New Mars Forums

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 28,138

Re: Potential Resources of Mars

Study finds evidence for more recent clay formation on Mars

Ritchey Crater, located near the Martian equator, has impact melt deposits containing clay minerals. Impact melt forms when rock melted during an impact cools and hardens. The clay minerals found within these deposits are very likely to have formed after the impact event. Most clay minerals on Mars are thought to have formed during the earliest Martian epoch, known as the Noachian. However, evidence from Ritchey crater and other post-Noachian craters, suggests that clay formation after the Noachian was not uncommon.

more sand dunes http://www.marsdaily.com/

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 28,138

Re: Potential Resources of Mars

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep533/SPRING … ture41.pdf

NASA Inflatable Solar Concentrator
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi. … 026381.pdf

http://www.psicorp.com/pdf/library/sr-1091.pdf

http://www.psicorp.com/pdf/library/SR-1395.pdf

Mars_B4_Moon

Member

Registered: 2006-03-23

Posts: 8,269

Re: Potential Resources of Mars

Scientists using data from NASA’s Curiosity rover measured the total organic carbon – a key component in the molecules of life
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9214/nasas-c … /?site=msl
“Total organic carbon is one of several measurements [or indices] that help us understand how much material is available as feedstock for prebiotic chemistry and potentially biology,” said Jennifer Stern of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We found at least 200 to 273 parts per million of organic carbon. This is comparable to or even more than the amount found in rocks in very low-life places on Earth, such as parts of the Atacama Desert in South America, and more than has been detected in Mars meteorites

Chinese findings on Mars suggest water existed for longer on planet's surface
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/scien … 022-05-12/

Faults with minerals?
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration … _tectonics
Tantalus Fossae faults are a great example of a surface feature known as grabens; each trench formed as two parallel faults opened up, causing the rock between to drop down into the resulting void.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, has been mapping minerals on the Red Planet for 16 years, with its Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mars … lored-maps
'One last map will be released within the year, covering visible wavelengths and focusing only on iron-bearing minerals; this will have twice the spatial resolution of the latest map.'

also a discussion here
Ore resources on Mars
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7579

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-06-28 11:06:49)

Mars_B4_Moon

Member

Registered: 2006-03-23

Posts: 8,269

Re: Potential Resources of Mars

New water map of Mars will prove invaluable for future exploration

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration … xploration

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-08-24 17:49:08)

Mars_B4_Moon

Member

Registered: 2006-03-23

Posts: 8,269

Re: Potential Resources of Mars

Photocatalytic CO2 conversion for artificial carbon cycle at extraterrestrial sites

https://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Photo … s_999.html

The results were published in Chinese Journal of Catalysis.

Evaluating mineral resources on Mars for exploration and colonization
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/mendenhall … xploration

Bringing Mars into the Iron Age
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/s … 03mar99_1/

Location of Large Subsurface Water-Ice Deposit in Utopia Planitia, Mars
https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/8183/lo … itia-mars/

Calliban

Member

From: Northern England, UK

Registered: 2019-08-18

Posts: 3,033

Re: Potential Resources of Mars

The Martian crust appears to be depleted in the heavy elements uranium and thorium.
https://marspedia.org/Radioactive_Rarity_on_Mars

This will make nuclear power more difficult on Mars, even though it will be essential.  Uranium could be imported from Earth. But the scarcity of naturally occuring fissile fuels will strongly impact the type of fuel cycle that is adopted.  There will be a strong incentive to extract all of the available energy from the fissionable material.  That implies the use of breeder reactors and fast spectrum reactors, capable of rapid breeding of fissile fuel.  The fusion-fission hybrid may find early application here.

Still, even if we end up having to extract uranium and thorium from basalt with a 1ppm concentration, 1kg of basalt would still contain some 750MJ of fissionable energy.  That is about 20x the energy density of anthracite coal.  So we probably could still run a nuclear power programme on ores with concentration 1ppm.  But only if we have reactors capable of fissioning all of the actinide atoms present within the fuel.  To extract resources that weak, we would probably use some sort of acid leaching process.  So fuel mining will require the mass production of nitric acid.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-09-05 18:36:29)

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"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."