New Mars Forums

Mars' crustal fields don't do much in the way of shielding the surface from cosmic radiation. That's because any low energy particles that would be deflected by the crustal field would be absorbed by the atmosphere anyway. The moon is a different story, since it has virtually no atmosphere.

I would mention here that McKay, along with Margarita Marinova and Hirofumi Hashimoto, redid the calculations using PFCs several years ago. Their study involved measuring the spectra of a few candidate greenhouse gases not previously characterized.

Radiative-convective model of warming Mars with artificial greenhouse gases
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 110, E03002, 15 PP., 2005
dx.doi.org/10.1029/2004JE002306

They've actually been releasing both unaltered and white balanced images for everything, though I find it's sometimes tricky to track both down. The unaltered is closer to what a person would see on Mars, but the white balanced is more useful scientifically because geologists can use their intuition based on Earth coloration and better identify interesting targets.

For example, here's an unaltered image:

And here's the white-balanced version:

Hi there Koeng!

Using organisms like bacteria is a very powerful tool when thinking about how to terraform other bodies in our solar system. It's primary drawbacks are that it tends to be a bit slow, and there have to be at least some pre-existing areas where the life can survive. Titan's surface is particularly bad, because it is only 94 Kelvin, which is very, very cold. In fact, if it a just bit colder, the N2 in Titan's atmosphere would condense out and form a liquid N2 ocean! At these temperatures, water ice is as hard as a rock, and any form of life we know of (including methanotrophs) would simply not work. It may some day be possible to engineer life that operates in methane solvent (and I know scientists who try to invent biochemistry for that; it's very difficult compared to water). However, we would have to build it "from scratch" because all the proteins and lipids that are the basis of life on Earth would not work in liquid methane. That would be a huge undertaking.

Things are a little better high up in Titan's atmosphere. Like Earth, Titan has a warm stratosphere, and it can get up to almost 200 Kelvin, which is similar to temperatures in Antarctica during the winter on Earth. We know that some organisms on Earth have organic molecules dissolved in their cellular fluid that act as an anti-freeze, allowing them to live well below the freezing point of water (273 Kelvin). However, this usually just allows the cell to survive through a very cold winter; it wouldn't be able to carry out normal functions this way. It's a long shot, but maybe some better anti-freeze molecules could be developed and allow bacteria to be active under the conditions in Titan's stratosphere. There are lot of organics floating around up there, so if you can figure out the temperature problem you would be in pretty good shape.

I'd just add that Saturn lacks the intense radiation belts that Jupiter has, making long term operation of electronics (and biology) possible without massive amounts of shielding. As long as you are beyond 4 Saturn radii, or approximately Enceladus and further, you don't need to worry as much about the radiation belts. On the other hand, Saturn's magnetic field shields the moons from solar and cosmic rays, which is convenient since none of them have their own magnetic field.

Ultimately, if it's in the next couple decades at least, it's going to be limited to when we have some nice close oppositions. The Viking missions went during an unfavorable opposition and Viking 2 took 333 days to reach Mars. On the other hand, the MERs launched during an extremely favorable opposition and Opportunity took just 202 days to make the journey. The next time we'll have an opposition like that will be 2018, but there's no way we'll be ready for a manned mission by then (in fact, NASA probably won't even have ANY mission, given the recent planetary science cuts...and ESA's own plans are in jeopardy as well). The next one after that will be 2035. So I suppose that's my estimate (give or take 2 years for the almost as good oppositions before and after). But I would predict we'll complete a robotic Mars sample return mission and perform manned missions to an asteroid or two in the 2020s (actually NASA is currently setting up a NEO survey involving amateur astronomers, in part to find appropriate objects for missions). We'll then perform a similar manned operation to a Martian moon ca 2030, and then we'll be all ready for a Mars landing.

In a climate model the atmosphere of the planet is divided into 3D 'boxes' on a latitudinal/longitudinal grid with vertical layers. The horizontal resolution is usually 64x32 or 128x64 for Mars models; that would be roughly 5.6° and 2.8° squares respectively. Higher resolutions can be prohibitively long to run if you don't have access to a supercomputer (it can takes weeks in realtime to complete a run of a few years in simulation time). The vertical resolution is usually on the order of 10 to 100 layers, depending on what you want to do with the model. Radiation transfer, fluid transfer, and photochemistry in these boxes are calculated, and usually output every couple hours (in simulation time). This gives you things like temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction (all at the surface and altitude), dust storm patterns, CO2 ice coverage at the winter pole, ozone distributions, and much more. We compare these with our satellite observations, and can use the model to explain observations we hadn't understood before and/or use the observations to correct the model when it is not predicting reality accurately.

The results of such models have been used to plan orbit insertion and landing of NASA's past several missions to Mars, as well as operations on the surface. They are also used to explain climate change. For example, we see yardangs which are not aligned with the current wind patterns, and we see polygonal frost heave patterns near the equator where the current climate cannot support water ice near the surface. In the model it is easy to do things like change Mars' obliquity, eccentricity, and atmosphere thickness to try to explain such things.

Yes, the predictability of seasonal Martian weather is very stable, far more so than Earth. The scientific community is looking forward to getting back data from the REMS weather station on MSL and using it with the available satellite observations and mesoscale weather models to better understand how Mars' climate works. We've gotten good at using this trifecta over the past few decades on Earth (surface station, satellite imaging, computer model), but on Mars we're still rather data poor.

With regard to atmospheric pressure: it is true that much of the southern Martian highlands are well below the average surface pressure, but you don't need to go to very low regions like Valles Marineris or Hellas Planitia to experience pressures > 6 mbar. The Viking landers are situated in Chryse Planitia (V1) and Utopia Planitia (V2) in the planet's northern plains, and never recorded pressures much below 7 mbar (see below). The pressure oscillations are due to changes in season and distance from the Sun, while the offset between V1 and V2 is a 1.5 km elevation difference (V2 is lower).

I don't know about basalt specifically, but water is more attracted to hydrogen bond to the oxygen in silica (SiO2) than with other water molecules (this is why you get a meniscus in a glass of water). Basalt is mostly silicates (-SiO4), so I my educated guess is that it would "wet" pretty well. But if not, it wouldn't be difficult to "weather" the basalt fiber surface to make it "stickier" (hydroxyl groups or something, perhaps).

As far as availability of carbonates goes, there's a good chance it could be mined from subsurface deposits. In 2010, Michalski & Niles spectroscopically identified carbonates in Leighton crater, which had excavated them from deep in the crust. It appeared to mostly be calcite (CaCO3) and siderite (FeCO3). A very similar observation was made about 1,000 km away in 2011 by Wray, which suggests there is a massive subsurface carbonate deposit spanning much of Mars. This is what was theoretically expected from our knowledge of the atmosphere and geology, but up until now there hadn't been any hard evidence for it. You see some details at the links below:

http://aram.ess.sunysb.edu/tglotch/TDG30.pdf
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/n … 10308.html

Reading the "Description of the Related Art" part of the patent makes it pretty clear what the idea is. I'll try to explain it as best I can for those not familiar with the technical jargon:

You start with a "surface plasmon polariton" (SPP), which is basically a photon trapped at the interface between a dielectric (i.e. an insulator) and a metal because of coherent electron oscillations in the material ("coherent" just means large groups of electrons are oscillating at the same frequency at the same time). The photon can move freely across the interface surface, sort of like it would through a fiber optic cable. You tune this system so that the oscillation frequency coincides with a proton or deuteron lattice resonance. That way the SPP can readily share energy with the proton/deuteron. It seems that this coupling provides the conditions for producing those "heavy electrons" I mentioned in an earlier post. The heavy electrons can then get captured by protons, which turn into neutrons (this doesn't happen with normal electrons, you would just get hydrogen atoms). These neutrons then float off and lodge themselves in the nuclei of some heavier atoms which then decay radioactively and release energy (the whole point of the contraption).

If you want to read more about the process, you can read a paper on it by Widom & Larsen which was published in The European Physical Journal C in 2005.

"Ultra Low Momentum Neutron Catalyzed Nuclear Reactions on Metallic Hydride Surfaces"

Ultra low momentum neutron catalyzed nuclear reactions in metallic hydride system surfaces are discussed. Weak interaction catalysis initially occurs when neutrons (along with neutrinos) are produced from the protons which capture "heavy'' electrons. Surface electron masses are shifted upwards by localized condensed matter electromagnetic fields. Condensed matter quantum electrodynamic processes may also shift the densities of final states allowing an appreciable production of extremely low momentum neutrons which are thereby efficiently absorbed by nearby nuclei. No Coulomb barriers exist for the weak interaction neutron production or other resulting catalytic processes.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s2006-02479-8 (official publisher version, behind paywall)
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0505026 (free pre-print version)