opening the cache was stopped by 2 screws that did not want to loosen up.
]]>We've spotted the OSIRISREx capsule on the ground, the parachute has separated, and the helicopters are arriving at the site. We're ready to recover that sample!
https://twitter.com/NASASolarSystem/sta … 5107279885
After a journey of nearly 3.9 billion miles, the OSIRISREx asteroid sample return capsule is back on Earth. Teams perform the initial safety assessment—the first persons to come into contact with this hardware since it was on the other side of the solar system.
]]>it seems to have landed a little ahead of schedule with variation in weather conditions
]]>If you compare to the price of a Mars sample which no agency has sampled from Mars, the MSR has been costing $4.4 billion, Mars Sample Return has been predicted to rise to budgets of $8 billion to $11 billion.
]]>The OSIRISREx spacecraft has released the capsule containing a piece of asteroid Bennu. The capsule will plummet through space for four hours, enter the atmosphere over California and land about 13 minutes later in Utah.
]]>NASA effort to bring home asteroid rocks will end this weekend in triumph or a crash
If all goes as planned, on Sunday morning a bell-shaped space capsule the size of a mini-fridge will come screaming down through the atmosphere toward a Utah desert.
Inside will be some precious cargo: about a cup's worth of rock and dust that a NASA spacecraft collected from an asteroid called Bennu that was, at the time, more than 200 million miles away.
This will be the biggest amount of extraterrestrial material to be brought back to Earth by any nation since the Apollo astronauts hauled home moon rocks, and it's the culmination of NASA's first mission to bring home samples of an asteroid.
The only way out for nukes or impactors is to make the asteroid fly apart very far from Earth, so that the diameter of the shotgun blast of its particles will be very much larger than the diameter of the Earth. That is how you reduce the total mass impacting Earth, but at the cost of every patch of ground on the impact side of Earth getting hit.
Just food for thought. Lindley Johnson at NASA would agree with me. I met him in Granada in 2009 at that asteroid defense conference.
GW
]]>https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/11/world/na … index.html
The report seems to be fairly well written for a general audience.
Dates of 2018 and 2035 are mentioned as of interest for "close encounters"
(th)
]]>I know how steel is made here on Earth. Those processes will not work out in vacuum and near-zero-gravity. But there is bound to be a process that would work. The killer will be controlling impurities, especially in the carbon, not the steel-making process itself. We do that by coking the coal down here on Earth. You cannot do that in vacuum. But again, there has to be some process that would work.
What might it mean if large quantities of high-quality steel and steel alloys were available "out there" without resort to import from Earth? Lots of forum participants have wondered about that for a Mars colony? But this is outside even THAT gravity well!
GW
]]>It was the custom in Korea during the time of the Korean War to use human sewage directly in the garden. This was in a country which at that time most people were small farmers. Such may still be true today, I don't know. More people there are city dwellers today.
But what it shows is a "circuit" on a small scale, from waste to produce. Not really a closed cycle, but almost. This is a technique that goes back to the stone age. We already know it works. And quite well.
Modified with a little sewage treatment to control disease, this should still work in smallish near-closed-cycle situations today.
I personally don't know how to do that, but observing how nearly-closed that cycle has been these last 10 millennia, says quite clearly that this will work. You only have to make up those differences traceable to it not being a fully-closed cycle. And that is really a rather favorable outcome.
If you will excuse my choice for words, just "food for thought".
GW (bad joke and all)
PS - first cut approximation: waste + wastewater output from a person ~ water + food intake into a person. ~5 pounds in, ~5 pounds out, each day. What could be simpler?
PPS: I have broached this same topic as "food for thought" in RobertDyck's large ship topic, as well.
]]>This discussion is a perfect illustration of how the new admission policy for this forum can make a difference ....
It is now possible (and indeed obligatory) to bring in new members with the expertise needed to address various problems/challenges that are identified in the course of planning for settlement of Mars.
Asteroid Bennu is an example (of many) of useful resources wandering around the Solar System, ready to be harvested by enterprising human communities.
There are (on Earth) persons who specialize in biological processes that support agriculture. Such a person, or perhaps even an institution which employs them, could address the questions you've posed with authority, and (equally importantly) guide the decision making of the thousands of people who will be working to build up a viable self-sustaining community on the Moon, as well as on Mars, where the challenges are less severe but still significant.
My observation is that 78,000,000 tons of manure is quite likely to occur for a population as large as that of Earth.
If someone with posting access to this forum would be willing to investigate, I'd be interested to know approximately how many humans are needed and for what period of time they would exert themselves, to make 78,000,000 tons of manure.
(th)
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