New Mars Forums

It appears that NASA is not interested in synthetic gravity yet.  I think they are looking at taking space medicine as far as they can without it, for keeping a human healthy as long as possible.

This causes me to suspect along with other evidence that they see a future where a highly automated mining of NEO's brings significant resources into the Earth-Moon system.  Water, then construction materials, then platinum group metals all the way to Earth.

Also, I think they are planning to pace themselves until several parallel developments occur.

-Private concerns taking over launches from Earth for the most part.
-Expandable space habs.
-Better space suits.
-Satellite that can be refueled/refurbished/repurposed.  (An orbital customer for space services)
-Better interplanetary transfer propulsion systems.
-And for now characterizing the nature of Mars and other solar system objects which might be targets for industrial activities in the further future.

I think they have structured like they have, anticipating that there will be quite a few improved methods available by then time a mission to Mars would be considered for real.

For instance most of those things listed above are likely to be getting fairly real within 10-20 years.

Lake Vida,

Hypersaline, very cold, but alive!

Great fun!

So even such a nasty lake, if you had special space suits, could have heated enclosures in it with habitats and "Greenhouses" in those, and

You could probably get in and out of the lake by having an open hole, with an unpressurized shed over it (To hold moisture in).

-13 degC / 8 degF water.  Not much vapor pressure there, well below 5.5 mb Martian ambient.

Nasty cold though.  I don't really think manufactured lakes will have to be that extreme to be functional havens for human habitats, but it is interesting information.

Yeah, I will just copy a post from another thread, and mention that a lake on Mars for the most part is a terraformation of location of the planet, to keep this "On Topic".  Further, lakes of the sort that have been proposed will facilitate a greater terraformation of the planet if that is later desired.

From "Water On Mars":

I seem to have found a supporting article for what you say.

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

I am very pleased to read the above. 

I was hoping to find information on "Splosh" (I just learned the correct word is "Yuty" craters on the "Pack Ice" but I struck out on that.

It is a young area they indicated.  Maybe nothing big has hit it yet.

So, it is looking good for your vegetables.

Alright, so I looked at the picture you provided:

The upper one looks a bit "Sploshy".  And is it my imagination, or aren't those craters unusually bowl like?  Maybe?

I am glad I consulted you.  I had bought the "Oh its lava story" some time back and gave up on that proposed frozen "Sea".

Hmmm! Indeed.

I think NASA is rather negative on the "Ice there idea".  Europe not as much.  Nasa thinks it's lava.

However I do recall a rather recent article which indicated opinions (And lots of evidence) that the Mariner Rift Valley has a layer of fossil ice buried deep in it's bottom, that is about 1 1/2 mile thick.  I cannot find those articles now, no matter how I search the web.

Anyway the story was that this ice was deposited in an ancient era, the Amazonian or Noachian?

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-la … onian.html

The idea is that when the atmosphere collapsed?  A large bulk of water was deposited in various areas and buried deeply.  Unless volcanism has melted it, supposedly much of it is still there due to the eternal cold temperatures of the upper crust.  Well I didn't say it was true, I just say it was said.

So your notion may fit into that, ancient ice, volcanos.

But this article says 87% of original water is gone from Mars.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/ … 213143.htm

But are they just making an estimate of polar caps and presumed glaciers?

Heavy water is concentrated by 5 times it appears, and that might suggest that 20% of the original water is present.

But that would be deceiving if there had been a massive burial of original ice some 1/2 to 1 1/2 billion years ago. (EDIT: 1/2 to 1 1/2 years after the birth of Mars).

I just don't know.  It's above my level.  It is good to know what your thinking is however, thanks.

I do seem to recall a recent entry from Spacenut.  If I recall correctly he indicated that there was some evidence for a reservoir of ice under the surface of Mars that was had a different isotope character than the surface water/ice.  Hope I remember that right Spacenut.

So, I did a search for that, and bingo, it seems:
http://www.lakeconews.com/index.php?opt … Itemid=197

And from NASA

So, am I the interpret the northern planes as being on top of an ancient frozen sea/glacier, dirty rubble?

Alright, I am risking off topic.  We just want to water some potatoes.  Peace Spacenut.

If I might break in temporarily.

I see you are most interested in the equator of Mars.  I also note that the soil is supposed to hold a small percent of water, so could be a source of water.  I cannot find out if that is hydrated minerals, or water bound to salt and soil grains (Easier to get out than hydrated minerals).

The point is I see enormous value in what you are planning here, it makes the most sense at the equator.  I am wondering where you plan to get the water.  I also am interested in sand dunes at the equator.  Since they will have the average temperature and humidity of the equator (Daytime warmer and very dry, nighttime very cold and towards saturated RH).  I wonder about drilling horizontally into a dune and hoping to aspirate out humidity from the drill hole.  A dry well of sorts.

The Poles are much too challenging at this time.  Glaciers in the mid latitudes are even quite a challenge because of long winters.

So, I am wondering how I might visualize starting a "Backpackers" settlement on the equator, and later linking it to a mid latitude settlement (Glacier) settlement later.  And of course as I have said elsewhere I think the end game on Mars is to access massive amounts of water from the poles, but I don't think polar occupation can precede terraforming, and I don't think terraforming can be done without access to a mid latitude glacier.

Since the best glacier I can think of is in Hellas, how about a near equator starter colony just south of the equator, and some kind of a surface transport developed to that glacier location?

I can only make this post on topic, by tying it to your gardening, and of course that needs water, and this is what I am inquiring about, that and how would an equator settlement tie into a whole Mars settlement process?

I am not against a nuclear reactor, it appears that they are likely to have a place in the schemes.

Antius,

Lots of options, once you have your containment for a cold water pond.  The air terrariums notion in a cold water pond is what I think could be the minimum effort that might support the growth of a few special vegetables.

Going a bit further, you could have a transparent warm water bag at the bottom of your pond.  That would be a transparent bag, that since you provided 180 mb water column pressure, would experience 180 mb pressure +/- ? mb.

The value of this is that for the air terrariums method you would be able to improve the temperatures, particularly the nighttime temperature.  The air filled terrariums would be inside the warm water bag of course, and of course the bag has to be weighted down to keep it from floating.

For this plan it would be important that the cold water of the pond itself be relatively sterile, otherwise algae build up on the transparent surfaces will vex you.  Similarly, you might have such a problem on the interior of the transparent bag, so you would need to keep the nutrients down in the water inside the bag, or inhibit algae some other way, or resort to an algae eating fish to clean it up, if one could survive.  Fish might be pretty tricky, and might die off for whatever reasons.  Removing dissolved gasses from the water inside the bag might render the water sterile to algae, since it would not be able to get Carbon.

Another variation would have aquatic plants inside the water bag, and forget the terrariums.  In that case, you would insert dissolved gasses into the bag, and perhaps you would like algae.  Or you would have to clean the algae off the surfaces, and then could have fresh water pond plants, for whatever value they  might have to you.  Pond plants have not really been established as much of a food source, havn't been farmed, so that is the weakest part of that notion.

But with Terrariums filled with air, if you could move your minimum nighttime air temp higher and your maximum daytime temp higher, then some other varieties of vegetable might work in this upgraded scheme.

Keeping your water sterile in that case would then allow the maximum amount of sunlight to arrive at your plants, through the water or ice & water.

Well, that's a solution.

The way I see it just now in my awareness of what is possible, I think the natural "Wet Spots" on Mars are what you want the most.  That is the polar ice caps and areas adjacent to them, particularly basins adjacent to the ice caps.

Now, they are not even inhabitable.

But if you throttled up your super greenhouse gasses to massive proportions, could you get them to start to melt?

However, that would be a bad plan, because there is an enormous thermal inertia, so while you would dry out the rest of the planet doing that and send it's surface water to the poles, it would be a long time before the polar ice caps would give up to you flowing rivers of water, or reservoirs of water not covered by hundreds of feet of ice.

Further you would not have enough humans and robots on the planet to generate an economy that could support such and intense build-up of super greenhouse gasses.

You could modify this by adding energy to the ice caps with fusion heat from fusion electric power plants, or putting power lines all over the planets lower latitudes, and exporting that electric power to the poles, where you would have underwater/under sea floor factories where your waste heat would be pushed into lakes/seas adjacent to the ice cap body.  Another alternative would be to pipe or ship by train, etc. water and split it into O2 and Hydrogen, pipe the Hydrogen back to the poles (Liberate the excess O2 to the atmosphere).  Pump Mars atmosphere into ice covered bodies of water adjacent to the ice caps, along with the Hydrogen.  Allow microbes to digest CO2 and H2, they will produce heat just by doing that.

Anyway, those are interesting supplements to consider as well.

Back to the original:

If it turns out that Mars cannot muster even a 500 mb atmosphere, then it will seem likely that the nights on Mars on the equator will almost always risk serious frost every night, I speculate.  The high latitudes might be better, but I think frost will be a problem.

For open field farm land your best hope in that case would be to go to the poles and heat them up enough so that during a 3 month out of 22.3 month year, the "Night" (Which will be very short in the summer) will be frost free.

That would also provide for a minimum 1 month out of 22.3 months where water can melt on the ice caps.

This uses Mars nature to an advantage, because it's year is much longer than Earths.  You also have a favorable factor where if you have a minimum atmospheric pressure of 100 to 300 mb, (Just guessing) you can hope that since Mars has less distance from the equator to the poles, equatorial heat will tend to move to the poles during cold spells at the poles.

And then I think greenhouse gasses do the most good for polar areas anyway.

But any settlement of Mars will have to ease into such an arrangement in a timely fashion.  If they do not, they will lock up most of the water into the polar ice caps, before those can be melted to provide water for the planet.  And as I have said, it will be a long time before enough infrastructure exists on the planet to drive that much greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and even if they do, it is going to take a long time to get the regolith to warm up and give up its gasses to the atmosphere.

So, I think that what is needed is a set of metamorphic changes, where at first, yes your backpackers have to get there, they have to graft themselves into the planets system, but at first, the will be highly reliant on items they have brought with them.  That will include air pressurized greenhouses all the time, but only that at first, and then perhaps, some dealings with larger and larger reservoirs of water can be included in the activities, if that turns out to be a productive thing to do.

As for when the ice caps are melted, I would think that most likely the north cap will be a ice covered sea, maybe it will melt around the edges now and then, here and there.

The south polar cap will be at a high elevation and should it melt, it will probably form rivers, and those will fill craters/basins (Mostly ice covered I would think), who knows, maybe even Hellas.  The water could be directed with canals, and pipelines, but yes, if a train or tanker truck gets you what you want for a better price, then why not?

It is important to remember that with the poles pointed as they are now, most precipitation will occur at the poles, Frost, Snow, or Rain.
So, that is where to go to get control of all of the Mars water.  (Which is of course one of it's greatly valuable resources).

I do want to think in that direction:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science … -Mars.html

I am not sure I agree with the "Near Equator" quote, but whatever.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picture … me=2909640

But huge reservoirs will be an excessive burden to start with, and likely out of scope at first, but later, I think a great idea.

But:
So a big glacier in Hellas, and a dome suggestion from you at local ambient pressure.

I will try to work with that, I think there are ways.

Of course a reliable steady source of water, to start with, and the ability for humans to have all the forms of life support.

Some have suggested strip mining the ice, and of course at first you will need to dig a hole in the rock and soil overburden to get to the ice (Ore).   However I think optimally, you would have a method to have pressurized ice caves which you would carve with heat.  How much pressure you could employ is debatable.  You would not need much for liquid water.  You would then take the liquid water, and vaporize it, suctioning it through a partial vacuum pipeline/hose, to the entrance area, and it could be pressurized to a liquid on the outside with compression equipment, and put in "Tanks".  (Plastic bags?) that could be on carts.  Let it freeze into blocks of ice, and then transport it to your base I guess.  Maybe later on you would have a vapor pipeline that would lead all the way to your base.

As things you might wish for perhaps you could find a largely intact lava tube under the glacier.  Presumably filled with ice.  Fairly unlikely, but maybe. 

Otherwise, I would calculate just how much glacier overburden will allow you to maintain a stable ice tunnel with a pressurization of 'X', whatever you think you can get away with.  I suggest that the tunnels will try to follow an interior perimeter inside of the glacier, where the bottom of the tunnel is on soil and rock.  Depending on how stable and habitable the ice caves are themselves, it may be desired to burrow into the permafrost soil, or even rock, and create habitat, factory space ect.

Mars having a gravity of 0.38 the requirements for tunnel supports is reduced.  How much could such an ice tunnel be pressurized, without a blowout?  Well I just don't know.  Hopefully at least to 30 mb, for melting water.  Ideally to .25 bar at least.  It would require a place in the glacier which was not "Flowing" very much.  It is a help that this glacier should be very cold and slow moving.

If they are even possible, I would suggest that they could be pressurized with raw Martial atmosphere compressed, and the humidity inside should be kept elevated.  The hope would be that for slow leaks, the leaking "Air" with humidity would deposit humidity to ice to plug the leaks.

But the ice tunnel thing is a side show.  We first of all want a source of water, and a ways to have it contribute to life support, and in fact food production.

Obviously, the back packers who come first will bring greenhouse methods to grow potatoes, and other vegetables.

The move to expand to large reservoirs, will be intimidating.  It will require a lot of effort before a profitable situation could be realized, but it is the most natural farm land that Mars could offer.

One solution is to build a reservoir and cover it's ice with soil and rock.  GW Johnson has proposed that.  In that case you would need to provide artificial lighting, in an underwater situation, and move solar or nuclear electric power into the devices in the water.  For standard vegetables, you also need air filled "Greenhouses" under water.

An alternative to that would be the reservoir which would be the same, but instead of light, you could provide chemicals to drive an ecology.
Oxygen, and a Food/Fuel, such as Hydrogen.  This should be very robust, but of course you have to convert solar electric/nuclear electric power to Oxygen and Food/Fuel.  I am also not certain that the value of what grows will be great.  Maybe you could grow fish food, but vegetables would be more efficient that fish.  Impaler has a post about growing a microbe for food, and it is a good one.  In that case you don't need the reservoir.  That is, unless you want to grow things like clams and crustaceans that feed off of methane seeps in the ocean.

Antius;

You have suggested a ambient pressure greenhouse.  Perhaps that can be done.  High humidity maintained, and so on.  In the region of Hellas, in a full Martian year, perhaps you could have a 3 month period of no hard frost inside the greenhouse.  Then, perhaps somehow some type of Vascular plant could be grown, if not perhaps microbial mats.

I would suggest as a variation, a slightly pressurized dome, with a pool of water in it.  The surface of the pool may or may not be covered with ice.

The surface water being at 0 degC / 32 degF, the water below able to reach 3.889 degC / 39 degF without the water "Turning over".

No frosts on your crops at the bottom of this pool of water.

Unfortunately your "Crops" will have to be high arctic or high alpine pond plants.  That's going to take some work.  If we had some of the pre Columbian peoples from the Andes, perhaps they could teach us how to domesticate such plants and make them useful.  They seem to have had genius for that.  But we don't have them, so we will have to use our own ways.

But what about a "Batch" method melded with the Dome/Pond plan?

Supposing that you could mass produce small terrariums, to grow vetetables in.  Suppose that they had a loop on the bottom, so that you could "Hook" them to the bottom of the pond.  Air filled.  During the night internal temperatures should not drop below 3.889 degC / 39 degF.  During the days sunlight, internal temperatures might reach satisfactory temperatures for some vegetables.

So, I think you see where I am going.  Obviously I am presuming a plastics industry, and a 3D printer to mass produce the terrariums.

A problem with growing vegetables in this manner, is to make the environment inside chemically suitable for the plants.  They need water and nutrients, CO2, etc, in a time released fashion.  Perhaps a Carbon source could be incorporated into the soil, to be digested slowly by micro organisms and released into the terrarium "Atmospheres".  And so on.

Now, an Apollo space suit will not do, for the "Farmer" who has to add and remove terrariums.   I am thinking a Boat-Suit.

A boat, with a habitat for an individual to dwell in for a time, and arms down below, allowing manipulation of objects in the water.  Perhaps it will be a cylinder actually, so it can spin on it's long axis, and perhaps it will be able to tip end for end somehow.

Anyway, there you go.  A method, perhaps a starter for introducing reservoirs of water as useful to human habitation of Mars.

End of post.

This post, presumes that "Super Greenhouse Gasses" will not be permanently used on Mars in large amounts.

Granted, if that were done, you could melt all of Mars, but that will take time, and during the time it takes, there will be an era of Antarctic conditions on Mars, that it would need to be handled, for the purpose of inhabiting the cold Mars that will precede your "Super Greenhouse Gasses" later Mars. 

I don't think that Earth will ever pay to terraform Mars, so that dictates that people will first inhabit it as it is now, and then will terraform it to Antarctic conditions, and then may choose to keep warming it up.  While they are doing that, it will make sense to utilize ice covered reservoirs, since they will want to exist on an early terraformed Mars.

This model deals with a successful Mars model, not the stillborn Mars that we have.  It relates in our real Mars, to the fact that even with "Super Greenhouse Gasses", it will take centuries for heat to penetrate the ground to release the locked up gasses, therefore for some time Mars will not have a 500 mb - CO2 atmosphere, that will come considerably later, and so Mars will remain much colder than the greenhouse factor provided by 500 mb - CO2 for quite some time.

OK, so I have had people tell me that they think that with Terraforming Mars could have anywhere from 300 mb to 1000 mb pressure, virtually all CO2.

If Earth were moved to a Mars orbit, it would be colder, unless it's atmosphere was almost entirely CO2.  The 1000 mb estimate is at the optimistic end of the estimates.  I will instead use 500 mb of mostly CO2, since it is an average between 0 and 1000.  Conveniently as well, 500 mb of CO2 has about the same greenhouse effect as 1000 mb of N2/O2.  Maybe we could say that if Mars had 500 mb CO2 and Earth had 1000 mb of N2/O2, they would each have a greenhouse effect of "1".

In this model, the size of the two planets is ignored.  In reality, if each planet had a greenhouse effect of "1", and they both were at the current orbit of Mars, they would behave differently because since Mars is smaller, atmospheric winds would average the temperatures between it's equator and poles more than winds would do for Earth.  But for this example I will hope to satisfy that difference by trying to deal with the mid latitudes of both planets, which should be similar.

Another difference is the amount of water, but I think that by dealing with the mid latitudes, and particularly staying away from Earth's large oceans, interior continual conditions might be rather similar concerning temperatures.

So then as models, I choose "The great salt lake", "The Mediterranean", "The Black Sea", "The Caspian Sea", and "The Aral Sea", and perhaps some other mid latitude medium and small bodies of water, tending to be salty.

I have read, that the Earth moved to the Orbit of Mars would still manage to have some open water on it's oceans, presumably at the Equator.

I presume that "The great salt lake", "The Mediterranean", "The Black Sea", "The Caspian Sea", and "The Aral Sea", and perhaps some other mid latitude medium and small bodies of water, at mid latitudes would be frozen over.

On Mars, with less water, the Oceans would be much more shallow, and in fact water might not make it down to the equator, but the oceans might end up being a set of relatively disconnected basins.

So, such a world, if capable of having an inflated astmosphere would consist of dried up sea basins at the equator, and polar ice caps, and perhaps mid latitude ice covered seas and lakes.

This is good, however, because it may reduce evaporation, inhibit the mixing of water by waves and allow these bodies of water to become natural solar collectors, as their waters can stratify between a warm saltier bottom layer and a colder less salty layer just under the ice.

If this world were to exist in reality, a sort of cross between the Earth and Mars, at the orbit of Mars, then Antarctica suggests what might happen naturally if it were provided life.

Here is some conversation related to it: https://books.google.com/books?id=fRJtB … es&f=false

It is fairly negative about the productive capacity of "Most" lakes.  (Keep in mind that for artificial human manipulated lakes, nutrients can be added, ice thickness can be moderated, and perhaps something can be done with water temperatures).

Anyway most organisms are small, with a few small animals, and no fish.

I would be curious if a fish that ate plankton could live in the cold Oxygen layer.  It can be very high in Oxygen I recall.  Probably the reason there are no fish, is that these lakes are relatively temporary.  They go through cycles of being displaced by glaciers, perhaps drying up, and so on.  The biology has to be simple, it is most likely only organisms which can come in on the winds or the feet of birds, that would colonize the lakes.

So, I suggest that for the model I suggested where significant long lasting bodies of ice covered water could exist at the mid latitudes of the model planet, those seas could allow for a more continuous habitation of such bodies of water driven by photosynthesis, and so more complex forms of life, even fish type things could be resident.

So, I suggest that for alien planets this model can move the "Habitible zone" out a bit more, for photo driven ecologies.

Some will argue that the old outer limit for sun melted water holds.  I will agree that in the atmosphere, that is true.  However, if there can be snows in the mountains around such solar heated bodies of water, then there can be glaciers.  If there are glaciers, and they flow into the bodies of water, and encounter the solar heated salty bottom water, then that glacier ice will melt, helping to keep the ice covered reservoirs hydrated.  As a further assistance, the top of the ice layers of those seas would be colder, at orbits more remote from the sun, so the evaporation rate would be less.

Further, even if the amount of sunlight is not enough to melt glacier ice by itself, that would lead to positive a feedback mechanism where
the lakes do dehydrate, and become hypersaline.  That cold very salty water might be able to melt the ice of a glacier feeding the lake.
Of course such cold and hypersaline lakes might not be that friendly to life, but never the less it would be water, and we don't know what presumed "Aliens" might adapt to.

And I am making the case, that this is likely what Mars wanted to be, before it died.

Tom asked:

The winters and darkness would be about twice as long, and those I believe are unbelievably cold, but as you have suggested, due to thin atmosphere, perhaps not as draining of heat as might be supposed.  Actually if you were to work in such, I would think you might have a special suit with no cooling system, just a heating system if needed.  But...

I think the poles are a rotten place to start, but a wonderful place to end.

It is reasonable that before the poles are used, methods would be developed at the locations of mid latitude glaciers of significance.  For instance I believe that there is at least one the size of Los Angeles.

While some concepts involve strip mining water, I would like to investigate the "Grounding Line" of a glacier/Ice cap.

If an Entrance structure were put into the side of a glacier, where the ground under the ice could be reached, then it would be possible to dig tunnels with dirt/rock bottoms in the ice of the glacier, and extract water at the same time.  Trenches could be dug in the dirt/rock, and perhaps tent like material used as a roof over them. The method of digging would be with heat.  Either evaporate the ice and condense the vapor, or directly melt the ice into water, and pump it to the exit.

Of course I am presuming that an ice tunnel can be trusted to hold an air pressure.

This is one method of providing a great deal of pressurized space.  However it may be sensible to re-enforce the ice somehow.

Ultimately however, I have said it before.  I want both ice caps converted into bodies of water, covered with ice.  Optimally allowing photosynthesis through the ice of these bodies of water during the summers.  Entire cities built under the pressure of the water, if it turns out not possible to generate a dense enough atmosphere for human health.

The reason I want this is because what ever evaporates from the surfaces of Mars will always want to condense in the coldest spots, and for now that is the poles for the most part.  If you have a method to inject heat into water under the condensed ice and snow, you can liberate water from the poles, and create a biosphere, and ideally each polar body of water will be a solar collector.

The excess melt water generated could be conveyed by canals and pipelines to lower latitudes, to feed more ice covered lakes, which would also be abodes for life, and solar collectors.

But you would have to be crazy to try to do the poles first.