New Mars Forums

where do you you guys get the all scientific results (if not the raw results, at least the interpretation) for the rovers ?
the web site is barely updated every 2 days now, actually the updates are about the song the rovers wake up, and the distance they drive.
Maybe they reshape the web site ?
Anyway, I feel frustrated. Is that the way NASA intends to interest the public ?

I guess I shouldn't complain, the Mars express web site has updated its site today, with ONE new picture, after almost 2 weeks !

A message for the geeks in command : people are educated in science now, they go to school, and yes, they want more than the songs played and stuff like that. And even those not educated in science are interested !

I was kidding with Shaun by the way, he knows. We all know that he is a fervent defender of life on Mars TODAY.

Well, sediment ? meridiani is hematite rich, which mineral forms in water, either through hydrothermal volcanism or through a biological process. So it's  possible to have sedimentation but we could also have volcanism and magma flow and magma tubes and noduled formed by fumeroles.
No analysis of the spherules and the cement composition have been relesed, so we don't know the composition. The hematite crystal I have seen in books are not choncoidal in form but I am not a geologist and here it's Mars, so who knows. But at one point, we must see that hematite somewhere, no ?

this concrete in meridiani outcrop is definitively hot topic, no need to post again the pic. A comment about the cement, it seems to be composed of smaller nodules. Could it be molten lava entering water ?
In my old geology book, there is picture of submersed lava in HAwai, they are call pillow lava, formed when the lava entered the ocean and was brutally cool down. And you can see the small riddles at the surface of these "pillow" shaped solidified lava.
Here it seems much smaller nodules and nothing which look like an Hawaian pillow lava, but who knows, the martian magma might be very different in composition and viscosity and have created these mini nodules, maybe they are the fossils of gas bubble escaping the magma in the contact with water. They might be some cavity inside then ?
Anyway, the suspens is great.

First of all, I think there is a  confusion between the situations that we forecast.
1) if we talk about a first mission in the spirit of "mars direct', with a Hab on Mars, then the issue of an atmosphere such as the one I was talking about is irrelevant. In the HAb, Shaun is right to say that a Skylab-like  atmosphere could be suitable.

2) after several Habs are installed, at the second or third mission of that type, I think it'ds gonna be time to install a small biodome.  Now, what's gonna be the purpose of that dome should be specified. It could be recreative, vegetal, green house, selfsufficient or not etc.

3) Other scenarios are possible but in any case I don't think that a self sufficient biodome, with an autoregenerative atmosphere by O2producing plants  can be installed in a first mission. It would need to be huge. BiospehereII failded to function autosufficiently, what is a problem of size ? probably not only, but size, by the buffering capabilities that it provides, is the most important factor. There is a threshold and we don't know where it is.
In any case that issue shouldn't be the main issue for the crew of a first exploration mission.

4) small domes could be tested however, in that mission. Like a green house using compressed martian air, mostly CO2 and repleted with chemically produced O2 to allow people to enter the green house. The atmosphere could be maintained that way. But the crew of that first mission should not depend on it, neither for O2 or food, it could just be a nice supplement.

But I have a question now, In the hypothesis that a big dome is installed on Mars, wouln't it be interesting to put plants in it ? and still be able to breath, how good is the skylab atmosphere for that ? 350mb, with 210mb O2, 140 mb N2 ?

Shaun, when you go into details, everything seems more complex. Ok, that low pressure is fine aboard a space station, and you are right to say that it could be used for human living quaters, but then, this is not exactly a biosphere.

We don't know if such ratio of O2/N2 (or maybe argon in Mars) and CO2 (that you omit but that we should consider if we want a biosphere with plants) is stable  at 350 mb on a long term, stabilized atmosphere in equilibrium with all the occupants, animal and plants, in the small partially enclosed ecosystem.
That's the point to study such small ecosystem on earth, in conditions as close as possible as the conditions that we think we gonna have on mars.
For a first test, we may very well start with a dome on top of a 6000 m or more submit on earth with the pressure and gaz ratio that you indicate but after 6 months the system evolutes by itself to reach an equilibrium, which might be unsuitable for human life.

And domes for plant and human life might even be incompatible. It would be nice if  vegetal domes were truely in equilibrium, with just some Mars atmosphere added from time to time, while food producing domes and human recreative dome could be partially repleted with O2 and maintained in an out of equilibrium state.
I have visited the biodome at Montreal several times, the idea to have different ecosystem (tropical, arctic) side by side is nice, however, one day, I saw the reconstituted arctic sea with salmons in poor shape inside. Obviously the ecosystem was collapsing.
That arctic pool was big, gigantic, but not big enough to sustain all its occupants obviously. What caused that collapse I don't know. Sometimes tiny details matter. I mentioned the porous concrete in BiosphereII, which unexpectidly left some gas filter in an out the concrete that eventually poisonned the biosphereII  atmosphere with CO2, Earthfirst mentioned the content in microorganisms etc. For the artic pool in the Montreal biodome it could have been the seabirds that were freely allowed to defecate in the pool (I always found that dangerous).
I would say there is a butterfly effect here.
If you are an aquarist hobbyist, you know that rule, the bigger the tank, the slower it reacts but the more stable it is on the long term, and that stable state can be quiet different from what you expect, depending of a multitude of parameters.

that's a problem very well known now. It needs cleaning. Also when I say a 8K summit, I don't necesseraly means the Everest, there are others 8000' in the Himalayan.

Well, that's for a noble cause. Maybe these indegenous population would like the idea to be associated with a great space adventure.

I think it depends about the size of the biosphere that you have in mind. The point of the experiment would be only to test the materials, kevlar or other, that make the dome and its plastic membranes, resistance to the cold (-60C recorded on Mt Everest), resistance of the dome to the low pressure : in the ambiant 300mb Everest pressure,  possibly 700mb of positive pressure must be contained if the dome is pressurized at 1 atm, which would be about the same pressure that the dome would have to sustain on Mars and resistance to the UV radiation on that dome. The dome would be pressurized by a small compressor wich would mimic the CO2 compressor that would work on Mars, and some plants would be added inside the dome to test their resistance to the UV in the long term, and how the dome cycle properly in the long term with these plants. But all together, it could be a small 10 meters diameter dome .
It would be light enough to be carried by an alpinist expedition.

You are right Shaun, I also read recently that scientist now doubt there is any ice in the moon.
What a bad surprise if a base 'must' be installed there and there is no water available. And anyway the 'Bush' concept is foolish : if the moon base failed/is more expensive than anticipated/is longer to set up, does that mean the Mars expedition is posponed ?
the answer is yes if you consider the moon as a testbed. So the moon-base must be installed there at all cost before we can venture to Mars ? Otherwise people will think that if we cannot do it on the Moon, we cannot do it on Mars ? dangerous strategy.

We know on this board that Mars conditions, OK, they are rough, they are bad, it's far etc. It's not for the faint of heart. But the Moon ! it's the vacuum, it's like the ISS, maybe worse actually. A base on the moon will just be like an ISS segment : a pressurized metallic can but buried under the lunar regolith.
A base on Mars : we talk about biodomes and vegetals growing inside, it's almost architecture and gardening together. It's the Eden garden reinvented.

The issue is to demonstrate that water, liquid, was present at the SURFACE of MArs in the past, not just to show that water present.
For how long and in what amount did that liquid water flood on the  Martian surface, that's a first question.
Did lake persisted
Was an ocean there ?
The issue of how long was liquid water there is the most important IMO.

Not much time, but I googled a little bit on Mt Everest.
Altitude about 8850. Average temperature is -37 Centigrade, goes as far as -60 C (-100 F said unother source ).
Pressure is 300 mb, one third of the atmospheric pressure.

isn't it close to Mars equatorial temperature ?
By setting a pressurized biodome at 1 atmosphere on top of a 8K summit, the dome would have a 600 mb positive pressure, a good exercise to practice on MArs. By the way, a 600 mb biodome in Mars 7-10 mb atmosphere would have to fight about the same positive pressure.

For the UV radiation on Mt Evererest, I found nothing , but, here again, it's surely high enough on Everest to constitute a good martian testbed. For other radiations on the Everest, cosmic, solar etc, I also found nothing. Too bad.

So, a pressurized biodome/greenhouse (small of course) with a couple of nice plants on top of a 8K summit , who is with me ?

not Juda, of course....

Better eat the martian dust than festing on a lunar banquet !

An intelligent (normal, it is from New York) article from the NY Times today , authored by William J Broad.

The NYTimes forgives my copy paste, I will buy 2 journals today for repentance. I need to do it, NY Times, because the minds are  CORRUPTED:

".....The Moon, experts say, has now taken on the role of steppingstone. "Lifting heavy spacecraft and fuel out of the Earth's gravity is expensive," Mr. Bush said in his speech. "Spacecraft assembled and provisioned on the Moon could escape its far lower gravity using far less energy, and thus, far less cost."

Many experts are skeptical of those claims, saying Mr. Bush overlooked the large energy costs of getting fuel and rockets to the Moon. Previous NASA studies for Mars missions have seldom if ever used the Moon as a launching pad because that would take about twice as much energy as going from the Earth or an Earth outpost.

"The president and some of his advisers appear not to be aware of the implications," said Saunders B. Kramer, a veteran aerospace engineer. "It's worse than a pipe dream. It's nonsense."

Dr. Roland of Duke said the Moon base had the same kind of inflated rhetoric that accompanied the station's debut and could suffer a similar fate.

"One definition of a fanatic is redoubling your effort after losing sight of your objective," he said. "That's NASA's problem. It needs to get back to basics.""

Good to see that some uncorrupted minds are still working.

Title is :
"From Glory to Sideshow, the Space Station's story" by William J Broad.
the link for article is :
[http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/scien … 3STAT.html]http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/scien … 3STAT.html
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Bio-I never existed ? I always thought it was a first attempt.

My vision of terraforming is that Mars should not be transformed 'from the outside'. If you want to use isolated biodomes to ferment biomass and produce fermentation gases (provided can you find a lot of nitrates in the soil, which is not obvious), you are using an 'external device' with an 'alien ecologic system'.
I would prefer that Mars would terraform by itself, from within its own capabilities (like a Gaia concept)  , after a slight gentle push. Yes you can use microbes, PFC, orbiting mirrors etc,  but they have to be integrated in a global Martian ecology -durable robust and flexible-
For example, PFC, if they could be produced by genetically engineered microbes able to sustain mild martian conditions, that would be better that if the PFC were produced massively in huge chemical reactors.
I think future terraformers will have to develop their own ethic. I don't think that the first martians, once that have been use to survive and live in a given martian landscape, will want that landscape to change too quickly.

A short description of what intendeded to be Biosphere-II :

J Aerosp Eng. 1991 Jan;4(1):23-30.     Related Articles, Links

Biosphere II: engineering of manned, closed ecological systems.
Dempster WF.
Sarbid Ltd. and Space Biospheres Ventures, Oracle, AZ 85623, USA.
Space Biospheres and Ventures, a private, for-profit firm, has undertaken a major research and development project in the study of biospheres, with the objective of creating and producing biospheres. Biosphere II-scheduled for completion in March 1991-will be essentially isolated from the existing biosphere by a closed structure, composed of components derived from the existing biosphere. Like the biosphere of the Earth, Biosphere II will be essentially closed to exchanges of material or living organisms with the surrounding environment and open to energy and information exchanges. Also, like the biosphere of the Earth, Biosphere II will contain five kingdoms of life, a variety of ecosystems, plus humankind, culture, and technics. The system is designed to be complex, stable and evolving throughout its intended 100-year lifespan, rather than static. Biosphere II will cover approximately 1.3 hectare and contain 200,000 m3 in volume, with seven major biomes: tropical rainforest, tropical savannah, marsh, marine, desert, intensive agriculture, and human habitat. An interdisciplinary team of leading scientific, ecological, management, architectural, and engineering consultants have been contracted by Space Biospheres Ventures for the project. Potential applications for biospheric systems include scientific and ecological management research, refuges for endangered species, and life habitats for manned stations on spacecraft or other planets.

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