Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

GW Johnson · 2021-11-16 15:57:03

Just to let y'all know, the Blue Origin mailing of the lander proposal went out today. It is scheduled for delivery Friday. I'll try to send an email to Jim Richard at Deltion tonight when I get home.

Cat is OK, just needs teeth cleaned. The doctor agrees I have a bad problem, but cannot yet figure out what it is. Early results seem to rule out heart failure or pneumonia. That's good news, but it does not solve the problem, which has been steadily worsening. Rock-and-a-hard place.

GW

SpaceNut · 2021-11-16 17:42:22

Sort good and bad in not nailing down the health issue. Good luck to finding out and for smooth recovery.

It would be good if someone did buy up all the business; not just equipment and IP.

edit I found I had posted about another drilling content testing here on earth

Finally getting through the
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/file … elease.pdf
Which had quite a few TBD indicators throughout the paper...Nasa is still trying to develope a system for mars whie running tests in

Antartica which is no mars...
First is the low gravity which will allow vapor to transistion from ice with only a slight bit of heat from the drilling and then as it rises its going to refreeze binding the drill. So we will need to place a dome to seal the drilling and pressurize to keep the water in liquid form.

GW Johnson · 2021-11-16 19:56:34

Email sent to Jim Richard.

I see the lung specialist Fri to discuss the lung function test results.

GW

tahanson43206 · 2021-11-22 10:46:47

For GW Johnson re #303 and Sunday Zoom

I apologize for forgetting to include your visit to the doctor in the agenda for Sunday evening.

I would invite you to be ** sure ** to update the group ** next ** Sunday!

Per our discussion Sunday evening, I sent the following to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, after evaluating a number of possible approaches. If you have not sent the packet, I recommend holding off. That particular Foundation does not seem like a good fit.

This request is on behalf of the Mars Society. It does ** not ** involve spending money. Please ask Mr. Gates to call Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to let them know we've asked for their help to buy Deltion (a Canadian research company). We've mailed a proposal to each of them to put landers on Mars in 2024, and Deltion has the IP needed to prove landing sites. The packets were mailed by Dr. Gary W Johnson, a retired aerospace engineer. I am a sweeper ahead of those packets. Due date is November 28!

The contact form allowed 500 characters, and that exclamation point was on byte 500.

(th)

tahanson43206 · 2021-11-22 15:56:44

For GW Johnson re November 28th deadline ...

National Space Society sent me an invitation to rejoin today.... It's been many years since I last held a membership, and even more years since I served as a lower level officer in the L5 Society. I will attempt to contact them tomorrow, to see if they would be able/willing to pick up Deltion, or if they can find someone with deep pockets in their membership willing to take that on.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2021-12-01 22:02:59

I hope all has gone well with the health issue GW.

It appears that we did not get success for this project at this time with not seeing any comments.

tahanson43206 · 2021-12-01 22:19:56

For SpaceNut .... it may be too early to know of our multiple initiatives had any effect. In the mean time, I am attempting to encourage GW Johnson to send his work to recognized print magazines. He's been thinking about the possibility.

In the market recently, I confirmed that both Popular Science and Popular Mechanics are for sale on the store shelves. I was surprised, because I thought both might have gone to digital only format, but the local library ** had ** told me that they still have subscriptions to one of them.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2021-12-01 22:33:11

It is also possible to send an article to the https://www.thespacereview.com/

As a more summarized version of why it should be done and what we would use.

MarsDrive Frank Stratford an Austrailian that is or was a Mars Society member and chapter.
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2086/1

They have gone towards a facebook form of communications...

GW Johnson · 2021-12-02 17:17:31

Y'all should be aware that I have some other things demanding lots of attention. These are health issues, and cancer may be one of them. I have to get those resolved before spending a lot of time writing and submitting articles.

Even so, it would appear the Waco newspaper will indeed run my column on the NASA DART asteroid deflection mission, and what it really means toward creating a proper defense.

GW

SpaceNut · 2021-12-09 18:42:56

Calliban wrote:

From the discussions that have taken place elsewhere on this board, it will be challenging to even land a Starship on Mars without a preconstructed landing pad. We simply don't know enough about the load bearing capabilities of the regolith to be able to commit to a manned landing.
Maybe the first task will be to land a robot that can construct such a landing pad? Could it be controlled by a crew in orbit? Louis' idea of a stone stacking robot may turn out to be a good idea. Maybe even a number of robots - some to gather the rocks, some to transport them to the site, others to stack them and perhaps apply compacted soil between layers.
Teleoperation of these machines would be far more rapid and practicable, if they were controlled by a crew in Mars orbit, effectively in real time. It isn't an ideal situation having to wait in Mars orbit whilst we use machines to build a landing pad. But it appears to be the only solution to this problem. Could we build such a pad in 30 days? Is that possible?

That is exactly why we were putting together a mission sales pitch to have that knowledge.

GW Johnson · 2021-12-10 12:46:01

Those proposals went to SpaceX and Blue Origin, plus a copy to Deltion Ltd in Canada, to let them know what we were up to. I heard back precisely zero from those submittals.

GW

tahanson43206 · 2021-12-10 14:51:09

For GW Johnson .... In addition to the mailings you listed in post #311, two email/contact form submissions were directed to Bill Gates via the Foundation.

I believe these efforts are all comparable to launching a ship during the Age of Exploration. We may never hear from the ship(s) again, or (on the other hand) a bedraggled but still serviceable caravel may show up at the dock three years later, as was the case with the Magellan expedition 500 years ago.

When you find yourself recovered, in health and energy, I am hoping you will be ready to resume work on delivering your message(s) to a wider audience, via recognized publications. In my opinion, no changes are needed at all to submit your work to editors. ** They ** are responsible for deciding if any changes are needed. It is not up to the author to make such decisions. With any luck at all, or with just common courtesy, you should receive helpful feedback it you offer your work to one or more editors.

I think you still have several years in which your "down home" style of technical writing can reach a suitable audience.

(th)

GW Johnson · 2021-12-10 15:54:40

Oops, forgot about the Gates Foundation thing. Thanks.

Early in my aerospace/defense career, I got fussed at by some managers over proposal writeups written in plain English without jargon. That ceased, with feedback from the government proposal evaluators who loved the way I write (because it made their jobs easier). All of a sudden, to local management I was suddenly the proposal-writing hero. Nobody ever complained about plain-English writeups again. Just goes to prove that all sorts of stuff flows downhill, not just water.

GW

SpaceNut · 2021-12-10 19:32:44

Some how there must be another avenue to get this document out into the news... other than to deep pockets that have shown no interest to this point.

SpaceNut · 2022-06-14 20:06:51

latest up date of project content is available and it appears to target the space x for the future and why a mission needs to be performed.

This still has a shot at getting to mars...

GW Johnson is continuing to work on an update of his lander proposal.

If anyone would have time to open the file at the link below, you would find illustrations that explain the problem and show solutions, in addition to the clearly written text we have come to expect from GW Johnson.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ju9a8shlzsb0 … f.pdf?dl=0

SpaceNut · 2022-07-12 17:36:30

Repost for the content on drilling for water

Mars_B4_Moon wrote:

MIT design for Mars propellant production trucks wins NASA competition
https://www.marsdaily.com/reports/MIT_d … n_999.html
Using the latest technologies currently available, it takes over 25,000 tons of rocket hardware and propellant to land 50 tons of anything on the planet Mars. So, for NASA's first crewed mission to Mars, it will be critical to learn how to harvest the red planet's local resources in order to "live off the land" sustainably.
On June 24, NASA announced that an MIT team received first place in the annual Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts - Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition for their in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) design that produces propellant on Mars from local resources instead of bringing it from Earth.
Their project "Bipropellant All-in-one In-situ Resource Utilization Truck and Mobile Autonomous Reactor Generating Electricity" (BART and MARGE) describes a system where pairs of BART and MARGE travel around Mars in tandem; BART handles all aspects of production, storage, and distribution of propellant, while MARGE provides power for the operation. After presenting their concept to a panel of NASA experts and aerospace industry leaders at the RASC-AL Forum in June, the team took first place overall at the competition and was also recognized as "Best in Theme."
"Previous ISRU concepts utilized several different small rovers and a fixed central plant, but MIT's BART and MARGE concept is composed of essentially just two types of fully mobile, integrated large trucks with no central plant," says Chloe Gentgen, PhD candidate in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) who served as team lead for the project. "The absence of a central plant enables easy scalability of the architecture, and being fully mobile and integrated, our system has the flexibility to produce propellant wherever the best ice reserves can be found and then deliver it wherever it is needed."
Gentgen led an interdisciplinary group of undergraduate and graduate students from MIT, including Guillem Casadesus Vila, a visiting undergraduate student in AeroAstro from the Centre de Formacio Interdisciplinaria Superior at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya; Madelyn Hoying, a PhD candidate in the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics program within the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology; AeroAstro alum Jayaprakash Kambhampaty '22, rising MIT senior Mindy Long of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); rising sophomore Laasya Nagareddy of the Department of Mathematics; rising junior John Posada of AeroAstro; and rising sophomore Marina Ten Have of EECS.
The team was formed last September when interested students joined the project. AeroAstro PhD candidate George Lordos, who founded the MIT Space Resources Workshop and who has led or advised all MIT NASA competition teams since 2017, was a mentor for the project team. Jeffrey Hoffman, professor of the practice in AeroAstro; and Olivier de Weck, Apollo Program Professor and professor of astronautics and engineering systems in AeroAstro, served as faculty advisors.
"One year ago, the MOXIE experiment led by Dr. Michael Hecht and our team's advisor, Professor Jeffrey Hoffman, produced the first oxygen on Mars. Today, we are on the cusp of orbital test flights that will bring us closer to the first human mission to Mars," says Lordos.
"As humans venture to other worlds, finding and utilizing local water and carbon resources will be indispensable for sustainable exploration of the solar system, so the objective of our MIT team's concept is an exciting and topical technology."
The MIT team addressed the RASC-AL theme "Mars Water-based ISRU Architecture," which required delivering the target 50 tons of propellant at the end of each year and the ability to operate for at least five years without human maintenance. A few other constraints were placed, chief among them that teams could rely on one or more landings of 45 tons of mass and 300 cubic meters of volume on Mars, leaving it to university teams to propose an architecture, budget, and a flight schedule to support their mission.
They developed a comprehensive Mars mission architecture and defined a comprehensive concept of operations, from a precursor ice scouting and technology demonstration mission in 2031 to the main propellant production, storage, and delivery mission in 2036. BART is an end-to-end "ice-to-propellant" system that gathers water from Martian subsurface ice and extracts carbon dioxide from the red planet's atmosphere to synthesize liquid methane and liquid oxygen bipropellant. These are then stored onboard at cryogenic temperatures until delivery directly into a rocket's propellant tanks.
BART is accompanied by MARGE, a 40 kilowatt electric mobile nuclear reactor based on NASA's Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology project (KRUSTY, which also inspired the MIT team's name) that generates power from nuclear fission to support long-duration operations on distant planets.
For the team's proposed mission, four tandems of BART and MARGEs will roam the region known as Arcadia Planitia at the mid-northern latitudes of Mars following a prospecting rover named LISA (Locating Ice Scouting Assistant) in search of accessible ice to use for propellant production. The entire system has 100 tons of storage capacity and can produce 156 tons per year, against a demand of 50 tons per year, and requires only three landings.

SpaceNut · 2022-07-12 17:52:29

https://rascal.nianet.org/wp-content/up … -Paper.pdf

a RedWater drill, scroll compressors, water electrolysis and Sabatier reaction chambers, cryocoolers, heat exchangers, fuel cells and 25t storage tanks.

It is powered by MARGE, our mobile power truck design based on NASA’s upcoming 40kWe Kilopower reactor

Relative to the initial proposal, we replaced the [CO2] freezer with scroll compressors, added fuel cells as a power source for mobility when in Delivery mode, developed a ConOps for propellant transfers between BARTs, and added more redundant units for various subsystems

This probably was due to the moxie experiment.

a precursor mission consisting
of 2 LISAs, 2 MARGEs and 1 BART will be launched in Feb 2031, two launch windows before the main mission, and will aim at characterizing the depths and purity of subsurface ice reserves, narrowing down the landing area of the full architecture, de-risking the integrated BART design and validating MARGE’s Kilopower technology on Mars. The main mission will launch on May 2035, targeting landing sites validated by the precursor LISA rovers and will consist of 2 launches, each with 2 BARTs, 1 MARGE and 1 LISAs. The precursor BART is not expected to be used for production; however, the two longer-lived precursor MARGEs will be used for production

Lisa is the prospector will take the end of the power cable from MARGE and MARGE will drive away to a safe distance
(≃100 m) while unspooling the cable.

Marge is the kilowatt power station (Mobile Autonomous Reactor Generating Electricity), which carries a 40KWe Kilopower fission reactor. During production, MARGE is stationed at least 100m away from BART. Solar panels and batteries power MARGE when the reactor is shut
down, such as during driving.

Bart is the mobile cart fuel processing unit acquiring CO2 from the atmosphere using a scroll compressor, electrolyzing water, producing methane with a Sabatier reactor, liquefying and storing propellants in a Zero Boil-Off (ZBO) state using Broad Area Cooling (BAC).

SpaceNut · 2022-07-16 16:12:47

2015 Honeybee Robotics Begins Field Testing Planetary Deep Drill System; Drill will be tested to reach 100 feet in Mars analog environment at USG Corporation’s gypsum quarry in California

https://www.honeybeerobotics.com/products/drills/

Honeybee Robotics has designed, built, and tested a TRL4/5 system known as RedWater, intended to drill into the surface of Mars and melt/extract water from locations identified by the Shallow Subsurface Radar, SHARAD. RedWater combines proven terrestrial technologies to extract water from the subsurface Martian ice. Rodriguez Wells, or RodWells, are a type of water well employed in Antarctica to maintain large pools of liquid water within an ice sheet and pumping water to the surface while heating and recirculating a portion to facilitate continuous well growth. RedWater also repurposes coiled tube drilling technology, which uses a thin-walled metal or composite tube to drive a bottom hole assembly into a borehole; the coiled tube itself is wound onto a drum and deployed by an injector system which transmits the required drilling forces through the tube as it is driven down. The combination of these two technologies with Honeybee’s existing rotary percussive drilling and pneumatic transport technologies make for an efficient means of producing large quantities of liquid water on Mars. Honeybee is currently working on evolving this technology to TRL6 and will be conducting end-to-end TVAC testing in 2022.

RedWater: A Rodwell System to Extract Water from Martian Ice Deposits

Z. D. Mank, Honeybee Robotics
K. A. Zacny, Honeybee Robotics
D. Sabahi, Honeybee Robotics
M. J. Buchbinder, Honeybee Robotics
B. C. Bradley, Honeybee Robotics
L. A. Stolov, Honeybee Robotics
Paul van Susante, Michigan Technological UniversityFollow
et. al.

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/ninth … f/6333.pdf
RedWater: Approach for Mining Water from Mars’ Ice Deposits Buried 10s of meters Deep.

A commercial CT rig, such as RoXplorer, weighs 15 tons and drills to 500 m at 1 m/min in hard rock.

GW Johnson · 2022-07-17 08:07:40

The Honeybee drill thing is interesting. Not sure yet how it is really supposed to work, but we'll see from the tests. I hope they test it on rocks tougher than gypsum. The rocks on Mars are way tougher than gypsum.

GW

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#301 2021-11-16 15:57:03

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#302 2021-11-16 17:42:22

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#303 2021-11-16 19:56:34

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#304 2021-11-22 10:46:47

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#305 2021-11-22 15:56:44

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#306 2021-12-01 22:02:59

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#307 2021-12-01 22:19:56

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#308 2021-12-01 22:33:11

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#309 2021-12-02 17:17:31

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#310 2021-12-09 18:42:56

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#311 2021-12-10 12:46:01

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#312 2021-12-10 14:51:09

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#313 2021-12-10 15:54:40

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#314 2021-12-10 19:32:44

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#315 2022-06-14 20:06:51

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#316 2022-07-12 17:36:30

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#317 2022-07-12 17:52:29

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#318 2022-07-16 16:12:47

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

#319 2022-07-17 08:07:40

Re: Scouting Mars for Landing Sites

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