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This is for a school project. Are there any raw materials or elements on Mars that can be valuable (like gold) on Earth? Please help, kthx.
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Yes, Mars has roughly the same stuff as Earth.
But if you want to make an impression: talk about PGM.
That is: Platinum Group Minerals.
Platinum is currently more valuable than gold, and will even increase in costliness.
Why? Becaues there will be much more demand for it, Already it is used in a staggering amount of industrial processes, petrol industry, fertiliser, explosives... as a catalyst, but the demand will even increase because it is used in fuel-cells, the new power-source you will increasingly see being used in cars, as laptop-batteries replacements, in cellphones etc.
So Earth will need mor and more PGM's, price will soar.
Now, on earth, all platinum comes from space already, in a way. That is: the PGM found on Earth mostly comes from old asteroids, buried deep or less deep in the ground, hence hard to find, etc.
On Mars, wich has little to no atmosphere, asteroids containing PGMs crash down, and well, the pieces scatter on the surface, and lay there undisturbed for aaaages, so eventually, over the course of millions of years of meteor impacts, you can imagine there are quite a lot of these fragments just lying around. this in contrast with Earth, where our climate (wind, rain, mudslides etc etc) quite quickly buries these meteorfragments over the centuries. Which makes them much harder to find (because there is not a big impact every year, heh, you get the picture)
So on Mars you could literally walk around, bend down and pick up these pieces, they'll be virtually everywhere, just for grabs.
Of course, you wouldn't want to just haul these pieces as you found them into your lander and bring them back to Earth, because they're far from 100% Platinum, so you'd have to have an installation to puryfy them on Mars first, which will be expensive, because it is quite energy intensive to do so, you need lots of electricity, but still would be possible to make a profit, just because the purified PGMs are so precious.
The same can be said for the mood, which is also peppered with such fragments, and very probably the first semi-permanent base there will experiment with purification-installations to bring back some PGM's to Earth.
I suggest you google for Platinum Group Metals to get some more info for its uses, prices etc on Earth.
wikipedia has a good overview too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum_g … oup_metals
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Won't work...sorry.
It comes down to cost per pound to retrieve these metals and return them to Earth. The cost would be staggering, since sending even a single pound of payload to or from Mars is extremely high. We need better reasons to establish regular bus service to Mars...say colonization.
You want to get metals for use on Earth? See this story:
'Parameter Error,' one of the stories in the sci-fi anthology 'Dimensions.'
You can find it at Adventure Books of Seattle. Miners work for years to attach a low-thrust (and very large) engine to an asteroid and move it into Earth orbit for mining purposes. Surprising results. 8)
Don't give up reaching for the stars...
just build yourself a bigger ladder.
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PGMs will be harder to find on Mars than the Moon due to the increased gravity well and Mars having an atmosphere. But they will be present, though the likehood is it will also be more expensive to deliver these items back to the Earth.
Another possibility is that by the time we get to Mars we will have a serious space culture and facilities in orbit and the Moon. Mars though it is further away, does have all the building blocks to create a substantial civilisation and this includes agriculture. There is nothing to stop Mars with its lower gravity to deliver grown food to the Moon and Earth orbit cheaper than it can be grown there or even delivered from Earth. Its not the distance that is the problem it comes down to how much energy is reguired to get it there.
Still there is also the possibility that our search for minerals will take us to the asteroid belt. And there Mars will be in a prime situation to supply water and Food to these prospectors.
Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.
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