Retrograde moons...

karov · 2006-04-07 02:30:40

MarsDog - thank you. This is like the move-the-earth scenario. Begin with pebble to destabilize rock`s orbit, the rock inject to destabilize bigger asteroid, the asteroid planetoid, the planetoid smaller moon or planet ( planemo ), they on their trurn some gas-giant...

BUt, how long such thing would take as time. We`d need several centuries max. in Phoebe - Titan case , I think...

chat · 2006-04-07 17:54:08

karov,

No doubt people would not like mining Saturn's ring for a mars moon.
But a few moonlets from the rings as teraforming impactor objects for mars, i doubt anyone would oppose.

I bet 1 good sized kb object in close to mars as a moon would do a similar job as earths large moon.
With an odd orbit for the moon we should be able to introduce quite a bit of tidal heating to moon and mars, maybe eneough to restart the core on mars.

karov · 2006-04-08 09:45:03

On first glance Saturn rings being "closer" to Mars are good mining site. But in space better measure the distances in Delta-V, not in AE or miles or so. The rings of Saturn need at least 15 km/s to escape velocity... Several moonlets removed - no big deal, but with this plenty of icy objects much closer ( Jupiter Trojans, the Near-Saturn planetoids, the Cantaurs, Damocloides, etc.) why to bother extracting in helocentric orbit gas-giant moonlets` mass? This is not economical. The first Centaur discovered Chiron is >100 km wide... Better to deorbit it... The KBO are so slowly moving that they are perfect for putting in deeper orbits toward the Sun... The ratio kinethic vs. potential orbital energy makes them quite favourable possible volatiles-mass source... They move with about 1000 km/s (?) orbital heliocentric velocity, Delta-V of only several hundred m/s will make them to plummet down with surgicaly sharp shots on every planet we`d like...

About the New martian moon:
-- First, why ( do ) we need it? Mars doesn`t have plate tectonics. See, the four reasons for moon-quakes. One single-spherical plate body will gain only regular quakes due to the tides caused by new comperativelly massive satelite... Do we profit somehow tidally of a new icy martian moon? I doubt. The tides will not restart the planetary dynamo, they`ll not make the planet warmer or better in any sence... Even if the tides re-create volcanism ( I don`t believe so) - what good of it?
-- The ice-ness of the moon -- it should be covered in order to not leak out / dissipate like a giant comet...
-- the only possitive effect I see now would be that we could use the thin martian nowaday atmosphere to deceleate the incomming from the High system icy planetoids. The aerobraking debris would thicken the atmosphere -- the bodies without to crashland/impact will warm up and make the atmosphere denser and if exactly pointed we could give them almost one and a same orbits, where they comperativelly gently to coalesce together into bigger body...

In order the new moon to exert the same level of tides as Moon to Earth, we need the same ratio of mass-to-radius(cubed). Say, 100 km typically Outer system body has 50/50 water+rocks&tar composition, and average density of 1.5x10e3 kg/m3. ... One object of such diameter would be , about 80-100 000 times less massdive than Moon. Such mass should be ~50 times closer to Mars to tide it as much as Moon-the-Earth... 7000 km are within Martian Roche`s limit -- such moon could not coalesce. It would form temporary ring, shadowing even more the sun hungry planet. Even such small 100 km body needs about million 1km comets or 1000 10km ones... really massive work with very arguable benefit.

chat · 2006-04-08 16:58:27

karov,

I was thinking the same thing about the moon for mars.
Other than some sort of temporary place for teraforming mars i don't see the point in a moon.

Maybe on a fully teraformed mars to stabilize the planets tilts, but until then no need exists.

Better to use the resource of building a moon at mars to teraform mars.

Good point about the Saturn rings, didn't give the DV much thought.
In principal it seems logical to get material from the rings, but in practice not so straight forward.

As you point out kb object are easier to move, and in just the location of them the kms will be much higher, much better energies on impacts and much better teraforming materials in them.
Only down side is the length of time to retrieve them.

Karov if you were going to guess at a size for a single kb mars impact to semi teraform (melt temperatures) for mars.
What would you guess?

Lots of math on that for sure, and lets say the kb is 50% water ice, and the Martian poles 75% water ice for guessing purposes.

I still like the near mars asteroids and comets impacts, but the kb's are sounding better and better.

karov · 2006-04-09 07:03:18

The timing of KB impactors is not so huge. It de-scales from the acceleration down in-system... But not all the KBO reside within the Inner KB. Many big ones are perturbed by the little gas-giants out there and now are around the orbit of Saturn and closer. So the plenty and the choise is BIG! We have to choose by composition. A body of water-ammonia mixture of the ices is perfect.

I think take two - about 60-70 km dimater, and collide them just over Mars ( less than 1000 km hight over the surface) under 90 degrees angle, so the debris to spread almost evenly over the surface...

Will make better calculations, but also -- MarsDog , please , give your estimate of such operation, too...

MarsDog · 2006-04-10 02:54:05

some Delta V numbers:
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep533/FALL2001/lecture28.pdf

Perhaps can get close to 50 km/sec on Mars impact from Oort cloud.
Mars Surface escape + Sun escape + Jupiter gravity flyby.

Assume 100 km diameter water object specific gravity = 1

1/2 m v^2 = 1/2 (4/3) Pi (10^5)^3 50,000^2 =
2/3 pi 10^15 25 10^8 = 52.36 10^23 joules

Mars Mass: 6.421 X 10^23 KG
Basalt rock 0.84 10^3 J/kg °K

(52.36 10^23 joules) / (6.421 X 10^23 KG) = 8.15 joules/kg of Mars
8.15 / 0.84 10^3 = 9.70 10^-3 °K = 0.0097 °K almost one hundreth of a degree

Need lot more to melt Mars

Average depth of water:
4.19 10^6 km^3 / 1.448×10^8 km^2 = 0.0282 meters of water

Mars — Diameter: 6,794 KM for fun, plug numbers here:
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Sci … roids.html

will recheck this

chat · 2006-04-10 05:11:05

It looks like a high altitude impact with Mars and a 100km object still wont produce a melt.

The wild card here is high altitude impact or surface impact.
With a high altitude impact the dust ejected is minimal but the elements released from mars into the atmosphere are also minimal and mostly from the impactor.

With a direct impact dust is much higher, heating and release of elements from mars.
So is the recovery time much longer due to the thermal shocks and preceding nuclear winter due to the released dust.

A surface impact with 100km body in any case will produce a global heat pulse that melts everything meters down, but would that be a sustained melt.

I think with the numbers from Mars Dog on the 100 km object and the additional input from a mars itself the 100km will just about do it, but it would need to be a direct thump, and mars cant be just mostly frozen water under the surface and at the poles or it will simply re freeze as global snow.

If its even a sustained degree to low for a permanent melt though we get stuck in a Mars ice ball scenario with no option for escape other than a much bigger impactor to follow.

Thanks for the work on the math Mars and Karov, helps a lot to define the scale of the teraform.

Interesting to think about the bad day on mars when a 100 km object lands.

MarsDog · 2006-04-10 06:40:00

Sorry, Made mistake

Cubic meter water weighs 1,000 kg not 1 kg

So temperature raised 1,000 times more, by 9.7 °K ?

Will recheck water level also

==========================

2.88 cm seems correct = 1/3 (100^3 / 3397^2)

Volume = 4/3 pr^3
Surface = 4pr^2

==========================

Impact deep and vaporize some of Mars to escape velocity ?

karov · 2006-04-10 14:13:39

Thank you , MarsDog.
chat, I think it is almost one and a same thing whether single ball of 100 km ice impacts Mars, or shower of "shrapnelled" into millions of chunks 100 km ice ball ... The showering creates better areal distribution...

The Impact simulator gives good lead about the fate of Mars after impact of compact 100 km ice impactor:
=======================================

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/

Impact Effects
Robert Marcus, H. Jay Melosh, and Gareth Collins
Please note: the results below are estimates based on current (limited) understanding of the impact process and come with large uncertainties; they should be used with caution, particularly in the case of peculiar input parameters. All values are given to three significant figures but this does not reflect the precision of the estimate. For more information about the uncertainty associated with our calculations and a full discussion of this program, please refer to this article

Your Inputs:
Distance from Impact: 20000.00 km = 12420.00 miles
Projectile Diameter: 100000.00 m = 328000.00 ft = 62.10 miles
Projectile Density: 1000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 50.00 km/s = 31.05 miles/s
Impact Angle: 90 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock
Energy:
Energy before atmospheric entry: 6.54 x 1026 Joules = 1.56 x 1011 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size is longer than the Earth's age.
Such impacts could only occur during the accumulation of the Earth, between 4.5 and 4 billion years ago.
Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.
Crater Dimensions:
What does this mean?

Transient Crater Diameter: 481 km = 298 miles
Transient Crater Depth: 170 km = 106 miles

Final Crater Diameter: 1080 km = 670 miles
Final Crater Depth: 2.42 km = 1.5 miles
The crater formed is a complex crater.
The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 5.82e+06 km3 = 1.4e+06 miles3
Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 32.1 km = 19.9 miles
Thermal Radiation:
What does this mean?

The fireball is below the horizon. There is no direct thermal radiation.
Seismic Effects:
What does this mean?

The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 4000 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 12.1 (This is greater than any earthquake in recorded history)
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 20000 km:

IV. Felt indoors by many, outdoors by few during the day. At night, some awakened. Dishes, windows, doors disturbed; walls make cracking sound. Sensation like heavy truck striking building. Standing motor cars rocked noticeably.

V. Felt by nearly everyone; many awakened. Some dishes, windows broken. Unstable objects overturned. Pendulum clocks may stop.

Ejecta:
What does this mean?

Little rocky ejecta reaches this site; fallout is dominated by condensed vapor from the projectile.

Air Blast:
What does this mean?

The air blast will arrive at approximately 60600 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 46500 Pa = 0.465 bars = 6.6 psi
Max wind velocity: 92.7 m/s = 207 mph
Sound Intensity: 93 dB (May cause ear pain)
Damage Description:

Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.

Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.

Glass windows will shatter.

Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.

Tell me more...
Click here for a pdf document that details the observations, assumptions, and equations upon which this program is based. It describes our approach to quantifying the important impact processes that might affect the people, buildings, and landscape in the vicinity of an impact event and discusses the uncertainty in our predictions. The processes included are: atmospheric entry, impact crater formation, fireball expansion and thermal radiation, ejecta deposition, seismic shaking, and the propagation of the atmospheric blast wave.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Earth Impact Effects Program Copyright 2004, Robert Marcus, H.J. Melosh, and G.S. Collins
These results come with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
=================================================

BTW, I know HOW to shower the impactor ( impactors ) without this tricky bussines to target them so exact that to hit eachother -- just choose such approach trajectory that on the impactor route to lie one of the martian moons. I`m sure -- don`t have time tonight to calculate that the impact of Phobos or Deimos onto the Impactor slamming on it -- that the energy of the impact would be greater than the binding energy of the 100 km ice chunk. First sellect the trajectory so that the shower to litter the one hepisphere, the second impact with the other Martian moon -- to cover with impacts densely the other hemisphere...

karov · 2006-04-10 14:18:07

Time for maximum radiation: 34.7 seconds after impact

Visible fireball radius: 1420 km = 885 miles
The fireball appears 162 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure: 6.04 x 1010 Joules/m2
Duration of Irradiation: 22600 seconds
Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 2680

====================================

THese are the results from 2000 km distance.

MarsDog · 2006-04-10 21:42:01

I think it is almost one and a same thing whether single ball of 100 km ice impacts Mars, or shower of "shrapnelled" into millions of chunks 100 km ice ball ... The showering creates better areal distribution...

Going extreme other way:

Line up 100 of these Oort cloud objucts, aim directly towards Mars's iron core.
If they hit one right after the other can the iron core be reached ?
Extreme high density and termperature plasma, similar to ati tank armor piercing.
Average temperarure rise of Mars almost 1,000 K.
Lot of vulcanoes and 2.8 meter water after cooling down.

karov · 2006-04-11 02:33:49

I duscussed such idea in Drilling by light, Venus collisional.. ec. I think such approach would work... Equal if you pierce a planemo with very long impactor - more spear than bullet -- but your interpretation is better, better to align seveal hundred cometary bodies of 1km diameter , hitting one after the other in perfect timing.. than to bother to find or worse! to create , say cilindical impactor of 1km widght and 100-200 km lenght. The "spear" could bend also, or just shatter in drops, cause hypervelocities liquify everithing.
Perhaps is better the first impactors to be wider and less dense, the last of the cadcade to be smaller and denser.
A good lead again is the size and depth of the transitional craters from the Impact simulator. First for 2 km icy bodies hitting sedimentary rock, then for 1km rocky bodies hitting basalt... BTW, It is not necessary , I suppose the impact sequence to rach down to the iron martian core. The deeper mantle is enough. 1000 km depth?

===========
2 km iceteroid hitting Martian crust, crater:
-------------------
Crater Dimensions:
What does this mean?

Transient Crater Diameter: 22.7 km = 14.1 miles
Transient Crater Depth: 8.01 km = 4.98 miles

Final Crater Diameter: 34.2 km = 21.2 miles
Final Crater Depth: 0.857 km = 0.532 miles
The crater formed is a complex crater.
The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 46 km3 = 11 miles3
Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 114 meters = 374 feet
=================================
1km stone asteroid hitting again with 50 km/s denser / deeper rock, crater:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Crater shape is normal in spite of atmospheric crushing; fragments are not significantly dispersed.

Transient Crater Diameter: 17.4 km = 10.8 miles
Transient Crater Depth: 6.14 km = 3.81 miles

Final Crater Diameter: 25.3 km = 15.7 miles
Final Crater Depth: 0.783 km = 0.486 miles
The crater formed is a complex crater.
The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 14.4 km3 = 3.46 miles3
Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 60.9 meters = 200 feet
=================================

You see for 1000 km depth , we`d need less than 200 impactors for this impactor "machinegun"...

chat · 2006-04-11 05:13:56

MarsDog,

Do we need hundreds of iron asteroids or just 1 or 2 traveling at very high kms.?

If we brought 1 or 2 do the planetary free gravity assists to increase speed of the asteroid all the way back to mars.

Wonder if we could get the kms up high enough, would it do the same thing as many slower impactors?

chat · 2006-04-11 05:37:23

karov,

The surface impactor in one place will contain heat longer in one area.
I guess that is the only plus to a direct impact.

On the poles the direct impact makes some seance, but breaking it up as smaller impactors does have the plus of spreading out the heat.

That same 100km object traveling 2x or 4x the speed would have a very significant difference in what it does to mars.

I think teraforming Mars with impactors all depends on what Mars gasses out in the impact.

If mars has a decent store of co2 frozen underground then 100 km object might be much bigger than is needed to teraform mars, but if its almost all water ice frozen underground then 100 km might be much to small.

If i was going to guess about the properties of mars i would guess at its composition somewhere between earth and Venus, if that is true then lots of frozen co2 exists on Mars.

Earth before life had similar properties to the composition of Venus, so mars might more resemble the elements of pre life earth and no life Venus. enormous amounts of co2.

chat · 2006-04-11 05:53:02

I'm not even sure of a mechanism to make polar water ice on mars.
Co2 poles i understand, but if they are only water ice how did they form on the poles only?

Co2 at cold temperatures can evaporate and slowly form a pole co2 ice as the planet slowly cools.
But h20 in the very cold climate where co2 has already frozen out shouldn't migrate only to the poles, you should see patches of water snow all over mars.

I can understand co2 ice covered in thin h20 ice at the poles as the poles slowly collect trace h20 snow.

I bet the poles are almost all frozen co

MarsDog · 2006-04-11 15:05:32

Do we need hundreds of iron asteroids or just 1 or 2 traveling at very high kms.?

Mars plus Sun escape is only 39 km/sec,
Optimistic gravity assists from gas giant planets might give 50 km/sec total.
Cannot think of a way to get more from within the solar system.

Substitute liquid hydrogen in place of icy objects and try for thermonuclear ??
need 1 Giga Kelvin at least http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion

from: http://mooni.fccj.org/~ethall/gases/gases.htm
u^2 = 3RT/M T=u^2 M /3R R=8.31
50,000^2 * 2 / 3 * 8.31 = 200,561,572 °K is only 20% required temperature.
If you has 2 objects colliding at 50 km/sec fot a total of 100 km or 802,246,289 °K
Not enough, so need fusion as a starter in a hydrogen bomb.

But some velocities are considerably greater
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect … press.html

chat · 2006-04-12 04:35:54

MarsDog,

Gas giant assists then sun assist then impact on mars.
Bet that still only gets us up around 100kms though, still not enough for a teraform unless mars is a co2 storehouse.
But that does get mars to about 40% with 1 impactor.

That might get it down to maybe 2 or 3 impactors with the additional sun assist.
Getting very technical to have the gas giants and sun and mars line up for an impact on mars from the kb though.

Big objects traveling at near 100kms crossing the earths orbital plane, i bet wouldn't be a real popular idea.

Adding a nuclear engine to the impactor to increase speed all the way and we might just be able to do it with 1 impactor.
Looks like we need about 250kms for a single impactor to teraform mars or two at 125kms directly following each other.

I think the 125kms is possible but the 250kms I'm not sure is even with nuclear assist.

chat · 2006-04-12 04:51:04

MarsDog,
What about this idea for high kms impactors.

An impactor that travels in the plane of Saturn passing Saturn many times until it has whatever velocity you desire, a perpetual Saturn assist.

When it reaches the desired kms you alter the orbit slightly towards mars?

Not sure how you keep it in the Saturn orbital plane, but if possible very high kms can be reached.

MarsDog · 2006-04-12 05:01:43

I thought of sneaking in a few Hydrogen composition objects in place of the water based ones. Don't kmow if can make a giant Hydrogen bomb that way.

After the first few have made a deep hole, a properly placed bomb inside the mantle, with other masses behind could really blow things up.

chat · 2006-04-12 06:09:35

MarsDog,

On Mars couldn't you just use a self sustained hole digger ?(similar to the ice melting idea at ganymede).

Dig down with it as far as you can on Mars then explode it in or near the center.
Mars has no real internal heat to mention so drilling a few 100km or even right to the middle of mars shouldn't be a gigantic problem.

You would need a mighty big h bomb on the other end of the digger to do anything useful though.
No fear of radiating mars at the surface though.

I wonder what kind of monster bomb would reheat mars internally?
Theoretically no limit exists as to how big a bomb you can use.

chat · 2006-04-12 06:21:15

MarsDog,

When you make the monster h bomb you could use some real nasty elements we would never think of using that create awful radiation in the middle of mars.

May as well add as much heat and radiation for as long a period as possible if its contained inside mars.

karov · 2006-04-12 06:53:16

I thought of sneaking in a few Hydrogen composition objects in place of the water based ones. Don't kmow if can make a giant Hydrogen bomb that way.
After the first few have made a deep hole, a properly placed bomb inside the mantle, with other masses behind could really blow things up.

MarsDog,

100 km/s enough for fusing Lithium Deuteride ( LiD ) "pellet" ( but kilometers wide and weighting billions and more tonnes ) . The yield is about 1 000 000 times bigger than the corresponding chemical reaction mass. Say 1 km wide spherical LiD impactor ( properly covered with say SiC or ceramics in order to survive the passing through the 'fireballs' filled tunnel, run multiple times in gravity assist tennis between Jupiter and Saturn to achieve 150 km/s, would yield - how much energy?

Impact nuclear fusion of LiD would generate tremendous fast neutrons flux, which has another two advantages -- 1. The neutrons will carry the detonation heat to much greater volume of the martian guts, 2. The fast neutrons will turn serious quantity of inner martian rocks into secondary radioactive, hence releasing energy from secondary nuclear reactions for long time...

But I like the serial impactor machine-gun scheme more... witout to be amplified with thermonuclear impact fusor. Just we should estimate the timing, cause the impact fireballs should be big and rarefied enough before the next to plunge into the hole... The burst/fireball pressure would keep the tunel walls from collapsing for enough time the next portion to burst...

chat,

1. The martain polar ice is water. Almost all the lowlands are indeed frozen mud covered with dust...
2. It is not easy to dig into planet deep because the hydrostatic pressure works to over rocks. Theey are not solid under high pressure, but mor like sirup.
3. What exactly you like to warm up? Litering the whole surface of Mars with millions of Tunguska event impactors, after schrapnelling the bigger impactor , via calculating the Martian moons Phobos and Dimos to be onto the collision course will cause GLOBAL regolith devolatilization!!! down to depth of dozens of meters. So, one could stear up the whole martian surface and close subsurface volatiles composition. Thus, ALL the water and CO2 will be liberated into the atmosfere, without to count in the very impactor volatile comosition... I think in such state the martian + added volatiles would be much easier for manipulation, than only remains the solar influx to bee regulated via morrors and soleta lenses.
4. The penetrating serial impact and/or thermonuclear impactor is necessary only if we want to wake up martian geology, which i find more a liability , than a solution... although interesting...

MarsDog,

I think that the serial impactnig is the solution for big deal of the astroengineering works. Thus indeed could be stored energy within HIgh system or interstellar bodies, which after that to be utilized as geothermal. Such way, even brown and grey dwarfs system could be restarted into more primordial state...

Thus, we could inject lots of heat into Titan, Pluto, Xena type of worlds, which energy to support habitation later gradually released for multimillion years long use...

Your "thermonuclar impact ignited impactors" could be accelerated Orion-style with lesser bombs where there aren`t suitably big attractors for gravity assists...

karov · 2006-04-12 07:20:36

Comparison between 1 km water-ice impactor vs. 1 km ( or indeed the same mass!!!) LiD "thermonuclear" impactor energy yield at 100 km/s terminal velocity ( The figures are very approximate. The value for the water impactor I`ll take from the Asteroid Impactor directly -- for the LiD fusor-impactor, I`ll calculate roughly on 10exp6 times its mass in TNT equivalent + the kinethical energy.
=====================
1 km ice = 2.62 x 10exp21 Joules = 6.25 x 10exp5 MegaTons TNT

same mass of LiD = roughly 550 000 000 MegaTons TNT or about 3x10exp24 Joules + 625 000 from kinethic ~ the kinethic energy would be less than 0.2% of the nuclear yield-- MarsDog, DEFFINITELLY there is sence to go nuclear...
=====================

Just for figure out from wiki` orders of magnitude energy article: the fusing of the impactor would inject in the Martian mantle about ( 1.5 × 1022J — total energy from the Sun that hits the Earth in 24 hours ) times 200.

The fusion depth should be significant, if the nuclear impactors are the last pieces of the series, than this could give time the crater/tunel collapse to burry the giant nuclear explosion. Mars still will be intact mostly - it gravitational binding energy is at least in orders of 10exp30, but if the blat is too shallow the power injection could be lost in giant splash out of the layers above it.

How deep -- 200 km?

The scenario becomes clearer: say 100 of icy objects with diminishing size ( 10 km, 9,5 km, ... 1.5 km...) hitting under the normally achievable 50 km/s every few seconds to keep the going deeper and deeper crater open, each of them digging several dozens of km more, followed by an array of iron impactors and the last one utilizing the very moment when the crater=tunel is not collapsed yet to hit directly the very heart of Mars with several dozens of fusor-impactors...

The same procedure could work with Titan, Triton, Xena, Pluto, etc...

chat · 2006-04-13 05:25:06

karov,

If the lowlands of mars is dust and water ice how did the polar water ice form in its current configuration.

As soon as the bar pressure is low enough for no clouds how do we get a substantial deposit of water ice on just the poles.

Either the pole ice shouldn't be in its quantity or the lowlands shouldn't have water ice.

That is why i think the poles are co2 covered in thin h20.
If it is h20 ice on the poles of mars its a riddle as to how they formed, and why mars doesn't have polar ice from pole to much lower latitudes in a thinner layer.

With co2 we can form pole ice on mars in its current configuration, then as the bar pressure drops a thin layer of water ice and permafrost everywhere until the bar pressure is to low for the transport of h20.

I'm not saying the poles at mars are mostly co2, but it fits a logical path to how they could form.
Another mechanism might explain them beautifully with h20 ice, but i cant figure out how.

The high speed impactor, just toying with the idea of heating both outside and inside at once.
Not sure any impact will be fast enough for that though.

The idea of drilling into mars and exploding a mega bomb.
It has its charm, but the machine to get deep into mars wouldn't be a simple one, more like a driller swimmer, but a self contained unit that carries its bomb with it shouldn't be a difficult build.

I also think the bomb would have to be such an enormous yield to do anything useful that its probably unrealistic, on the other hand you could make them on mars and make as many as you like.

karov · 2006-04-13 13:04:25

wikipedia : Mars
========================
"...In the winter months when the poles are in continual darkness, the surface gets so cold that as much as 25% of the entire atmosphere condenses out into thick slabs of CO2 ice (dry ice). When the poles are again exposed to sunlight the CO2 ice sublimates, creating enormous winds that sweep off the poles as fast as 250 mph (400 km/h). These seasonal actions transport large amounts of dust and water vapor giving rise to Earth-like frost and large cirrus clouds. Clouds of water-ice were photographed by the Opportunity rover in 2004.[4]
..."
========================

And various other water cycle mechanisms...

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#26 2006-04-07 02:30:40

Re: Retrograde moons...

#27 2006-04-07 17:54:08

Re: Retrograde moons...

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Re: Retrograde moons...

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Re: Retrograde moons...

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Re: Retrograde moons...

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Re: Retrograde moons...

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Re: Retrograde moons...

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Re: Retrograde moons...

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Re: Retrograde moons...

#36 2006-04-10 21:42:01

Re: Retrograde moons...

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Re: Retrograde moons...

#38 2006-04-11 05:13:56

Re: Retrograde moons...

#39 2006-04-11 05:37:23

Re: Retrograde moons...

#40 2006-04-11 05:53:02

Re: Retrograde moons...

#41 2006-04-11 15:05:32

Re: Retrograde moons...

#42 2006-04-12 04:35:54

Re: Retrograde moons...

#43 2006-04-12 04:51:04

Re: Retrograde moons...

#44 2006-04-12 05:01:43

Re: Retrograde moons...

#45 2006-04-12 06:09:35

Re: Retrograde moons...

#46 2006-04-12 06:21:15

Re: Retrograde moons...

#47 2006-04-12 06:53:16

Re: Retrograde moons...

#48 2006-04-12 07:20:36

Re: Retrograde moons...

#49 2006-04-13 05:25:06

Re: Retrograde moons...

#50 2006-04-13 13:04:25

Re: Retrograde moons...

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