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hello. I'm only here for a temporary time.
I had a question for some people who know about mars rocks samples.
My Computer Club is going to be participating in a Robotics club and i was wondering if anyone could help me with my research.
If any of you would like to help, please do so. I just need to know what is one of the most valuble rock samples on Mars.
Thnx
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Depends what you mean with 'valuable?'
-in money terms- for future Martian settlers or for 'Earthdwellers'
-for Martian settlers it would be ores containing materials they can easily refine to build stuff with (Mg, Fe etc...)
For earth economy you could say 'valuable' stuff like gold, platinium, uranium etc BUT it wouldn't be economically interesting to mine it and transport back to Earth, due to the very high transport costs... (with today technology) If you mined gold and sent it back to earth, you'd lose money with current launch systems.
To give you an idea: if you'd fill up the shutlle with confetti, launched it to low earth orbit, and the paylod 'magically' turned to gold, after landing, you'd be not a penny richer, it wouldn't cover the launch and processing costs of the operation... And that's only Low Earth obit...
-in science terms: of course rocks with fossils, or even better living organisms in them would be *the single most* valuable objects found...
Then there's 'pristine' rocks from impact craters, giving an idea of the coposition of asteroids etc
or 'old' rocks, remnants from when Mars was young, giving data about the formation of Mars and the solar system...
Or certain minerals, like andesites, that'd give you an idea about the compoition of the atmosphere of Mars in the past...
Hey, keep us posted when you do somethng interesting, robot- wise. Robotical operations are an important aspect of Martian exploration/settlement plans, maybe, one day, one of your ideas gets implemented on the Red Planet!
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Like rxke said there is different types of valuable. To a future space crew the deposits of most value will be ones that can be processed into core components such as water, oxygen, and fuel of varying types. By the time it becomes economically viable and even profitable to mine on mars for consumption on Earth, NEOs will be taken advantage of, with their Rare Earth Metals variety and close proximity to Earth.. it wouldn't be that hard to snag one on fly bye and park into a Lagrange point for processing (L5?)... Of course that is many many many years away.
We are only limited by our Will and our Imagination.
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any rock with fossil evidence would be the most valuable of all rocks on Mars.
design the robot to find that.
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as things stand, *anything* from Mars is valuable, scientifically, so maybe it would be more interesting if you could program your robots to gather different rocks, and/or SUBSURFACE samples/rocks, i.e. a variety. Robot should be able to take some pics in order to show exactly *where* the rocks were gathered...
what you could do for a *simple* mechanical sorting of rocks: scoop some up, deposit them on a set of vibrating sieves with holes of a known measure, so you can discard the small and bigger samples. Each sample would be roughly same dimensions. After that, by comparing their weight you can decide to keep em or toss em (metal-rich being more heavy, some volanic stuff (pumice) being very light... so you could scoop up a big amount of differentiated stuff but end up with a pre-sorted variety of little rocks to send back...(weight issue for return-launch being an important limiting factor)
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ok, thnx for all your help guys
Rxke, i'll be sure to keep you posted on everything that happens, but right now the robot programming isn't going too well, but I'm sure we'll get it fixed.
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