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With the Chryse Planitia you're within striking distance. You're away from good iron ore, water and PV territory if you head for VM first off.
I'd like to clear a "road" south from Chryse towards VM.
How about sending some bouncers to the Marineris Valles? If they survive, they can survey the landing terrain and guide in further landers to a pin point precision landing. Now need for boring flat landscapes! The most interesting thing on Mars is the Marineris Valles, so lets go there!
Let's Go to Mars...Google on: Fast Track to Mars blogspot.com
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The Viking Lander site is fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1
Those rocks don't look too big. Better that then something that looks smooth but turns out to be less than solid.
As the MIT Paper specifies, 10,000 sq metres of ultra light PV panelling is not ridiculous. It's 100 metres by 100 metres and can be laid down in 17 hours.
Dook wrote:louis wrote:Dook -
From the MIT Team's evaluation of the best latitude for PV systems:
"The results show that there is an optimum location for solar architectures around 30 degrees north latitude. The results also show that northern latitudes are always better then their southern counterparts."
http://systemarchitect.mit.edu/docs/cooper10.pdf
So for me, favouring PV, that would push it a little further north of the Viking 1/Pathfinder landing sites.
31 degrees north of the equator is the best spot for solar panels on Mars? Okay, fine, sounds like that's where the settlement needs to be then for solar panel power making and for heating.
This study suggests a 100 kw solar panel farm, that's tens of thousands of panels. That's absolutely ridiculous.
Can't land anywhere close to where Viking 1 is. Have you seen the pictures? You can't land in a rock field.
What size do these rolls of thin PV roll up into?
I looked at Viking 2 pictures. The Viking 1 landing site is probably okay.
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The ultra-light arrays have efficiencies of 15% and a mass/area of 0.063kg/m2! So for 10,000 sq. metres that's 630kg. I am guessing you can probably fit that into a couple of cubic metres, but with protection and roll out mechanism...perhaps they are talking about three cubic metres?
louis wrote:The Viking Lander site is fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1
Those rocks don't look too big. Better that then something that looks smooth but turns out to be less than solid.
As the MIT Paper specifies, 10,000 sq metres of ultra light PV panelling is not ridiculous. It's 100 metres by 100 metres and can be laid down in 17 hours.
Dook wrote:31 degrees north of the equator is the best spot for solar panels on Mars? Okay, fine, sounds like that's where the settlement needs to be then for solar panel power making and for heating.
This study suggests a 100 kw solar panel farm, that's tens of thousands of panels. That's absolutely ridiculous.
Can't land anywhere close to where Viking 1 is. Have you seen the pictures? You can't land in a rock field.
What size do these rolls of thin PV roll up into?
I looked at Viking 2 pictures. The Viking 1 landing site is probably okay.
Let's Go to Mars...Google on: Fast Track to Mars blogspot.com
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Louis, the panels described in the paper are very light but they don't pack densely. The paper cited in the one you linked (with the 0.063 kg/m^2 panels) lists a volume of 0.055 m^3 per 35.3 m^2 of panel area. So for 10,000 m^2 of panels the volume would be 15.6 m^3.
Last edited by 3015 (2017-04-16 17:37:37)
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Mars Loaded With Mineral Closely Associated With Life, NASA Rover Finds
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mars-loaded- … 59322.html
'Settlement' might require reasonable weather temperature for Biosphere farming, access to sub surface waters, some lower altitude or atmosphere for flight or caves to protect from solar storms, near by minerals and Nuclear material for example 'Thorium'?
The spectrometer map from NASA's orbiter shows Thorium in northern Acidalia Planitia, other satellites and other groups, nations have detected other minerals and potential resources on Mars. NASA is looking at Nuclear Power in Space and the Chinese are also expanding Nuclear power in space.
There is also a philosophy of transporting a reactor from Earth to Mars, rather than trying to have a local Mars manufacturing economy.
Kilopower an experimental U.S. project to make new nuclear reactors led by NASA and the DoE’s National Nuclear Security Administration
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/ … wer-hmqzw/
SAFE were NASA's small experimental nuclear fission reactors for electricity production in space.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231117053 … 049426.pdf
'Low-cost nuclear reactors'
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=9197
of course there might be political and scientific reasons, people from the astro-biology community who want a Private Sector mission or NASA astronauts to go to where there may be a possibility of 'life' and push a mission to the most interesting site from a biological perspective.
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