an ultra high speed robotic process.  And the chain materials would have to be of great utility or it would not be worth it.

It is a process somewhere between crash landing and a somewhat soft landing.

Again I am not proposing it as a defninte solution, but a thought experiment I have been working on.

I am not even sure why it would be needed to save the engine section from impact except to soft land a inflatable habitate, or some other sensitive machine or if that engine section was to be turned into an assent rocket for return to orbit.

There is much to challenge in this, I simply present it as thinking, not as an effort to overturn previous work, but as in the crash landing notions presented to suppliment other various previously considered options.

I actually want to avoid hovering, unlike that skycrane which is to deploy the next rover.

As I said, I find this entertaining, and if you did not criticise it I would, but since you are somewhat taking the con, I will attempt to give it a little pro.

Impaler said:

I'm a big fan of electric propulsion but it just wont work in the atmosphere, I've seen studies that show that current SEP systems can't even go below the altitude of the ISS without suffering drag greater then the thrust they can generate, the figure of merit is W/m^2.  Contrary to popular belief their is still a lot of atmospheric drag up their at orbital altitude and a big low density balloon is going to get pulled down so fast it ain't funny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionocraft

If I am not mixed up, I have seen video's of actual devicis "levitating" (Actually being thrusted by ion flow).  As the article implies, short circuits are an issue, but perhaps that is more true when you use it in a sea level air pressure environment.  Perhaps the voltages don't have to be so high at 140,000 to 200,000 feet.  So, the confusion is totally understandable, but I think it is a different type of electrical propulsion than the ion rocket.  I also recall a reference to yet another device to propell airships, that woud involve charging a volume of gass electrostatically, and then compressing that and venting it.  So, perhaps I am still confused.  I am sure that they have some notion that they can build a device to thrust with.  Otherwise I wouldn't think they would mention it for fear of being discredited.

Teraformer said:

One of the more interesting aspects of Airship to Orbit is that it doesn't need a heat shield or landing system. That's a major mass saving right there, though likely to be eliminated due to the mass of the airship.

I thought that might be true.  So, return at least could make sense, if lifting does not.

I wonder if the device could plane in the air like an airplane, to get to 200,000 feet, only going 50-100 mph faster than the spin of the air at that height, and with a burst of propulsion elivate (Perhaps a small chemical rocket), pointing the nose up, and then pointing horizontal (More or less) then being above the worst drag, begin propulsion to have an orbit?  I am imagining that if you are going to use electrostatic thrust for most of it even in "Sub-Orbit to Orbit mode" you would need to be able to feed a propulsion gas to the "Ionic Propulsion" once you were very much above 200,000 feet.  They do talk about sending it to other places in the solar system, so, it must need a plan for that propulsion.

While magic tricks and camera tricks could easily produce the following references, I do believe that the effect is real.  I have seen these before.  Some people like to say it is antigravity (But it is not), and some think UFO's might use it.  (Aliens)  I guess if they exist, and if they have assender vehicles, then yes they might use it for some methods of travel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWJFQ3eF2HY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrfBrrDf … re=related

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index … 239AAdGmat

Perhaps it could make sense, since if you can lift a mostly balsa wood model against the Earth gravitational field there could be a thrusting method which would work in the very dry ionosphere, where the lifter would actually "Plane" to a higher altitude than it's floatation characteristics would allow, so it would encounter increasingly thinner air as it increased velocity, and planed upwards.  I don't know what would happen to molecules impinging on the leading edge.  Would they be sucked into the thrust process?  Of course if the impact released heat, then that heat would be at the expense of sub-orbital movement.  It would have to be made up for just to stay at the same altitude, and more would have to be added to increase altitude.

Alright, I guess I will read the manual:

Quote:

So, OK then Ionic? propulsion from 200,000 feet, which is different from what I said, so I was a bit wrong, or a lot wrong.

But I might be learning something new!

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index … 706AAVxNJV

So, if you accept 62 miles, then the thing stops being a balloon at 200,000 feet, and must be a plane from there to 327,360 feet (127,360 feet higher), and then must be an orbital object above that.  Since they say that the things are expected to be interplanetary, then I would think they would want to get to a higher altitude as fast as possible to reduce drag.  Otherwise, I would think that having an orbital vehicle dock and take the load off their hands would make sense, ASAP, and then just drop back down.

I am interested in how such a system might be used on Mars.  Slower oribital speeds needed, thinner atmoshere.  And Venus, and Titan.

Oh and one more trick has occured to me.  Could the wings that are actually balloons up to 200,000 feet be flattened as it transistions to a plane?  Perhaps if it were filled with hydrogen, could you burn some of that off with Oxygen, and compress it into water?  This might reduce drag, if the wings become thinner, and flatten out.  Of course then they still have to be rigid.  Then before return you would have to re-inflate the wings with Hydrogen.

I do a lot of things by intuition.  Love your calcs, but really beyond that not going to talk the language unless it need to.  Have plenty of mind benders at work at this time and must rest my tiny little mind for that.

But interesting stuff.

I have in the past proposed an enclosure on the surface of low gravitational objects where that enclosure is filled with CO2, or Air.

Inside is a spinning "Balloon" contianing H2 or He2, or maybe air, if the esternal is CO2.

You get the notion, heavy gass with spinning baloon with gondola, where spinning baloon contains a lighter gass.

Further a "Mast" extending from the bottom of a floating boey, could An

(Note I could just scream, this site is one where a whole paragraph will misteriously dissapear, on a keystroke, therefore, I am wise to save and then edit.  I have often had incidents where I have composed whole messages, and on a keystroke everything vanishes)

Anyway, if that is as bad as it gets, I will live.

Continuing;

A bottom thing floating on water.  Think of an old fashion childs top, with a floatation gass inside, and a pool of water under it, and the apex of the bottom immersed in that pool of water. 

So, maybe "Centrifuges" on Asteroids and Mars.

I like the geosynch stuff though, and for asteroids smaller than Vesta, perhaps a cavity created in the center with zero gee, where spinning worlds choudl be.

I suppose the disk notion is more conventional, and perhaps more correct.

However, consider the desalination of water.  I will mention two methods.  1) One is more familiar to logic, where you boil water with heat, and then condense it with cold.  2) Two is a method where you use a rotor (Actually two that have a cross-section like a peanut), and pull a vacuum on water which  is briny, and then compress the vapors into a liquid.

So, I consider the formation of the Earth to be 2), and the formation of the Moon to be 1).

If a protoplanet has an extended atmosphere, then the zone of condensation is in two places.  1) The upper atmosphere, where the cold of space penetrates, and 2) The forming core, where pressure causes materials which might alternately in a vacuum become vapor, to become liquid, even at high temperatures.

It is to be understood that during the formation of such a binary world, there would be a continuous input of falling materials which would provide heat to the core, and a coninuous radiation of heat out of the atmosphere, which would provide the opportunity for very dirty, very large hail stones to form in a geosynchronous orbit inside of a temporary atmosphere surrounding a protoplanet.  Further, the forming hail stones would tend to gravitate to each other, sticking together into one mass.

When the infall of small materials from the disk ceased, then the temporary extended atmosphere would dissipate, and the Moon would be left in a Vacuum, and would be gradually spiraled outwards into a more distant orbit by tidal interactions with the Earth.

Then afterwards if there were a heavy bombardment of Earth, by asteroids, some of that ejected material would pile up on the giant hailstone Moon.

I suggest a variation of this process for many other planets, and there moons.

Or yes perhaps many moons condense outside of a temporary planetary atmosphere from planetary disk materials.