New Mars Forums

OK Tom, I will play ball.

This video will have some parts that annoy many here.  For me the video also plays recordings of Buzz Aldrin after.
-Most here don't like cyclers.
-The presenters look like kids to me, but I am guessing they are quite a lot smarter than I am, and youth is not a crime.
-Their heat shield concept with a toroidal balloon is very interesting.
-They seem to think in terms of Hohmann transfers for their resupply ships, but I think that for most cases ballistic transfer would be better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-energy_transfer
-I like the idea they have of lifting their hab onto a wheeled chassis to make it mobile.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=bu … ORM=VDQVAP

Here is a more generalized web site on the topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler

The difference however between this material and what you are thinking Tom is that you want to use a O'neill device for the cycler.
Also the previous material emphasizes reaching Mars as the objective, but your plan is more that there will be people living on an artificial world, and that world will also transit both Earth and Mars periodically.  Those periodic transfers will be the secondary purpose, but may be useful to the inhabitants of the artificial world, as they can perhaps take on passengers as a business option.

I would like to speculate on sizing down your habitat even more.  How about a gravity of Ceres as the background gravity field of a main chamber?
This may be enough so that things will stay in place (Or be clamped down).  Humans will be able to lift large loads, if we are presuming that this could be a manufacturing facility as well.

The lower gravity will reduce the centrifugal rigors imposed on the device.  The Ceres gravity will provide very useful data, to find out to what degree humans could adapt to the gravitational environment of Ceres, and work in it.  Also, can farming be done in such a low gravity field?  Very important I think.  Later if humans inhabit artificial spinning worlds around Ceres, they may still want to do most of their farming in chambers on Ceres, just to save space on the spinning worlds.

I do not intend however to subject humans to only a Ceres level gravity field, but also to have a secondary toroidal chamber where hyperloop technology could provide additional synthetic gravity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop

So, I would like a "Rotor" torus inside of a "Stator" torus, with an air film between them as lubricant, and the use of induction motors to add or remove rotation.

The "Main Chamber" would rotate in a different direction than the "Rotor".  The "Stator" would be solidly attached to the "Main Chamber".

Most likely the "Rotor" would start and stop periodically, so it would go from a spin to produce "Moon", "Mars", or "Earth" synthetic gravity, towards but not necessarily at Micro Gravity.

The Main Chamber would respond by having a variable gravity as well, going from "Ceres" synthetic gravity towards and possibly even at Micro Gravity.

Obviously a "Habitat" could be composed of more than one MainChamber/Stator/Rotor.  In that case a "Main Chamber" could be used as a giant air lock, that is a large portion of an end of a main chamber could be opened up (After capturing most or all of the air inside), and large objects could be move into that main chamber or out of it.

Then reseal it and with whatever machinery is inside do some kind of construction/manufacturing process, producing a value added service, and later removing whatever was made, and taking a profit, if possible.

One method of propulsion for these machines might be:
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/an-au … ion-2015-9
http://www.iflscience.com/technology/ma … magnesium/

It is still being developed, but I do believe that it can run on Titanium, and the Moon has abundant Titanium.

One thing about using a material from the Moon as propulsion mass, is that it (perhaps) may not have to be as high quality as if the metal were being fabricated for use as structure.

One additional thing, the "Main Chamber" could have a reduced atmospheric pressure relative to the interior of the rotor torus.
The Rotor Torus perhaps could be at 10 pounds pressure N2/O2, and the "Main Chamber at perhaps 5 Pounds? O2?
Air locks between required then of course, and additional non rotor space at 10 pounds provided as well.

But by keeping the "Main Chamber" at a lower pressure, of course less stress on the pressure shell.  But it is a trade off, as it complicates things.

The above is an attempt by me to find a compromise between the cyclers mentioned, and your habitat, possibly pointing to a more useful agenda.

Done.

Karov,

I have reviewed the first document to the degree I could comprehend.  I have some reason to apply a dispute to the presumptions of "Water Trapped" worlds which is depicted towards the end of that document.

You yourself pointed out that Katabatic winds can evaporate sections of ice cap even if they are in permanent shadow, and I have been pushing also the notion of wind blown snow.

The model I think is depicted is that for water to cycle on tidal locked planets, a polar ice cap must be extensive enough that it will glaciate past the terminator line and into the sunlight.

This is not required I think for both of the reasons previously mentioned.
1) Katabatic wind warming on descent, and evaporation of ice.
2) Wind blown snow.

This is a picture of a Martian polar ice cap:

Something like this is what I would expect to see on the dark side of a tidal locked planet where the night side is cold enough.
For Proxima b, I am a bit confused, if the planet is tidal locked and has a cold cap on the night side, then does it spin every 11.2 hours?  To be tidal locked, and orbit Proxima Centauri, it must spin every 11.2 hours.  So would the Coriolis Effect be even more than on Mars?  And then actually, the spin axis is perpendicular to the sub stellar night spot isn't it.  So, I'm not so sure about the pattern of ice cap with deep carved ruts in it, ruts carved by descending Katabatic winds, evaporating ice cap in certain lineal paths.  Something more to learn here.

So, the etching pattern will be different, but I expect that it will exist.

So, lets presume a tidal locked planet with an ice cap with a thickness of perhaps 1/3 of the depth of the troposphere, for Earth, that is about 10,000 feet high (Sorry for the English).

Anyway if this cap only covers 1/2 of the night side, then we may think that this planet cannot have humidity on the day side as sunlight cannot reach any part of the ice cap.

For this model, blowing snow might not work as well as I might wish, (Just not sure), but Katabatic evaporation still might do some good.

If you have a boiling hot desert on the day side, and for a period of Earth weeks, a pool of very frigid air accumulates on the top of the ice cap, then an event triggering winds will unleash an evaporation method which may move humidity from the ice cap to the day side, and that humidity then floating upwards into the daytime atmosphere will encounter yet another reservoir of cold, cold from altitude.

Should the temperature differential be at maximum between the day and night side, (Similar to highest voltage in a fluctuating electrical circuit), then upon it's peak, energy of motion is created by the expenditure of energy differential.  This then creates the fast winds.

Fast winds descending down the edges of the ice caps, pressurizes the air suddenly, heating it, and allowing it to evaporate ice into vapor into the flowing air.  The low atmospheric air then enriched with humidity on the night side flows to the day side.  There, it should accumulate as fog/clouds high in the atmosphere, to reduce the solar flux, and dampen the temperature differential between the day and night side.  As that dampening overdrives, rain and snow might happen on the day side, particularly in the mountains.

So, I say.  Maybe, in some cases.  If the whole atmosphere pulses like an electrical LC circuit.

Maybe a repetitive cycling with an approximate time constant.

So there may be a way for tidal locked worlds not fully endowed with the necessary water to satisfy current speculation to wiggle out of the notion of being "Water Trapped".

  Maybe

Yes I think you are right.

I have been browsing around, to actually try to get the drift of what may be in the works, and I think this has cast some better light on some possibilities that I like.

Earth based resources from hardware re-use/re-cycle methods:
I know that we cannot for the large part depend on materials from Earth to build the devices discussed in this topic.  However, it seems that there is no reason not to plan to have a continuous stream of such materials as a contribution of higher quality materials, at least until the processing of Moon/Asteroid/Comet materials has advanced sufficiently to make the method not cost effective.

This has been posted elsewhere, but thinking it through, it demonstrates how perhaps the majority of hardware launched from Earths surface can go into a re-use/re-cycle plan also involving space habitats.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aero … fuel-tanks

I believe that there are multiple concepts on how to re-use launcher hardware.
1) Recover the 1st stage back to the surface, as re-furbish/re-usable.
2) Recover the engines only, as re-furbish/re-usable.

Neither of these seem to be able to recover 2nd stage hardware (Maybe #2 can get the engines back, I don't know)

I know that SpaceX originally had hopes to recover the 2nd stage from orbit to the surface in some cases, but it is becoming obvious to me that it would make sense to instead recover the 2nd stage to station assembly areas in the Earth/Moon system.

Perhaps doing that it will also make sense to put the engines from the 2nd stage into a compartment of a return to surface vessel, perhaps a commercial re-entry device.  Some companies are looking at only recycling engines anyway, not fuel tanks.

So, I think that if most launchers eventually evolve to the above scheme, then there would be a continuous stream of Earth based materials to re-cycle into orbital purposes.

As for getting the 2nd stages to where you would want them, the re-cycle centers, I would think that a robotic electric tug would be one possible option.  I would think that eventually, there will have to be billing applied to entities which leave discarded space junk around in orbit anyway.  Only so much space junk can be tolerated.

Then if experimentation on Moon/Asteroid/Comet materials can produce low quality processed materials, they still may be valuable for the purposes they can serve, while the higher quality recycle material from Earth will take care of the more fussy applications.

Eventually it could be hoped that Moon/Asteroid/Comet materials could be made into high quality materials, but that would come later, not first, most likely.

I think you are moving to convergence towards the rest of us, so I will move a bit in your direction Tom.

Yes, that only makes sense, to do it smaller, at least at first.

O'neill's vision was inspiring, but it was also defiance of history and nature.  It was a good aspiration, but a bit of a deception, so now I better understand G.W's position.

We like to think of ourselves as much more powerful than we are.  For instance I can recognize that the substances cast off/excreted from my body are matter, I cannot make a spaceship out of it and fly somewhere.  I might have tanned leather with my Urine, simply because that was something discovered to work, and I might fertilize a patch of nature with my outputs, but sadly no spaceship emerges from my B.S. or my emissions

Take for instance my mining experience some 30+ to 40+ years ago, yes great minds figured out how to upgrade an ore economically, but nature had to lay that ore that we would upgrade into our laps in the first place.

We need to find humility.  Our abilities allow us to do more than is obvious to a mindless brute, but never-the-less, life is a gift to us.

From my point of view, we should always be thinking efficiency against necessity, and capability expansion.  Never excluding either one.

O'neill's concept presumed that the human race might bypass Mars, because crunching up asteroids into synthetic habitat would be so efficiently capable of satisfying human needs.  Probably too optimistic.

So, if humans make even a mini-habitat, do I get fat medically expensive potato chip eaters, lounging in sunlight emitting bad smells which servile (Secretly Evil) robots compliment them on, or do I get more?

Do I get generation ships, or cycling spaceships, or way stations which serve a bigger purpose?  Or do I get lazy people increasing our rate of experienced flatulence?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatulence

You guys are all saying things that I can agree are true to many cases, and likely so for Proxima b, however...:)

Proxima b could have resonance like or similar to planet Mercury.  Or like Venus (Perhaps) it's atmosphere could have it in a slow spin (A theory says that is possible).

But let's suppose it will be tidally locked, I wonder if it is likely to have a steady state of thermal equalization between day and night side or a pulsing equalization.  I tend to think it will pulse, and it may do so with a Oscillating time constant, which could be deviated from it's constancy by things like solar flares.

You could watch some of these video's if you have patience for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vglUtBUWwNw

So, perhaps I might try to describe a possible sequence.

The oscillation would be between two extremes.
State 1: The sunward side has heated up as hot as it can get before the winds will trigger.  The sunward side is depleted of moisture, so it will have less cloud cover.  The dark side has dried out the atmosphere of the planet to it's driest, by the moisture condensing as snow and ice cap (Which can glaciate).

State 2: The winds are blowing at their maximum, snow is being blown off of the ice cap onto the day side, where it will tend to evaporate, and that evaporation will blow further towards the high noon side, and move upwards in the atmosphere, eventually contributing to increased clouds.

The whole planet cools down during the process of State 2, because the night side is still the night side, but winds are bringing moisture to the day side, causing more clouds to reflect sunlight.

Should State 2 continue long enough, many of the day surfaces will be cold enough for snow drifts, and so that is another way for water to move further into the day side.

Eventually, the moisture in the atmosphere on the day side should rain or snow out, further cooling the day side, and moisturizing parts of it such as mountains.

Eventually the temperature differential between the night and day side might equalize enough that moisture will no longer be blown into the day side as drifting snow, and evaporation, in the lower atmosphere, but the upper atmosphere should help to sweep the moisture back to the night side to fall as snow, and then the day side will clear of cloud deck, and will heat up again.

I can't guarantee that an oscillation will happen, but I am suspicious that it will.

A situation such as I have suggested, could also expand the habitable zone outward, because, if you presume a tidally locked red dwarf planet to have a average temperature of 0 Degrees C. at it's terminator, but you oscillate the temperature up and down by say 50 Degrees C, you then have a temperature range of + 50 to -50.

If your terminator average temperature was -40 Degrees C. you could similarly have a range of +10 to -90, which would still allow for periodic liquid water, and incidentally, "Dry Valley Lakes".  (Ice covered lakes).

So, you see where I am going with this.

Another feature of such an oscillation, is that if somehow you could actually get to such a planet, during certain periods of the oscillation, the situration would be deadly without a good forcast and shelter, but in other periods of the oscillation, it could quite a pleasant environment.

Done.

I will put this here.  Not trying to kiss up but G.W.'s take seems open to the possibilities, which I think is appropriate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/scien … type=Blogs
Quote:

Not too much activity.  Has everyone gone to the Moon?
https://www.bing.com/search?q=song+%22e … he+moon%22.

This is all my speculation.  I speculate for the entertainment of it, and in the hopes that when better scientific measurements are possible, some additional things to test/check for can be identified.

I am glad you choose to consider the thoughts of the last post Karov.

A cold tidal locked planet is less likely than a hot one, due to the difference in the distance to the parent star.

But for this, it is easiest to think about it as tidal locked, and without Coriolis effect.

But then after that you do have to factor in all the possible variations.
-Coriolis effect.
-Spin rate.
-Tilt of axis.
-How circular is the orbit.
-Nature of the atmosphere.
-Flare activity.
-?

Starting with the simplest model:
-Katabatic Winds. (Ice erosion from it as well).
-Land Slide Run-outs. (Slurry from avalanche of snow involving vibration and air mixing as a fluidization process).
-Dune fields.
-Slurry (Fine snow air).
-Siphon.
-?
The above are things we have witnessed on some planets.  I think under optimal conditions they could work together to help to moisturize the dry parts of such planets.

I will try to apply a greater efficiency to keep this shorter.

I think the temperature build up, cold on the ice cap plateau, and hot in the sunward basins, would build up until the difference was enough to overcome  barriers to air flow.  Barriers might exist because of natural mountains, and also because snow will fall preferentially nearer the edges of the ice cap.  But the remaining moisture might condense further inside the ice cap, as a finer snow.

I expect that the Katabatic wind might be triggered periodically by this buildup, and then it would behave in the manner, as you described.  It would cut "Dry Valley Channels".  As the winds released the "Gravitational Energy", in the correct situation, the winds would draw air from the interior, and if those winds were sufficient they would build a "White Out", which would be a slurry of air and fine snow.  This getting to the edge of the precipices would fall by gravity, and would be even heavier than the very cold air.  It might in some ways begin to resemble a talcum powder avalanche.

We are talking about hurricane force + winds after all, at max.  Plus such a planet would have an engine which would be gigantic compared to the Antarctic/Greenland models.

Such planets might have thicker atmospheres as well, so that can be taken in consideration also.

If a plume of super cold air were to suddenly begin to fill a hot basin, I do not think it would take long for portions of it to get cold enough for wind blown snow to remain frozen.  Then you could consider snow being transferred further by wind blown dunes.  Mars has wind blown dunes, and here we might be talking atmospheric pressures from 250mb to 10 bar, maybe more, possibly moving at hurricane speeds at times.

Now you might consider what would happen on less simple models of such planets where you have variations of combinations of:

-Coriolis effect.
-Spin rate.
-Tilt of axis.
-How circular is the orbit.
-Nature of the atmosphere.
-Flare activity.
-?

Sounds good teraformer, but I don't want to stink up this topic, so good luck.

My feeling at this time, is that I would like a background gravity field to work in as would be provided by the Moon.

~1/6 g.

I think our minds will handle that better than in microgravity.

Tom said:

That is an interesting notion Tom, but consider doing it in microgravity vs the Moons surface.

If you could do that, I presume you have to have a condensing surface, to collect the presumably separated materials.  (I think it will need a lot of work to be useful).  The Moon can provide that.  And a human or teleoperation machine can go and collect the various concentrations for further processing.  You might include an electric field to help in the processing.  I choose not to go much further.  Think about what it would take to do this in microgravity.

Ores:
http://www.space.com/13247-moon-map-lunar-titanium.html

And I speculate that you could use a magnetic system to concentrate magnetic particles involving some metals from the soils of the Moon, due to meteor impacts over the ages.  That could involve essentially a four wheeled cart with some special attachments.  I don't think you could do that with small rocks in microgravity.

And then it seems that Hydrogen and Helium are captured in the soil as well. I won't tire GW out with the Helium 3 thing, but I am interested in Hydrogen and Helium captured from the solar wind for other reasons.

And the Moon has lava tubes, and polar deposits of volatile materials.

So, if you figured out how to use the Moon, you would have a slug of those resources to use for a long time before they ran out.

If automated asteroid mining turns up vast amounts of metals to be used for parts, I might reconsider, but I think that in light of what I have mentioned and more that could be mentioned, the Moon should be strongly reconsidered in a positive light.

With extreme respect for the opinion expressed by G.W. the logic is sensible, but it forgets about the wandering attention span of society.  I appreciate the anxiety, the worry that after all the wasted effort, it would be a mistake to not put all effort to going to Mars and hope for a win.  I can appreciate the point of view.

However, there are very strong hints of things boiling up under the surface, the attention span drifting back to the Moon.

http://qz.com/779719/amazons-jeff-bezos … -the-moon/

All you have to do is query for NASA Moon plans.

As I have said before, "I want it all", but reality might choose something else.  Interesting article though.

Pretty Pretty!

Say what you want, I know that I am not a rocket man, but I am interested in stuff like this.

There are three factors that I can think of that have to be satisfied.
1) Can it be done technically?  I think that that is unlikely at this time, in reality.  We can imagine it, being done, but we don't have a likelihood of causing it to happen, due to lack of infrastructure.
2) Is it safe?  I wouldn't trust a whole list of current actors to behave themselves, even if the technology could be made failsafe and idiot proof.
3) Market for the power.  The USA, Russia, and the Middle East want to use their petrochemicals, and likely can do so for some time.  Others want to control their own alternative energy resources if they can.  I don't see how a space based energy supply could be brought forward at this time for those reasons.  I also don't think it would be likely to be competitive with surface energy sources.

Another factor is globalization appears to have overplayed it's hand, nationalism is on the rise, because the globalists chased a utopian agenda (Once again), where they wanted to be the arbiters of moral issues, but in reality were doing it in a manner to facilitate selfish purposes.  This has offended lots of people and has made nationalism rise.

A space based system would have to be international I would think, and at this time the trust level between nations, and other groups is eroding.

I think a Moon base still might be possible, and from that an attempt to project materials from the Moon to a purpose.  Maybe, if it can be done on the lines of the international space station, more or less.