Mars Needs Nitrogen

karov · 2005-08-05 13:32:11

If mars is producing methane,
http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.ph … =0&thold=0
doesnt that mean it has nitrogen.

Methane is CH4 , no nitrogen atmos in its molecule. You probably`ve mistaken it with ammonia NH3, or have s.t. much more complicated in mind connecting the presence of N with the methane?

samy · 2006-01-25 09:06:36

I don't really see how transporting the nitrogen from Venus to Mars in gasbags is feasible. Gasbags are too fragile; a single micrometeorite (and there are MANY between Venus and Mars) would puncture the gasbag, and suddenly the whole shebang would empty like a runaway balloon. No gasbag would make it to Mars.

Another possibility is freezing the nitrogen in Venus orbit into solid chunks -- 100% nitrogen asteroids -- and then push them onto a trajectory for Mars. Put a homing beacon on them to track them for extra logistic control.

If necessary, they can be broken into smaller chunks with weaponry when they're on final approach towards Mars. Then just plunge to the planet, aerobrake -- ideally, chunks sized so that they never hit the surface, but are vaporized into the atmosphere by the friction of aerobraking.

Austin Stanley · 2006-01-28 00:53:28

I don't really see how transporting the nitrogen from Venus to Mars in gasbags is feasible. Gasbags are too fragile; a single micrometeorite (and there are MANY between Venus and Mars) would puncture the gasbag, and suddenly the whole shebang would empty like a runaway balloon. No gasbag would make it to Mars.

A common myth. Space is actually pretty darn empty. The odds of hitting a signifigant chunk of matter in transit bettwen Venus and Mars is pretty much nill. And there is no reason a self-sealing gasbag could not be developed.

Another possibility is freezing the nitrogen in Venus orbit into solid chunks -- 100% nitrogen asteroids -- and then push them onto a trajectory for Mars. Put a homing beacon on them to track them for extra logistic control.

Not a terrible idea, but there are problems. Space quite frankly isn't cold enough for liquid nitrogen, especialy as close in to the sun as Venus is. The nitrogen will melt/sublime away into the vacume. Now, the rate of this will be fairly slow, but it signifigant losses will happen enroute.

samy · 2006-01-28 02:38:17

A common myth. Space is actually pretty darn empty. The odds of hitting a signifigant chunk of matter in transit bettwen Venus and Mars is pretty much nill. And there is no reason a self-sealing gasbag could not be developed.

You don't need to hit a 'significant chunk'. At interplanetary speeds, a grain of sand less than a millimeter across will puncture a gasbag. You're *not* going to get a gasbag from planet to planet without it hitting any cosmic dust on the way.

A self-sealing gasbag is an interesting idea; can you point me to any developments giving us hope that such a technology is possible? Of course, it would need to self-repair almost instantaneously, because any puncture would powerfully blast the air out of the small hole, very rapidly ripping the hole open wider and wider with the force of the escaping air.

Not a terrible idea, but there are problems. Space quite frankly isn't cold enough for liquid nitrogen, especialy as close in to the sun as Venus is. The nitrogen will melt/sublime away into the vacume. Now, the rate of this will be fairly slow, but it signifigant losses will happen enroute.

I'd be interested in any figures and numbers on how fast sublimation would occur. I was wondering about the rate myself, and we can't really determine the feasibility of this method without crunching the numbers.

REB · 2006-01-30 09:53:56

Chat,
2. Perhubs - good example for gas container is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel -- with C we could build even better and more robust dendritic structure, and the gas pressure in the gel could be even higher - remember R.Freitas and his respirocites with 1000 bars of internal pressure.
Make enormous 'pancake" of "carbogel" filled with N2 and /or O2. The blackness of the carbon makes perfect absorbtion type solar sails. The pancake stiff foam sails could be build from uniform 1 cm3 blocks for example. The bulk of the material allows from the carbon to be manifactured and build in quite sophisticated guidance and navigation systems. The unused or waiting purchase C+N2 pancake sails can be delivered to stand by orbits - some libration points, etc.

How about building the 'gas bags' out of carbon fibers.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2965

This could be part of the Venus terraformation, where Venus CO2 is combined with H to make water and carbon.

chat · 2006-02-06 05:14:16

REB,

You have given me an interesting thought with your idea about carbon fibre.

How about all carbon fibre, and no gas?
Carbon is the main element Venus needs to loose and mars needs to gain.

Sending just giants balls of carbon fibre to mars might require simple technology, and on return to mars it can simply be unwound to burn up on re entry.

Now how do we get a steady flow of co2 at Venus into orbit to convert to carbon fibre?

Austin Stanley · 2006-02-06 07:03:07

You don't need to hit a 'significant chunk'. At interplanetary speeds, a grain of sand less than a millimeter across will puncture a gasbag. You're *not* going to get a gasbag from planet to planet without it hitting any cosmic dust on the way.

Even encounters with millimeter scale particles are extreamly infrequent in space. Especialy interplanetary space. There is simply an extreamly large amount of space and a small amount of matter to fill it. You're just not likely to encounter any signifigant particles of any size. "Cosmic dust" is non existant, unless you are referring to the stray particles the sun spews out. This "dust" is realy just a sprinkling of stray nuclei, and hardly worth worring about.

A self-sealing gasbag is an interesting idea; can you point me to any developments giving us hope that such a technology is possible? Of course, it would need to self-repair almost instantaneously, because any puncture would powerfully blast the air out of the small hole, very rapidly ripping the hole open wider and wider with the force of the escaping air.

The simplest concept I could come up is to simply suspend a great deal of water-vapor inside the bag. In the envent of a puncture, the water vapor will turn to ice at the sight of the breach, plugging the whole. More conventional typical sealing polymers could be use.

However, the rip would NOT have to be plugged instantly. Any well designed gasbag is going to have a cohesive strength far larger than the bursting pressure within it. In other words, if would be made out of some sort of rip-stop material. So the bag would not "burst" if punctured.

I'd be interested in any figures and numbers on how fast sublimation would occur. I was wondering about the rate myself, and we can't really determine the feasibility of this method without crunching the numbers.

Hmm... I'll have to look up the statistics for nitrogen at these conditions. After I get the figure for the amount of energy necessary for the phase change, it's pretty simple to calculate. Suns radiated energy vrs. surface area.

Earthfirst · 2006-02-06 17:03:47

N2 from Venus is a good source for Mars. Also Merury could use some good amount of CO2 and N2 for any colonies, and Earths Moon colonies would need gas.
But a better source of N2 is the outer solar system. Neptune has lots of CH4 and NH3 in atmosphere. So does Uranus. The moons of the outer planet should have lots of NH3 ice mixed in their ice surfaces. You would have to mine the ice on the moons, process the ice for pure NH3, sublimate the gas to form large NH3 balls. Then throw them towards Mars where they would hit and melt in to Mars atmosphere adding needed NH3. That would get turned into N2 by the sun UV light.

Also CH4 could be sent too, both NH3 and CH4 are good greenhouse gases. It is easy to send object towards the sun where Mars is compared to the outer planets. Then to send stuff out away from the sun like Venus to mars when it comes to energy cost.

Dook · 2006-02-07 20:53:15

Somewhere in the previous pages of this topic is the explanation of how much nitrogen it would take to terraform mars.

It's not a small number, in fact, it's impossibly large. Think of a trillion super oil tankers worth.

It's impossible.

chat · 2006-02-08 06:03:51

Dook,

Those numbers are just to have as much nitrogen as on earth.
I doubt if 1% of that total would be needed for mars.
If we are talking co2 then the number will be 2x - 5x what earth has, but that is still a respectable number.

All of mars needs for a teraform other than nitrogen could be delivered in 1 decent ice asteroid.
Do mainly or partial nitrogen asteroids exist in the kyber belt?.

All depends on what type of a teraformed Mars we are aiming for.

Your probably right about trying to get that quantity of nitrogen to mars as being (not thinkable) but does Mars it need it?

Moving even the quantity of co2 mars needs would be a daunting task for our technology, but moving asteroids and comets?.

What would the main purpose of nitrogen be on Mars?
What is the minimum amount of nitrogen needed on mars to support bacteria and plant life on a wet mars?

holger2401 · 2006-02-13 03:28:24

Shaun,
Higher than normal amounts of UV plants and animal life can adapt to, such as high elevations on earth.
But on mars the problem is not just UV at 50X earth levels, but gama rays, x rays, cosmic rays, charged particles etc that mars blocks little to none.
All of those radiations are life destroying, on earth most are deflected by the magnetic field.
Increase those sets or radiation even 1% or 2% on earth and the extinctions and mutations would be massive, maybe even global extinction for everything.
A thicker atmosphere on mars will help a lot with UV but little with the rest.
We can probably engineer bacteria to do some of the work to steer mars to a new direction, but first it will have to be safe enough for the bacteria to live long enough to do something.
Warming mars then making it a radiation safe place might be the first 2 mandatory steps to teraforming.

Reb,
I agree..
Making mars a safer place to begin with, then set up shop on mars to complete it sounds like the way to go.
The colonist can complete the place as they see fit.
In the final outcome mars might resist any change we attempt, the colonist might have to learn to live with mars as is.
That is not such a bad thing as I'm sure mars is already a spectacular place as is.
karov,
Not a bad plan at all.
Highway, electricity and magnetic field all rolled into one.

Don't think that it is true that you need a magnetic field. At least not in the conventional meaning. Earth had, and soon will again, have periods were the global magnetic field weakened and collapsed. Every 150000 years or so. So, no big deal. Seems it hadn't much of a consequence. New scientific data indicate that after a collapse a magnetic field in the ionosphere was created that acted like a planetery magnet field. So, seems only a large enough atmosphere is necessary for protection.

karov · 2006-02-13 06:09:53

Hope you`re right! The ionospheric plasma is both more convenient and more manageable magfield generator. Look back in the forum...
Mag field is absolute necessity especially around weaker gravity objects, but you are right to stress on the ionosphere as vry usefull magfield generator.

knightdepaix · 2014-09-25 02:25:56

I agree that Mars needs nitrogen and assuming what we have known and what we have known we have not known,

1) import nitrogen from Venus
2) import nitrogen from near-Earth and near Mars objects and asteroids.
3) let solar wind plasma, which bombard Mars anyway, make nitrogen with chemical elements on Mars or in Martian natural or artificial atmosphere with nuclear reaction
4) by nuclear reaction, similar to the above, split silicon, which is commonly found in rocks into nitrogen with endothermic nuclear reaction. For this option, a calculation of fusing Carbon-12 to Nitrogen-14 finds that the nuclear fission is hugely uneconomical with current technologies, not to mention carbon-12 contains more binding energy per nucleon than nitrogen-14.

JoshNH4H wrote:

in Mars, splitting water
My expectation would be that the cost of building such a large fusion reactor would be immense. Let's say that fusion reactors are on par with nuclear fission reactors in terms of cost per watt. this website suggests a value of about $4/watt.
By "using the CNO cycle", I assume you mean not the CNO cycle, but using the nuclear processes in the CNO cycle to make Nitrogen from other elements, chiefly Carbon and Oxygen. It's not actually possible to make Nitrogen from naturally occurring Oxygen using the reactions in the CNO cycle (The Oxygen produced is actually just an intermediary with a half-life of about 2 minutes. It's not possible to create O-16 from it unless you bombard it with neutrons, which is not feasible for various reasons).
Anyway, the reaction to go from C-12 (the common form of Carbon) to Nitrogen-14 involves the addition of 2 protons in 2 separate fusion events, and releases 10.7 MeV per atom. This works out to 7.5e13 J/kg of Nitrogen. To produce 30 kPa of Nitrogen on Mars over 100 years would require 1.2e18 kg of Nitrogen, which would generate 2.8e22 W, thus costing about $1e23. That's $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or one hundred billion trillion dollars. Assuming that world economic output grows at 5% per year in perpetuity, this is equivalent to putting the entire world to work building fusion reactors on Mars from now until 2381. If 10% of Humanity's economic output goes to fusion reactors, we will be building them from now until 2428. 1%, until 2476 (Exponential growth is weird).
It would probably be cheaper to ship nitrogen from titan, or even better to try to make do with what we have.

Last edited by knightdepaix (2015-08-07 14:43:13)

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-09-27 09:30:32

Nitrogen is easier to get from Titan than from Venus. One way to get nitrogen to Mars is to park a comet at Mars' L1 point The tail will engulf Mars.

The gas tail is much more highly charged, made of CO+, N2+, and CO2+ ions. The ions - electrically charged particles - interact with the sun's solar wind, causing a comet magnetotail that points away from the sun. The ions travel along the magnetic field lines, so the ion tail points away from the sun. CO+ absorbs sunlight and fluoresces, emitting energy at a wavelength of 4200 Å, which is blue light.
http://burro.cwru.edu/stu/advanced/comets.html

So what happens of we put a comet at Mars and Venus L1? See where the tail is pointing? Now imagine Mars or Venus sitting in that tail and the comet staying in a fixed position between the Sun and the Planet. I think this will block sunlight from reaching the planet. Notice that nitrogen is among the gases in the tail. Seems to me Mars can accumulate a a nitrogen atmosphere over time and a number of comets, this will make Mars colder over the short term, but it will build up its atmosphere, and when its atmosphere gets thick enough we can remove the comet.

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2014-09-27 09:34:42)

knightdepaix · 2014-09-28 22:15:35

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

Nitrogen is easier to get from Titan than from Venus. One way to get nitrogen to Mars is to park a comet at Mars' L1 point The tail will engulf Mars.
Notice that nitrogen is among the gases in the tail. Seems to me Mars can accumulate a a nitrogen atmosphere over time and a number of comets, this will make Mars colder over the short term, but it will build up its atmosphere, and when its atmosphere gets thick enough we can remove the comet.

First of my comments, I like the idea of using solar wind to drive nitrogen onto Mars: let nature work.
If current technologies are feasible for the parking, can the planet get other chemical elements also by parking a source of them at L1 ? Regarding Mars getting colder over the short term, please note that other terraforming processes such as the Martian global warming with CO2 are concurrent by warming the polar ice caps. So the suggested less heat from sunshine is not as problematic as it first seems; however blocking of sunlight may hurt the agriculture or plantations on Mars.

RobertDyck · 2014-09-29 03:26:25

I still hope to find burried nitrates somewhere on Mars. Mariner 4 was the first flyby mission to Mars, returned the first images of the surface. It showed craters like the Moon, so scientists assumed Mars lost its atmosphere to space. This century scientists discovered Mars didn't lose it to space, there's so much dry ice that if it were all sublimated it would generate a planetary atmosphere sufficent for humans to walk the surface without a spacesuit. They would require an oxygen mask, but no pressure suit. Then scientists claimed all water escaped to space. But MGS, Odyssey, Mars Express, and MRO discovered permafrost, glaciers, and a south polar ice cap. There's so much ice that if it were melted, it would fill the ancient ocean basin in the north. The south polar ice cap alone is 3.7km thick and extends to 60° latitude. If melted, the south polar ice cap alone is sufficent to cover the entire planet with 11 metre depth of water. But of course that water would not cover the planet evenly; tops of mountains would remain dry, while low lying areas such as the ancient ocean basin would fill much deeper. Now some scientists try to convince us that nitrogen has escaped to space. Uh huh! There's an old saying: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But these guys are trying to fool us a third time. Not going to believe them. I strongly suspect nitrogen is still there somewhere. Probably as nitrate bads in soil. The geology team for Spirit, Opportunity, and Phoenix, and now Curiosity, tried to look for it. They haven't found any yet. But it's probably burried.

I've posted elsewhere that ammonia that has been discovered in Mars atmosphere is probably an indication of surface nitrade beds being decomposed. That is, current surface conditions decompose nitrate to nitride. Then when a warm day melts permafrost, as soon as liquid water touches alkali metal nitride, it decomposes into metal oxide and ammonia. We've seen alkali metal oxides in Mars soil. And surface liquid water. Surface water doesn't stay liquid very long; it either soaks into the ground, or evaporates, or freezes when night falls. But rivulets do run down the sides of channels. If this is true, it would explain why any surface nitrate is decomposed. If an orbiter could detect ammonia close to the surface, not just upper atmosphere, with sufficient spacial precision and quickly enough, then ammonia could be used as an indicator to find nitrate beds close to the surface.

X · 2015-04-26 08:58:41

Is there any compelling reason not to use a rail gun to launch loads of solid nitrogen from earth to Mars? a correctly designed or large enough nitrogen capsule could even slam into the planet's surface and impart heat as well as nitrogen. You could build a power plant along with the project and sell power to finance ongoing maintenance and operations. Not really a solution but a start.

karov · 2015-04-26 11:32:19

X,

Outer SolSys bodies are better - more abundant and positive energy gradient - sources.

SpaceNut · 2015-04-26 16:16:27

So from the illustration provided by Tom Kalbfus"s post #114 the maximum time spent in the gas tail yields the most versus diving into the planetary atmosphere as the penalty to get out of a gravity well is to high.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-07-17 17:01:35

Pluto has frozen nitrogen on its surface!

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-07-17 17:23:52

X wrote:

Is there any compelling reason not to use a rail gun to launch loads of solid nitrogen from earth to Mars? a correctly designed or large enough nitrogen capsule could even slam into the planet's surface and impart heat as well as nitrogen. You could build a power plant along with the project and sell power to finance ongoing maintenance and operations. Not really a solution but a start.

The delta-v is significantly less from Pluto than from Earth, and getting nitrogen from Pluto is more of a mining operation as it already comes in frozen form, you don't need to freeze, just keep it frozen for its journey.

Pluto's escape velocity is 1.22 km/sec, Pluto's Orbital velocity is 4.74 km/sec, and throw in an additional km/sec pointed towards Mars and we have a total delta-v of 6.96 km/sec. The frozen nitrogen will start off traveling towards the Sun at 1 km/sec, The distance of Mars from Pluto is on average the same as Pluto's distance from the Sun, since that distance is 5,913,520,000 km, it would take 188 years for the chunks of nitrogen to reach Mars, not taking the acceleration due to Solar Gravity into account. Of course the ice chunks would have to be precisely aimed to hit Mars. The escape velocity from earth is 11.18 meters per second, and to give it a 1 km/sec departure velocity would require 12.18 km/sec. Earth's orbital velocity is 29.79 km/sec. Venus is not much better. escape velocity is 10.39 km/sec and if we want a departure velocity of 1 km/sec that will be 11.39 km/sec. Orbital velocity is 35.02 km/sec.

From Pluto, we don't really worry about the velocity at which the ice chunk hits Mars, impact with Mars takes care of the difference of velocities at that end, suffice to say it will be close to the Solar Escape velocity at the orbit of Marsm add to that the orbital motion of Mars which is 24.13 km/sec. Probably the nitrogen ice chunk will explode upon impact with the Martian atmosphere, Mars will probably capture most of that nitrogen as mixing with the carbon-dioxide molecules will cool it down afterwards.

Terraformer · 2015-07-18 03:50:57

What. Yes, you *do* have to worry about the velocity of impact, because you want to keep the nitrogen, not have it escape...

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-07-18 06:14:40

Terraformer wrote:

What. Yes, you *do* have to worry about the velocity of impact, because you want to keep the nitrogen, not have it escape...

Well what happens if it hits Mars? Mars has an atmosphere. Now if it hit the Moon, it might bounce off the Moon's surface and escape into space, but Mars has an atmosphere. Since the molecules in the Martian atmosphere are loose, it a nitrogen atom hits one, it will transfer its momentum to that carbon dioxide molecule, that carbon dioxide molecule may hit another one and so on. Basically the Martian atmosphere will act as a sponge rather than as a solid wall of matter as would the surface of the Moon. The energy of impact of the nitrogen gas would be transferred to the Martian atmosphere as a whole, increasing its temperature, the impact energy would make Mars a little warmer that it otherwise would be. We kind of want Mars to be warmer anyway, so it makes little difference. With Venus it is much the same, other than wanting Venus to get warmer of course, but the increased warmth is only temporary of course, and Venus atmosphere is much more massive than Mars, it would probably be warmed by only a tiny amount. Venus doesn't need nitrogen however, but it does need hydrogen. Hydrogen doesn't freeze solid at Pluto's surface, so any Hydrogen we hurl at Venus will have to be in a container, the container would vaporize upon impact letting loose the hydrogen, maybe the heat generated with disassociate some carbon-dioxide molecules so the hydrogen could combine with oxygen to make water. Carbon lacking a partner would fall to the surface.

knightdepaix · 2015-07-27 17:54:45

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

Venus atmosphere is much more massive than Mars, it would probably be warmed by only a tiny amount. Venus doesn't need nitrogen however, but it does need hydrogen. Hydrogen doesn't freeze solid at Pluto's surface, so any Hydrogen we hurl at Venus will have to be in a container, the container would vaporize upon impact letting loose the hydrogen, maybe the heat generated with disassociate some carbon-dioxide molecules so the hydrogen could combine with oxygen to make water. Carbon lacking a partner would fall to the surface.

GCNRevenger wrote:

But yet we are willing to vent Hydrogen as a waste byproduct onboard the ISS from the russian oxygen unit into space.
But this Hydrogen is worthless.
Plus, getting electricity from the Moon 240,000mi away, when the Earth does not spin in synch with the Moon, and getting the energy through EARTH'S atmosphere, oh yes and solar flares frying the Lunar arrays and transmission gear...
Power from the Moon I think is a pipe-dream excuse, not ideal in the least. The only things that the Moon canprovide from Earth are metals, He3, and as a base of operations for spaceflight way WAY down the road.

If helium-3 fusion energy generation became reality, would the 2 moles hydrogen atoms/protons or 1 mole hydrogen gas exhaust be useful to make water and carbon with Venus atmospheric carbon dioxide. Both the carbon and oxidane (water) could then be sent to Mars.

knightdepaix · 2015-08-04 05:28:59

JoshNH4H wrote:

in Mars, splitting water
My expectation would be that the cost of building such a large fusion reactor would be immense. Let's say that fusion reactors are on par with nuclear fission reactors in terms of cost per watt. this website suggests a value of about $4/watt.
By "using the CNO cycle", I assume you mean not the CNO cycle, but using the nuclear processes in the CNO cycle to make Nitrogen from other elements, chiefly Carbon and Oxygen. It's not actually possible to make Nitrogen from naturally occurring Oxygen using the reactions in the CNO cycle (The Oxygen produced is actually just an intermediary with a half-life of about 2 minutes. It's not possible to create O-16 from it unless you bombard it with neutrons, which is not feasible for various reasons).
Anyway, the reaction to go from C-12 (the common form of Carbon) to Nitrogen-14 involves the addition of 2 protons in 2 separate fusion events, and releases 10.7 MeV per atom. This works out to 7.5e13 J/kg of Nitrogen. To produce 30 kPa of Nitrogen on Mars over 100 years would require 1.2e18 kg of Nitrogen, which would generate 2.8e22 W, thus costing about $1e23. That's $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or one hundred billion trillion dollars. Assuming that world economic output grows at 5% per year in perpetuity, this is equivalent to putting the entire world to work building fusion reactors on Mars from now until 2381. If 10% of Humanity's economic output goes to fusion reactors, we will be building them from now until 2428. 1%, until 2476 (Exponential growth is weird).
It would probably be cheaper to ship nitrogen from titan, or even better to try to make do with what we have.

knightdepaix wrote:

Tom Kalbfus wrote:
Venus atmosphere is much more massive than Mars, it would probably be warmed by only a tiny amount. Venus doesn't need nitrogen however, but it does need hydrogen. Hydrogen doesn't freeze solid at Pluto's surface, so any Hydrogen we hurl at Venus will have to be in a container, the container would vaporize upon impact letting loose the hydrogen, maybe the heat generated with disassociate some carbon-dioxide molecules so the hydrogen could combine with oxygen to make water. Carbon lacking a partner would fall to the surface.
GCNRevenger wrote:
But yet we are willing to vent Hydrogen as a waste byproduct on-board the ISS from the Russian oxygen unit into space.
But this Hydrogen is worthless.
Plus, getting electricity from the Moon 240,000mi away, when the Earth does not spin in synch with the Moon, and getting the energy through EARTH'S atmosphere, oh yes and solar flares frying the Lunar arrays and transmission gear...
Power from the Moon I think is a pipe-dream excuse, not ideal in the least. The only things that the Moon can provide from Earth are metals, He3, and as a base of operations for spaceflight way WAY down the road.
If helium-3 fusion energy generation became reality, would the 2 moles hydrogen atoms/protons or 1 mole hydrogen gas exhaust be useful to make water and carbon with Venus atmospheric carbon dioxide. Both the carbon and oxidane (water) could then be sent to Mars.

As projects on Mars, Venus and the Moon have their own drawbacks, how about combining them to minimize the drawbacks ?

At Venus and Mars' atmospheres
1) Need a sufficient yet huge start-up amount of hydrogen to produce carbon and water from Venus' atmosphere.
2) the processes on Moon would supply some amount of hydrogen
3) Better yet, carbon dioxide would be liquified and sent to the Moon for processes.

On Moon
1) helium-3 and carbon from Venus fuse to produce helium-4, nitrogen and hydrogen-1 and producing energy, according to this equation
10 heium-3 + 2 CO2 ---> 4 helium-4 + dinitrogen + 4 water + di-hydrogen
2) the energy will help drive all the processes and transportation on Venus, Mars and the Moon
3) Although the nitrogen will be stored away and waiting to be transported to Mars, JoshNH4H's explanation means that this trip to Mars would likely only happen once or a few times in decades.
4a) The stored hydrogen, although in much smaller amount, can be used to supply the effort on Venus
81 heium-3 + 21 CO2 ---> 32 helium-4 + 8 dinitrogen gas + 36 water + dihydrogen
4b) this hydrogen can react with CO2 to make methane and oxygen instead of the conventional paradigm of making carbon for the aforementioned fusion to nitrogen, and water, which will then be splitted into oxygen and hydrogen.
5) In fact, only finite amount of helium-3 is available on Moon so only finite amount of helium-4 is produced and used as coolant for fusion reactors and export to the Earth for nuclear (fusion and fission) reactors too.
6) Because the processes are mostly on the Moon, they are close to the required helium-3 resources except import of CO2. The planets can go on with their terraforming efforts without huge infrastructure consideration of the processes that are on the Moon.
7) The consistent import of CO2 will need to be done by huge sunshades or other efforts but this only drawback combines previous drawbacks that would happen if the terraforming and nuclear fusion efforts were done on separate efforts at astronomical bodies.

On Mars
1) nitrogen and water from the Moon is released as part of the terraforming effort.
2) Mars' atmosphere composition will be changed: water, helium-4, nitrogen, oxygen, methane will all be part of it. The original CO2 amount will be diminished. The methane can be used for agricultural, or organic chemical industrial and laboratory start-up.

------
Take away ideas:

1) combining separate efforts at astronomical bodies to eliminate much drawbacks
2) nuclear fusion or fission efforts are better done near the sources of the required starting resources.
3) All efforts shall be done away from the Earth and self-sufficient enough to not affect the Earth own human development.
4) Can helium-3 be mined from the gas giants or elsewhere and sent to the Moon ?
5) Carbon-12 holds more nuclear binding energy per nucleon than Nitrogen-14. (Cox, P. A.; The elements: their origins, abundance, and distribution. p.31). However the difference in energy from Helium-3 to Helium-4, or - for what it worth - Carbon-12, or Nitrogen-14 is greater than that from Carbon-12 to Nitrogen -14. In other words, according to the nuclear binding energy curve, fusing helium-4 to carbon-12 is exothermic. Can the helium-4 by-product be fused into carbon-12, which will then be fused into nitrogen-14 ? This would eliminate some of the huge but required consistent import of CO2 and provide more energy. Note that in the solar system Carbon is more abundant than nitrogen. Oxygen is even more abundant but human needs oxygen in general and fissing oxygen to nitrogen nucleons is endothermic, defeating the purpose of self-sustaining production of nitrogen nucleons and energy for transportation.

Last edited by knightdepaix (2015-08-07 14:54:42)

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#101 2005-08-05 13:32:11

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

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Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

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Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#104 2006-01-28 02:38:17

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Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#106 2006-02-06 05:14:16

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#107 2006-02-06 07:03:07

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#108 2006-02-06 17:03:47

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#109 2006-02-07 20:53:15

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#110 2006-02-08 06:03:51

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#111 2006-02-13 03:28:24

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#112 2006-02-13 06:09:53

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#113 2014-09-25 02:25:56

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#114 2014-09-27 09:30:32

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#115 2014-09-28 22:15:35

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#116 2014-09-29 03:26:25

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#117 2015-04-26 08:58:41

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#118 2015-04-26 11:32:19

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#119 2015-04-26 16:16:27

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#120 2015-07-17 17:01:35

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#121 2015-07-17 17:23:52

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#122 2015-07-18 03:50:57

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#123 2015-07-18 06:14:40

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#124 2015-07-27 17:54:45

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

#125 2015-08-04 05:28:59

Re: Mars Needs Nitrogen

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