What to bring - if resources found

jabe · 2005-03-08 16:16:25

ok,
I'm not 100% sure of this has been covered...
Lets just say that by chance a huge "iron" deposit or some other useful ore for construction/fabricating was found right beside a huge ice deposit near the surface..
What do we take to mars to use it properly?
If my history is correct when North america was first being colonized they still needed many raw materials from Europe to make all the things needed. It wasn't for a while before the true use of the resources here was used. This was true even when you had a few hundred people and no worries of space suits for your mining...

with a crew of lets say six..what is needed to get self sufficiency going ASAP? How do you get at the ice wthout it sublimating off uncontrolably? A bulldozer of sorts, processor of sorts, etc..The thought of strip mining is kind of depressing but hey gotta do what ya gotta do etc

Jabe

Grypd · 2005-03-08 17:18:51

First thing is self sufficiency cannot be done with a crew of 6, But using resources gained make the whole job of sending crews a lot easier for mission designers. To get the best from such a resource simply tent it over and push the ash out of the way. But if we discover Iron rich deposits on the first missions it will not really matter until we do send the colonists who will use these materials. Iron deposits are structural materials and as such really needed when construction is done. But not for the first exploration missions.

Still we have plenty of CO2 and from that we can create Iron Carbonylls and use that to create any shape of pure Iron we want.

GCNRevenger · 2005-03-08 17:28:28

I think that I would aim for a crew of 16 or so for minimum self-sufficency and enough man-hours to operate a minimally useful mining operation.

The first and most important item would be the power plant, obviously. A megawatt class nuclear reactor, probobly gas cooled, perhaps liquid metal cooled, would be nessesarry to get anything done. You would need electricity to operate the base and such, and lots of heat to do many things...

-Keep from freezing to death
-Warm greenhouses
-Melt water
-Distill water
-Split water with a Copper/Chlorine thermal cycle
-Operate Carbonyl metal refinery
-Operate Sabatier plant for rocket fuel
-Operate modified Sabatier plant to make Methanol
-Operate modified Sabatier reactor to make bulk plastic monomer
-Misc. industrial functions, seperating elements from the soil.
...You get the idea.

If the reactor could be based close to the "mine," you might even be able to operate some heavy machinery directly from the reactors' generator.

jabe · 2005-03-08 17:57:52

what hunks of hardware will be needed... I'm assuming some sort of earth mover..the repairability would want to be high. Hate to fix the thing on mars.
I guess one "launch" from earth would be just the hardware..and the future and or present colonists hoping the parts lands safely or two years is down the drain til the next window opens.

Commodore · 2005-03-08 18:23:26

This is exactly why we should set up shop on the moon first. All of this can be manufactured and launched from there, and we won't be 6+ months away from a critical replacement part.

RobertDyck · 2005-03-08 19:10:42

It depends. If you land near a chunk of http://www.esa.int/export/esaMI/Mars_Ex … tml]frozen sea pack-ice then harvesting water becomes a lot easier. Use the primary coolant of a nuclear reactor to heat pressurized Mars air, then pipe that hot air down into the ice. Melt the ice to form a cavern, letting liquid water accumulate. Pump out the water. To avoid sublimation keep the pack-ice chunk covered in soil (loose regolith, Mars dirt, whatever you call it). To avoid evaporation keep the cavern sealed, recycle air to the nuclear reactor and pump back down. The cavern doesn't have to be pressure sealed, just ensure there isn't a lot of moist air escape.

The tripple point of water is 6.1173 mbar. Mars Pathfinder recorded pressure between 6.77 and 7.08 mbar, so that's above the tripple point. That means liquid water can exist. Boiling temperature is very low at 7 mbar, so the difference between freezing and boiling is very small, but liquid water can exist. Salt water will melt at a lower temperature and boil higher, Mars soil is salty so pack-ice probably is as well. That can be used to melt remnant pack-ice.

If you land near a land form like Meridiani Planum with http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom … l]hematite concretions called "blueberries", then you can scoop them up and separate from soil with a screen, then smelt with the Direct Reduced Iron process. DRI is similar to the Mond process that uses metal carbonyl. DRI uses carbon monoxide and/or hydrogen to extract oxygen from iron oxide leaving iron metal. This works without melting, it leaves iron ore and iron metal in solid phase. Lower temperature means it uses less energy, but it only works with iron oxide, not more complex minerals like chromite, bronzite, olivine or augite. Hematite is iron oxide so it would work, but the spherules must be ground to the consistency of fines (finer than dust). Most of Mars doesn't have hematite, but it forms in sedimentary rock so it'll only exist where there at least was water at one time.

::Edit:: DRI also has the advantage that it's operating temperature can be generated directly by the reactor. Heat to melt iron tends to melt reactor parts.

::Edit:: How do we test ice melting or hematite smelting on the Moon?

GCNRevenger · 2005-03-08 20:29:19

If the reactor failing on Mars is a problem compared to it failing "closer" on the Moon, then the solution is simple... bring two reactors.

On Mars, you also have daily sunlight for emergency solar power, but on the Moon, if you are in the two-week-long Lunar night... you are out of luck.

Lunar manufacturing of ANYTHING complex and mechanical will easily take decades longer then it takes to get to Mars, particularly with the lack of carbon and nitrogen.

dicktice · 2005-03-09 09:25:15

Since it takes a lathe to make a lathe ... (to make anything round) carrying a small lathe along to Mars might not be as ridiculous as it may seem at first thought.

RobS · 2005-03-09 15:58:56

I agree with GCN that we need more than six people. Sixteen or even twenty-four would be a more likely number. Since some of the necessary equipment hasn't even been developed--we can imagine most of it, but what it will actually be like, designed to be shipped so far, to withstand the vibration of launch, to work reliably in the cold and the thin air, to be efficient, and not to produce hazardous byproducts--we really can't draw up an inventory and assign detailed masses to it. I would think we are talking about one or two or three hundred tonnes, though, as opposed to many dozens of tonnes. An outpost of such a size would also need a reusable shuttle to reach Martian orbit; probably two or three copies of it. Right now our existing launch system will cost about $100,000 to put a kilogram on Mars (that's a hundred million per tonne) so 100 tonnes will cost $10 billion to get there, exclusive of the people to run it or the cost of developing the equipment. (Of course, $100,000 per kilo is a very rough number; it could really be more like $50,000; but in either case, we're talking about big numbers). Developing a cheaper system to low Earth orbit, then a cheaper system to get stuff to Martian orbit,and from there to the Martian surface, could cut the overall cost quite a bit but the transportation system itself will cost tens of billions to develop.

-- RobS

jabe · 2005-03-09 17:14:15

One of the reasons I ask what to bring is for discussion in my classroom. I do a few days talking about the physics of how to get to Mars in my senior high school class (the delta v's I get are close to the "accepted" values so the kids are surprised physics makes some sense at times lol) and I figure I may add a small off shoot of what to bring..since its so expensive to ship it from earth.

You can never have enough power so the more power the better.. (hope they have the forethought to start designing that now).. never thought of a lathe myself (dam good idea)..I'm thinking half decent sized smelter.. a "high tech" blacksmith shop .. (I think a by-product of some of the chemical processes that can easily be done on mars can be used to make plastics... so maybe a "plastic" shop) I guess it boils down to what you need to bring to make the making/repairing of structures/machinery easier.

case in point..to move "mars dirt" (or the "useless" stuff left over from your strip mine in your backyard...) you'll need a conveyor belt to cover the buildings you make from the metal from your smelter..so you make the coveyor belt from what you make from smelter and the "plastic shop".. with this bigger building you can make a bigger conveyor belt for quicker mining which gets you more raw materials for your "smith" shops...be an interesting "map" of what you should make first that will eventually make something else which can make something else and so on and so on...

any other "must haves"?

GCNRevenger · 2005-03-09 17:36:05

A reuseable RLV on the Mars end will take a little while, you will need to build up industrial capacity to make enough fuel to fly it regularly. You might build two RLVs, since early on the only thing you'll be launching are people and sample boxes occasionally, then later on send a bigger cargo version that will fly often.

I don't think an end-to-end RLV cargo system will be practical for a while. The first thing to shoot for is to take the expendable system, like NASA DRM ("Semi-Direct") and make it partially reuseable (reuse the ERV in concert with reuseable crew MAV) and then use the savings to work tward expanding Martian industrial capability... then, when we are ready for the ultimate leap, colonization, then the cargo RLVs will be needed.

Austin Stanley · 2005-03-14 02:10:35

I think that Iron wouldnt' be the most valuable resource we could just "come across" that would probably be water. A good source of water is THE number one resource that needs to be located for a good base sight.

But as for stuff to bring to get your colony cracking, I agree with the recomondation of a DRI smelter, probably the most practical iorn smelting method avaliable. But an electric furnace will still be necessary to convert that product into usefull forms of steel. In reality mining and refining is a very comlex process which has many stages and needs a lot of heavy equipment. You'll need some way to convert the molten steel into usefull bars or plates for example.

I also think some sort of setup for doing electolysis will be necessary. Virtualy any metal you could possible want can be produced via electrolisis, in fact for most of them it is the only practical method of refining. A complex set of chemicals will be necessary however, and it is very energy intensive. But the setup could probably be converted for other processes such as plating and chemical milling.

On the mining side of things, besides some method of getting the ore, you are also going to needs a machine to grind it up and a system to filter for what you want, probably by flotation.

Proccessing the refined product is actualy probably the simplest parts. Compter controled lasers/millers/plamsa/water jets can cut virtualy any material into virtualy any shape you could desire. While not ideal for mass production the machines are realtivly compact and simple to operate.

But the more I study this issue the more problomatic it seems. The list of equipment you need to import and mineral resources you need to persue is seemling endless. I don't think 100's of MT is going to cut it, 1000 of tons of equipment will probably be required for even the begining of self sufficency. This makes getting the cost of getting equipment to the planet down vital.

I've been thinking, perhaps some sort of solar sail reusable transit vehicle could be used? The travel times to and from Mars would be great, but the system could be reused many times and doesn't require any exotic designs. Construction would also be realtivly simple, the entire vehicle could probably go up in a single HLLV, then you would just have to deliver the cargo modules to it.

RobS · 2005-03-14 08:50:27

Part of the difficulty is that the ways we do things on Earth may not be the easiest and cheapest ways to do things on Mars, but until we are there, we really won't know what's best. That's why it doesn't make sense to start with a "settlement" phase. We need to start with an "exploration" phase that does basic science, engineering, agronomy, etc.

According to the *Case for Mars,* the process of making carbonyls does not require more than a few hundred degrees centigrade. It does not require the thousands of degrees that smelting requires. The process does not work on iron oxides, I think, but meteoritic nickel-iron is pure metal and if it is exposed to hot cabon monoxide, it will become liquid metal carbonyl. The liquid can be poured into molds which are then heated to drive off the carbon monoxide, making a solid metal. Possibly the result can be cold-rolled to make it stronger, or maybe cold-poured iron will be strong enough for many purposes. There may even be ways to make alloys by mixing different carbonyls together.

There is also new technology being developed for "ink jet" creation of items. A computer controls an ink-jet like device that spits out tiny droplets of either a plastic or maybe even a carbonyl (who knows) and it slowly builds up a three dimensional shape drop by drop. It might take a few days to make something big, but that will be fine for a small Mars base. The U.S. Army is researching this technology so that spare parts can be manufactured quickly under wartime conditions near the front.

So it may be that in twenty years, two ten- or twenty-tonne trailer-sized modules may be sufficient to make many of the parts a small Mars base will need. I suspect they will start with water and carbon dioxide, make plastics, and make most of their parts with plastics. One trailer would make the plastics (probably three to five basic kinds), the other would fabricate things from them.

-- RobS

SpaceNut · 2005-03-14 09:03:00

The problem of creating a laundry list of items to bring comes back to how much volume to place the item within and how much does it weigh.

When packing for a camping trip you have much the same problem in that you are trying to plan for a period of time, number of meals and for how far you are willing to haul all of it on your back. Since it gets quite heavy as you go on the journey.

There will need to be a piority list to all wish list items for which, when we go on these missions to be part of the desired outcome and goals. Counting on insitu's may not be the best thing to do if when you land those items are not available or in the quantities needed.

GCNRevenger · 2005-03-14 10:01:02

"I've been thinking, perhaps some sort of solar sail reusable transit vehicle could be used? The travel times to and from Mars would be great, but the system could be reused many times and doesn't require any exotic designs. Construction would also be realtivly simple, the entire vehicle could probably go up in a single HLLV, then you would just have to deliver the cargo modules to it."

Solar sails? No way, they are so slow that you wouldn't get enough use out of them. You'd need too many of them to make a useful supply train to Mars. Lousy payloads too, and nobody has ever done more then contemplate one of the required size (which would be enormous).

jabe · 2005-03-14 17:01:09

I may be wrong but I'm assuming the main reason we would want to process metals at the start is to give the ability to make larger structures. This gives them more room to do what ever they would like. I would think the quality of the metal to start wouldn't have to be great to build rudimentary structures. Would the DRI smelter do the job? I saw a show on using microwaves to smelt metal sometime ago(forget what the metal was).. seemed like a good idea but is that a practical solution for this type of process? It was a simple setup and used very little energy.

An ion engine "tug" may be a good way to ship stuff from mars to earth and back. Since its just cargo, the time to get to mars, using the ion engine, wouldn't be a huge factor. Or does the low thrust of the ion engine make it not practical for large payloads??

Then the question is what would you first do with the extra room.. (besides giving you larger living accomodations).

An abundant source of water makes your oxygen needs for the extra volume you've created easily done. I guess with the limited power supply that we would have at the start..one or two nuclear power sources of some sort.. any power not being used would be used in the electrolysis of water and the hydrogen used to make methane as your fuel source for your vehicles..I'm assuming.. So this begs the question.. What would the method of power be to drive the machinery you drive around in or do your "bulldozing". Hydraulics are good but I'd hate to repair hydraulic hoses on mars.. Is there any design around for the type of vehicle that would be used? I've read about it but is there a "blue print" of one around?

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#1 2005-03-08 16:16:25

Re: What to bring - if resources found

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