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I am not sure if this topic was covered here before, if so my apologies.
Where on the red planet the first Mars base should be. Should it be up in the mountains for less sand storms or down in the valleys where the pressure is higher? Should it be close to polar ice caps for easier “water” access or somewhere warmer like the middle of the planet for more day-sunlight?
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Right now that depends on a few things...
We could pull off a Mars mission with no planetary water supply, and infact we probobly should plan it that way in case the water turns out to be less accessable then first thought, so the first missions can go to the points of maximum scientific interest.
As far as a base, you would want to set up where water was available for sure, but close enough to the equator to maximize daily sunlight for plant and solar farms. Air pressure and temperature shouldn't be serious concerns... As far as where this is, the radar on MarsExpress should give us a good hint.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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*Hello. I seem to recall someone (dicktice?) mentioning years ago that a broad canyon would be a good place for the first Mars base. But I can't recall his/whoever's exact thinking on this.
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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Easy to enclose to create the first artificial atmosphere and greenhouse conditions since you would at a minimum have 2 walls and would only need to add the ends and the dome.
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Not so fast... a neat idea in theory, but not so much in practice. The main problem is simple leakage, through the soil, through caves, through gaps in the canopy seals...
It would also be so large that it would be hard to keep warm I imagine, and the high walls would restrict the hours of direct sunlight you would have.
Start small, with clusters of flattend cylinder "domes" that might be partially buried for insulation, easy to make in number on Mars and seperate/redundant enough to minimize problems if they leak.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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water was available for sure, but close enough to the equator to maximize daily sunlight
Although I agree that the base should be closer to the equator (I am from Canada I know what the lack of sunlight can do to you, specially when it’s your only power source) but I thought only the polar ice caps have the concentration of ice-water.
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The poles are the only place we know has water ice available. There could be a large amount of "permafrost" under the top layers of dry Martian soil... The radar on MarsExpress will tell us if this is likly or not, but thus far no drill-equipped space probe has ever landed on Mars.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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Everybody is talking about drilling or digging should we pick a place that would be easy to excavate. Is there a place that has (I don’t know) “softer” regolith?
And we will definitely have to somewhat burry the habitats since the regolith is such a good insulator against the radiation.
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We still don't know about the water situation, but the fact that a frozen sea appears to exist 5 degrees from the equator and was formed only five million years ago suggests that the Martian regolith has LOTS of water. I suspect (for what its worth) that the Martian ground has a "water table" not too far below the surface (in some cases, meters; other cases, hundreds of meters below the surface), meaning all the pore space between particles is full of water, but that right now that water is frozen solid. If that is correct, then one could land almost anywhere, and if one had a really good drill, one could drill down into the regolith and inject heated Martian air, which will come up the hole humidified. You'd then cool and condense out the distilled water. A typical sedmentary rock or sediment deposit on Earth is ten to forty percent pore space, which means the material has several hundred kilograms of water per cubic meter. Most of the water is not free water; it is a film clinging to particles. It won't flow. But it will evaporate.
Let us assume the water table is 100 meters down and you drill down 200 meters. You'd have to case the top of the shaft with plastic to keep it from collapsing unless you've drilled through bedrock. If you then injected heated Martian air into the hole (you'd want either two shafts side by side or two plastic tubes, one for inputting air and the other for withdrawing it) the Martian bedrock would heat and release water into the shaft, opening the pore spaces. Air can penetrate into the empty pore spaces, so you could then raise the pressure in the shaft mildly to drive warmed air into the rock; then you'd lower the pressure slowly and the air would flow out of the pores into the shaft with water vapor. Gradually over time the warmed zone would expand outward, and each pressurization cycle would push it farther.
If one were drilling through 100 meters of water-saturated bedrock, assuming it has 100 kg of water per cubic meter, if the heated zone reached out one meter from the shaft, you would have heated pi x r squared x height = 3.14 x (1x1) x 100 = 300 cubic meters of rock, containing 30 tonnes of water.
A system like this would require a sophisticated drill, a good power source, a good heat source, casings to line the shaft above the water table, and a two plastic tubes (the outer one to send heated air down, the inner one to pull moist air up; that way you avoid frost buildup in the shaft). But it would yield a lot of distilled water over time, and I suspect it would yield it just about everywhere on Mars. We will see.
If such a system is possible, we could land almost anywhere from the point of view of water. We probably would want to avoid volcanic areas, since this system might not yield much water in fresh (or even old) basalt, but if there were an old crater with sedimentary buildup in the middle of a volcanic field, this system probably would extract water from the sediments in the crater floor.
We probably would not want to land at high altitudes because atmospheric braking would be restricted. If we want to set up a "Martian McMurdo" (a single home base for exploring the planet, as opposed to a series of regional bases as advocated by Zubrin) then we would want a spot near the equator where surface vehicles suffer few mobility restrictions (i.e., few escarpments or fissures or cliff edged valleys blocking the way).
Right now Meridiani and Elysium are at the top of anyone's list, but we still know too little about Mars to finalize the landing spots.
-- RobS
P.S.: The evidence of pervasive subsurface water appears to be growing. If it is true that the axis tilts and the polar icecaps completely disappear and migrate to the equator every few million years--where some of the snow inevitably gets buried under dust--then almost every crater floor should have buried snow somewhere. The gully networks (and some of these "gullies" are tens of kilometers long and hundreds of meters wide and deep!) appear to be reasonably fresh, suggesting periodically available water sources throughout Martian history. Some appear to arise from subsurface discharges of water, while others appear to come from snowmelt on crater rims.
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