New Mars Forums

Why do you have to be so blessed practical, Phobos?!
   O.K. .. How about one young cow and a few dozen frozen embryos?
   I understand that in Scandinavian countries, it's not uncommon to keep cattle in indoor pens through the long winter months. Surely a cow could survive 6 months in transit to Mars!
   I have to confess, though ... you've got me a bit worried about the hay!!
   Can anyone suggest a way around this problem?
                                           ???

Hi Adrian!  Don't want to bother you during exams so I'll understand if you don't respond immediately to this.
   But you mentioned that membership is increasing quite rapidly. Do you mean membership of The Mars Society or New Mars (or both)?
   Incidentally, are all of the New Mars members necessarily members of The Mars Society? If not, what proportion is?
   Also, if some New Mars members aren't in The Mars Society, should we be trying to encourage them to join?
   I hope these aren't painfully obvious questions or anything but I've never really thought about it and I'm curious.
                                       :0

This could be the early beginnings of a subtle groundswell of opinion in favour of Mars.
   The fact that it is espoused by a right-wing publication is encouraging since that kind of person is, traditionally, likely to have money and is likely to know people in positions of executive power and/or authority ... i.e. "the establishment"!
   It seems that the prospect of America being denied any formal rights over the Moon and Mars, coupled with the stated intention of China (the last significant communist power) to stake at least a commercial claim to parts of both, might be starting to register in the consciousness of the Washington bureaucracy! And the thought of the UN standing on Mars and dictating terms to Uncle Sam is just too much to bear!!
   Elsewhere I've suggested that the best reasons to go to Mars are because we're curious and we have to explore. If gung-ho jingoism turns out to be the only thing that will actually get us there, then so be it. Better than not going at all!
   Even if it means the first expedition to Mars consists entirely of property-rights lawyers!!
                                             

I hope I haven't made things sound too depressing, Cindy!
   I'm still hopeful that the whole Martian environment is on a "hair-trigger" as far as the atmosphere is concerned. This is no new idea, of course, but has been made more likely (at least to my mind) by the fabulous good news about the quantity of subsurface water now believed to exist in the Martian regolith. Some people are inclined to think there may be enough (so far discovered) to create a layer up to 500 metres deep over the whole planet .... that's assuming the topography could be smoothed out to make Mars a true sphere!
   It may be that just by raising the temperature sufficiently, a whole train of events might be triggered whereby the atmosphere could thicken to maybe 500 mbars or more. If so, you'd end up with a very respectable troposphere virtually automatically! It wouldn't be breathable, of course, since most of it would still be CO2, but we could keep it warm with carefully chosen super greenhouse gases and wander around the surface with a simple "breather" ... no space-suit required!
   There!! Doesn't that sound more optimistic?!
                                           

OHHH!!! Now I get it! At last I understand NASA's procrastination.
   They've figured out that if they just keep stalling with this Mars exploration thing, they'll have better rockets with more thrust pushing spacecraft made of lighter, stronger materials!
   H***!!  If they wait long enough, say another 30 years, we'll probably have warp-drive and be able to get to Mars a few days before we leave Earth!!
   You can probably forget Mars Direct and the NASA Reference Mission. Seems to me NASA ain't goin' no place 'til they've invented a better mouse-trap!!
                                         

It seems to me that a higher frequency stream of very low-yield bombs might be more comfortable for the crew than a low frequency stream of higher-yield bombs.
   Wouldn't it be better to have 0.1kt explosions every 0.5 seconds than Mark S's 3kt explosions every 5 or 6 seconds? I'm not trying to be critical and I know Mark S is just trying to be practical by using off-the-shelf hardware. But I'm genuinely curious about yield and frequency ... is it possible to produce 0.05kt bombs and pump them out every, say, 0.2 seconds? There must be a lower limit to both yield and timing, I suppose. I imagine the natural resonant frequency of the spring system behind the plate would have to be matched to the frequency of the blasts, too(? )
   I believe the pusher plate itself is not really a problem. Although the thermal pulse from a nearby detonation runs to millions of degrees, it is very short-lived. It seems that only a very thin surface layer of the plate is vapourised for each explosion and, apparently, one plate can be made to withstand thousands of them.
   Adrian's right, of course, when he indicates it'll be a cold day in Hades when they OK surface launches for Orion!! Still, some people say we're overdue for an ice-age!
                                   

I agree with Dayton3 and Bob Zubrin. In my opinion, much of any early exploratory effort relies on luck. Without wishing to labour the unpopular parallels drawn between the old American West and Mars, how many wagon trains had dedicated medical personnel back in 1875?
   Going to Mars is a risky business and you can't possibly cover every conceivable eventuality. Even if you take a general surgeon with you, what can s/he do without a properly equipped O.R. and support staff? What if your geologist dies on the way and you lose the benefit of that expertise for the whole 500 days on Mars? What if your mechanical engineer has an unforeseen massive stroke and can't fix the descent engine for the landing? ... The list goes on and on.
   I think Mars Direct would work as it stands. Have everyone able to do lots of different things and just trust to luck. A fifth person makes the mission bigger, heavier, and more costly. And each extra person is another possible medical emergency anyway! ... Who's to say the surgeon won't get sick?!
   Let's face it ... WE CAN'T ELIMINATE RISK!! The sooner NASA realises that, the better.
                                             

Hi Byron!
   Yes, I believe dirigibles would be a very elegant way of getting around on Mars. And I understand it's a practicable idea, too.
   Because Mars' atmosphere is effectively inert and can't support combustion, we can use hydrogen for lift without fear of another "Hindenberg" disaster. And the news about all that water ice in the regolith means we should be able to produce large quantities of hydrogen by electrolysis.
   Unless or until we thicken the air on Mars, winged heavier-than-air craft may prove too difficult to use. So dirigibles may be the method of choice in the early years of colonisation/terraformation.
   There's actually a very interesting account of a dirigible flight on Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars", "Green Mars", "Blue Mars" trilogy. They're quite heavy going in places but, if you haven't read them yet, they're well worth the time and are practically required reading for Mars nuts, anyhow!
   Good to hear from you, Byron! And I'm sure this topic will create a lot of interest.
                                       

A very good point, C M .
   I'm pretty sure the automated methane production experiment wasn't taken to its obvious conclusion: Cryogenic storage.
   Maybe Dr. Zubrin just assumes that power from the nuclear reactor will be used to maintain a miniaturised cryogenic facility to keep the gases liquid(? ) Easier said than done, I suppose?!
   You've certainly got me thinking, now. If Bob Zubrin is serious about Mars Direct, and I'm sure he is, a demonstration of the entire production AND STORAGE  process is surely a necessity.
                                      ???

Now just a minute all you certifiable whackos out there! You can't just hijack my "Gravito-Magnetic Effect" Topic with all your delusional delinquency!!
   This is a serious Topic, I'll have you know.
   Just a minute ... got to ... adjust my metal helmet. ... Thought rays from NASA ... seeping in ...! Feel strange .....
                                    :0

I sympathise with Cindy's point of view but, a viable colony on Mars or anywhere else is at least decades away ... probably 50 years at best.
   Half a century is plenty of time for the religious lunatics in the world to put paid to civilisation in the name of their god. So it's too late to shift enough people off-Earth to save what's best of our world-culture. And besides, even if you somehow managed it, it's cold comfort for those of us left behind!
   The whole concept of pursuing space exploration as some kind of remedy for our self-destructive tendencies is, at least in the near term, a forlorn hope. As a long term insurance against natural disasters it's a more practicable idea.
   On a more optimistic note, my 2 cents worth is that I don't believe either India or Pakistan is stupid enough to use nuclear weapons. For all their blustering and ridiculous posturing (we're so much like apes sometimes it makes me squirm), somewhere in their leaders' cerebral cortexes is the nagging realisation that nobody wins in a nuclear exchange!
   Somebody tried to tell me that the present acrimony between India and Pakistan has been fomented by Bin Laden's  organisation in an attempt to destabilise the world. Does anybody know which way the prevailing winds blow in Kashmir? If they blow west, radioactive fallout could well fall on the land of the Prophet, Saudi Arabia ... Bin Laden's own home ground. Even Al Q'Aida can't win a nuclear war! Radioactive fission products don't care if you're christian, muslim, or jewish .... they'll kill you just the same.
   Let's put all this nonsense to the back of our minds and go to Mars for the right reasons: Because we're curious and because we need to explore. Those are the best reasons!
                                   

Maybe nobody will believe me now, but I spotted the exact same thing that caught GOM's eye. "something amazing" really got my attention too!
   I think I was looking for something profound in all this new information about Martian water but was just a little disappointed to find that all they were really doing was confirming earlier findings.
   I think Adrian is right, though. I think it's just that once you know you have squillions of tons of water (ice) on a planet, the possibilities for life and future exploration/colonisation become so much more .... well ... possible!!
   A thought occurred to me about all that water sitting close to the surface in the southern hemisphere: The southern hemisphere is some 5 kilometres or more higher than the northern hemisphere, on average. The northern hemisphere is looking more and more like it was probably host to an ocean, or at least some very large lakes, in the past. (We can see the evidence that water poured northwards in vast quantities from aquifers in the southern highlands, probably on more than one occasion.)
   Yet today we find that there is a huge reservoir of water again in the southern hemisphere, some 5 kms higher than the northern plains!
   Does this mean that Mars does indeed have (or at least had) an active hydrological cycle which somehow has taken water from the lowlands and redeposited it in the highlands? And, if so, could the process have taken place many times as the climate on Mars has periodically warmed and cooled?
   I am very much hoping that this is the case because it would mean that most of the water Mars started with has probably not been lost to space after all, but is safely stored back in the southern aquifers. Much of it may be stored in the northern hemisphere also, as an enormous frozen artesian basin under great pressure from the weight of subsurface ice to the south!
   This would fit in with my pet theory (not exclusively mine, I realise) that the Martian climate is on a "hair trigger". I suspect small external factors cause regular and very large changes in the Martian climate and atmospheric density. This pet theory sees Mars as cold and dry for long periods (perhaps millions of years), interspersed with episodes of watery warmth which may last for many thousands of years. Carl Sagan tended to favour this hypothesis, I believe, and speculated about indigenous organisms hibernating through long ferocious winters to emerge like desert flowers when the waters flowed again.
   I confess I'm romantically in love with the idea and so my judgment is probably clouded! But the latest information from Odyssey is certainly pandering to my infatuation!!
   If all that water is still there, and the climate can easily be induced to change, then we CAN terraform Mars! And maybe more easily than we dared to hope.
   GO ODYSSEY !!