New Mars Forums

Official discussion forum of The Mars Society and MarsNews.com

You are not logged in.

Announcement

Announcement: As a reader of NewMars forum, we have opportunities for you to assist with technical discussions in several initiatives underway. NewMars needs volunteers with appropriate education, skills, talent, motivation and generosity of spirit as a highly valued member. Write to newmarsmember * gmail.com to tell us about your ability's to help contribute to NewMars and become a registered member.

#1 2022-07-14 04:31:37

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 9,175

How bad would a Car / Bike Accident be on the Moon or Mars?

A Dummy Astronaut inside a suit tested in a fake crash?

You have off road Bikes and ATV's moving on Titan, Mars, the Moon one of them has a wheel that bursts and the vehicles hit each other in a glancing blow, or worse you hit something and get thrown from the vehicle. You have the same mass but there is less gravity on these worlds so you would be thrown further and higher, coming stop a stop in sandy material would be better than landing on a sharp rock. The First Crash Test 'Dummy' on Planet was a Living Human, if unprepared will it also be a Human on the Moon or Mars?  In the 1930s, the Motor Industry almost started Grave Digging and Stealing Corpses for tests, Car companies would test car crashes with a cadaver in the car to measure impact and start to design the best safety features. For a while the poor Pig replaced the corpse as the Pig had organ structure to humans, making them the perfect “dummies”. You can find Public Domain Archive Footage of Lieutenant Colonel Doctor John Paul Stapp inside a rocket sled that accelerated to 600+ miles per hour 965.6 kph in five seconds and came to a complete stop in just 1 and a half seconds seconds, people started to get hurt.

'On October 21, 1914, US-American engineer Samuel W. Alderson was born. He is best known for his development of the crash test dummy, a device that, during the last half of the twentieth century, was widely used by automobile manufacturers to test the reliability of automobile seat belts and other safety protocols.'
http://scihi.org/samuel-alderson-crash-test-dummies/
' Medical Phantoms
Samuel Alderson also became known for his humanoid figures that were able to dub medical phantoms. They were designed to measure radiation exposure, as well as synthetic wounds worn by soldiers during training exercises. The dummies were even capable of oozing fake blood. However, his contribution to automotive safety, in the form of the crash test dummy, that saved the most lives and become an icon of popular culture. Alderson also worked for the United States military. During World War II, he helped develop an optical coating to improve the vision of submarine periscopes, and worked on depth charge and missile guidance technology.
Samuel Alderson died on February 11, 2005, at age 90 of a bone marrow disease.
'
There are also specialized dummies for unique side impacts, there are dummy built to simulate fat or overweight people, CRABI is a child dummy used to evaluate child restraint devices, including seat belts and air bags, it has different models of the CRABI, representing 18-month, 12-month, and 6-month-old children. In the US military two generations of WIAMan prototypes have undergone a series of lab tests and blast events in the field https://www.aerodefensetech.com/compone … cles/27963 WIAMan evaluates the effects of under-body blasts involving vehicles, and assess the risk to soldiers in ground vehicle systems. The most expensive dummy might be 'Thor' and seems to cost over 1 Million Dollars
'The Test Device for Human Occupant Restraint (THOR) is an advanced 50th percentile male anthropomorphic test device (ATD or crash test dummy) that represents human-like anthropometry and response to impact.'
https://www.nhtsa.gov/biomechanics-trauma/thor
This website says the dummy costs around $400,000. 
'Despite its steep price tag, the U.S. Department of Transportation, Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, and European New Car Assessment Programme, all plan on utilizing THOR in the near future to conduct crash tests and increase vehicle safety.'
https://injurylawattys.com/blog/crash-test-dummy/

Maybe if outer space has idiots the people will be forced to have some test or drivers license and registration? 135,000 people are injured every year due to ATV accidents and over 700 people are killed in these accidents every year. You can expect to pay between $200 per year for basic ATV insurance but ATV insurance is not legally required because ATVs are not street-legal vehicles, how much would it cost to insurance for a Mars guy on an ATV?
'Compilation d'accident de Quad n°1 / ATV Accidents and Crash'

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=c1gU1NcLAtU

However some accidents are not due to stupidity there are unknowns
the vehicle might rollover and flip down a hill, an explorer might simply fall by themselves

'Apollo 17 Astronaut Falls on the Moon'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1cVnC7EtWw

Some vehicles might have their own environment and you might not need suits, for deaths in a harsh environment you can look to deaths in dry desert regions, the tops of mountains, Norway, Russia, Alaska or the South Pole. In McMurdo 2018 two contractors asphyxiated maintaining fire suppression system, at McMurdo Shear Zone, Antarctica  Gordon Hamilton, was killed in 2016 after his snowmobile plunged 100ft (30.48m) into a crevasse

What Went Wrong: Climate Scientist Gordon Hamilton Dies in Antarctica
https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/w … a-w446537/
Despite the technology available to keep researchers safe, circumstantial accidents still arise. For example, you can have a seemingly stable area, but the borders of cracked ice are often completely hidden by snow, which is constantly blown around by strong Antarctic winds. “There can be a breach of snow covering a crevasse,” Zenteno says. “So it’s safe to walk that path twice, and then the bridge suddenly collapses on the third. It’s very tricky. That’s why these kinds of accidents happen.”

The crash-test dummy can measure sudden deceleration injury, the difference between banging your head into a pillow or wall, the airbag has now saved many lives, the dummy has accelerometers all over it measuring in all three directions fore-aft, up-down, left-right. Crash tests measure how seatbelts deal with all that kenetic energy,   they can also measure  Head Injury Criteria impacts, Chest deceleration forces and Femur loads on the human bone, new car test methods can use a dummy to check bending, folding, or torque of the body,. We perhaps would have a future where with AI and everything record the Mars highway or the dirt track road of the Moon becomes the test lab, and every event recorded, data examined and a crash becomes a way to learn more about how to protect people. Loss of health an explorer and colonialist space citizen would be very costly for whichever group is investing in colonization.

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-08-26 04:10:35)

Offline

#2 2022-07-14 05:00:58

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 9,175

Re: How bad would a Car / Bike Accident be on the Moon or Mars?

Some previous topics on newmars


Bikes on Mars? - Don't laugh! https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3504 Long Range Rover https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7494 Simple Mars Vehicle Part 1 https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3476 ,   Lithium used for batteries https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=9230 Fuel Cell Development, Application, Prospects https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8974 Simplest Mars Vehicles https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3472 Light weight rover for Mars https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7387
MIT Mars Bio Suit https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=9529
small, high speed buggies
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3457

SpaceNut also posted a pick of an Antarctic Bike: Four Wheels For Polar Cycling

Brian Hanley wrote:

Let's see. At 38% of earth weight, with additional gear on board for suit, and miscellaneous carrying minus a few pounds because the bike would come from earth, let's compare weight.

On earth, a bike and rider is about 180 pounds. 150 for rider, and 30 for bike and stuff carried. (We are talking utility bike here. With standard Mt. bike tires, the contact patch is about 5 square inches per wheel, with about 70% of weight on rear. So, you have about 126/5 = 25 PSI on the rear, and about 54/5 = 11 PSI on the front on earth.

On earth, by creating dual front and rear wheels, riders in th Iditabike can ride through snow, which presents similar problems to sand. That would tend to indicate that the compression strength of snow/sand is on the order of 12 PSI. That correlates reasonably well with figures for ultra low pressure farm tractors which use special radial tires inflated to 6-8 PSI. That enables the tractor to be used on wet, soft, muddy ground without damaging the soil from compression or creating ruts.

So, multiplying those mountain bike figures by 0.38, one can establish a pretty reasonable guesstimate of whether a bike could be ridden on Mars over the surface.

Bike and rider + stuff total weight = 180 * 0.38 = ~70 pounds
Rear wheel PSI of ground contact = ~48 lb / 5 square inches = ~ 10 PSI
Front wheel PSI of ground contact = ~21 lb / 5 square inches = ~ 4-5 PSI

So I think the answer is yes - a bike would work very well on Mars for transportation with little or no modification.
smile

We also had a Toyota thread and JAXA are invested in Moon Exploration Projects

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-07-14 05:22:41)

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB