New Mars Forums

Hi Atitarev!
    I can't find the article right now but I did read on Google, quite recently, that at least one scientist had examined the prospect of creating an atmosphere around the Moon.
    Apparently, if you could find the gases to do the job, Luna's gravity is sufficient to hold onto a low-pressure atmosphere (was it 200 mb? ... can't remember exactly) for a period of some 3000 years.

    Sorry I can't be more use to you than that!

    Getting the gases in the first place is the really tricky bit but it's surprising just how long a lunar atmosphere would last. Having thousands of years to work on replacing the escaping air, makes it sound almost feasible - at least to a technology a little further advanced than our own.
    Maybe a few 200 km diameter iceteroids from the Kuiper Belt would be sufficient to provide the raw materials(?). I would suggest bringing them in at a low angle, in an easterly direction, in the plane of the Moon's equator. This might 'hurry' our sluggish satellite's rotation rate and create a more manageable day/night cycle. [Beware of accidentally bringing them down on Earth, by the way!]

    It's been pointed out by more than one writer that a thick atmosphere on a planetoid like our Moon, with its low gravity, would allow humans to strap on wings and take to the skies. That's something I think I'd like to try!
                                           

Good post, Robert!   

Wild guess!  :-
    Mars 1
    Came within 6000 miles of Mars.
                                                     

I once heard of a questionnaire given to air travellers, regarding the make up of the flight crew on commercial flights.
    The majority opinion was that you could have an all-male crew or you could have one female and the rest male. But most people didn't want to fly in a plane with two or more females on the flight deck.
    Go figure!

Great 3-D image, Stu! Thanks.
    It's difficult to judge how steep those sandy slopes really are but I would guess something like 20 to 30 degrees(?). Depending on the looseness of the surface material, I assume some of those beautiful stretches of stratified rock will be out of reach of the RAT because the rover won't be able to get up to them.
    Is this a fair and reasonable assessment of the situation? I hope I've got it all wrong.
                                       ???

I'm not at all sure how efficient this novel 'heat engine' might ultimately become but, if it were ever to reach macro-scale 90% efficiency ratings, it would be an incredible breakthrough indeed!
    One can imagine a time, far in the future, when the universe is expanding ever faster under the influence of the dark energy in the space-time continuum, when everything is declining into a long slow 'heat-death', that heat engines of this kind could help to maintain life among the sentient beings who populate the cosmos in that dismal era.
    Sorry, the 'Cecil B. De Mille' in me suddenly came to the surface there for a moment!   

    In the meantime, a macro device of that kind could revolutionise our present civilisation by providing almost unlimited usable energy.
    But I still favour the three-band-gap solar panel to do us more good in the near future, if it can be mass produced and if it can deliver on the 50%+ figure.
                                             

This is all very exciting stuff!
    I had a note scribbled out relating to your link here, Cindy, and was going to post the same link when I got the chance, but you beat me to it. ... Great minds .. !  :laugh:

    I have to say I agree with Dicktice that the three-band-gap solar panel looks to be more practicable for the near future. And, with any luck, it may prove possible to mass produce it quickly and relatively cheaply.
    Electrically self-sufficient homes with solar panel covered roofs ... here we come!
                                         

    Having said that, I don't mean to detract from the intriguing and perhaps very promising energy-conversion device John has brought to our attention. It may be the start of something big! Thanks, John.

I'm not sure I understand the possible ramifications of this device. Is it likely to be useful only for powering nanomachines or might it be useful for macro power generation? Am I correct in inferring that efficiency falls off quickly in larger versions of the set-up, and is that a possible reason for the lack of excitement about the device at present?
                                              ???

Nice work, Luca! Thank you.
    There seem to be one or two of those very dark depressions in the Columbia Hills. Rex Carnes has a hypothesis about similar areas in other parts of Mars being briny lakes and I've seen some of the pictures he's presented in support of that hypothesis. I have to say, he puts forward a very compelling case.
    I'm especially keen for Spirit to be directed to those areas in the Columbia Hills so we can see what the dark surface consists of. It may just be shadow or very dark sand or a great accumulation of 'blueberries'. But what if we wake up one day to find that Spirit is standing on the shores of a small lake of highly salty water?! Wow!!!

    The MERs are supposed to be there to look for evidence of water, past or present. What more fitting end to their exploration than to find a standing body of the stuff right there on the surface today?
                                         

I don't think I'd make a very good politician because, when I put my views here, I seem occasionally to cause consternation among people I have a high regard for. This makes me regret, at times, that I ever bother to get involved in political threads at all.
    Anyway, what I was saying was that, before the war, President Bush was sure of WMD in Iraq, so was Britain's Tony Blair, so was Australia's John Howard, so was the Aussie Opposition Leader at the time, Simon Crean (not known for his ardent admiration of the U.S.), and so were many others in the U.N., I'm told.
    I personally weighed up the information I had concerning Saddam Hussein's character and his record in using WMD within his own borders. I weighed up the fact that the former Soviet Union had collapsed in some degree of financial chaos and that its scientists weren't getting regular pay cheques from Moscow in the 1990s. Some of those scientists were working on covert weapons systems and a proportion of them had no doubt succumbed to the temptation to sell what they knew to people they shouldn't have done deals with - people with large bank balances and ideological axes to grind. I remembered a story concerning dozens of 'suitcase nukes', which had gone missing from the Soviet inventory after the collapse of the iron curtain. Fortunately, their tritium triggers decay quickly, rendering those nukes inoperative. But the point is clear, that a great deal of dangerous material has been mismanaged since 1989 and unscrupulous people, with access to the resources of whole countries, may well have availed themselves of some of it.
    So, my personal opinion at the time was that the notion of WMDs being secreted inside Iraq was certainly not an outrageous one. And I could see that other people were thinking along similar lines; even people who had no particular inclination to believe what President Bush said.
    I don't regard myself as entirely stupid, nor as someone who believes everything I see on T.V. or read in the paper. So, it seems reasonable to me that, if I see enough circumstantial evidence honestly to believe a madman like Saddam Hussein may very well have WMDs hidden in his country, then perhaps other people genuinely believe the same thing. Hell! Maybe even George W. Bush really believed it when he told America about it!
    The fact is, you can believe whatever you want to believe. You'll never be able to prove categorically that Bush, Blair, Howard and others didn't believe what they were preaching. My view is that their position was quite plausible and that they probably believed it themselves. (This leaves aside the whole question of whether they were all badly advised by incompetent intelligence organisations.)

    For what it's worth, I say again, my personal view is that, in the wake of burgeoning overt terrorism against the West, the invasion of Iraq was justified in an effort to remove one very obvious loose cannon in a region of the world intricately involved in the sponsorship of terror. The war was legal, though I wish a further U.N. mandate could have been given - I blame unscrupulous elements within that organisation for the lack of that mandate (more on this as the case develops). And the war was indisputably moral, in that it removed the yoke of barbaric oppression from the Iraqi people. (And yes, if it were practicable, it would be very satisfying to remove other tyrants like Kim Jong Il and some of the theocratic despots distorting politics in Tehran etc.)

    I think, sometimes, I could fall into the same mood as many here at New Mars' political threads and say: "It's a country on the other side of the world. It's not our business. They were no direct threat to us."
    It would be easier to withdraw from the world, let it go, curl up in a ball and just get on with our lives.
    But I don't believe in that. Despotism and terrorism are like a cancer in the world today, which cannot be ignored any more than a person can ignore a malignant melanoma on his/her leg. Sure, it's far from the heart or the brain but it will undoubtedly metastasise.
    One of the first metastases of the cancer of Islamic terrorism spread to America in 2001. There will be others - not may be others, will be others - unless we systematically seek to cut out the main sources of the cancer, as and when we find them. I don't care how you have to do it, diplomatically or militarily, but it does have to be done.

    As a last comment, I find it hard to stomach some of the barely disguised glee of some commentators in the wake of the coalition's difficulties in Iraq. This utterly immature schadenfreude, at a time when we should all be pulling together instead of bitching about who was right and who was wrong, causes me far more despair than any setback on the path to freedom and democracy for Iraqi people.

Yet again, I find myself saying I agree with CC.
    Everyone seemed to believe there were WMD until it looked like President Bush (a.k.a. The Redneck Cowboy, The Grasping Oil Baron, The Prince of Darkness, or The Evil One) was going to go after them.
    I think people tend to overlook the fact that America went into Afghanistan first, after 9/11. Iraq came later. The only thing wrong with that is the fact that it's taken a back seat to Iraq since. If it were up to me, I'd be policing and rebuilding Afghanistan with much more gusto.

    But I am a little suspicious of the contrived naivety of some people here, who have climbed up on a soapbox of righteous indignation to proclaim they've been lied to by President Bush. The logic seems to be that, since the President has lied and been found unworthy, somebody trustworthy should be elected in his place. Somebody like, say, .. Senator Kerry.  :hm:  (Which lies are more heinous? Those of a Democrat or those of a Republican? Tricky moral question.)
    My point here is not to denigrate Kerry and support Bush. It's not my country; it's not my call. All I'm saying is that politics is a dirty business and you're going to get lied to no matter who you vote for!

    I'm like CC in that, for me, the WMD thing was just one aspect of a bigger picture. I expected we'd find evidence of WMD somewhere but Saddam had a long time to hide them, if he still had any, and I wasn't too disappointed when the search proved fruitless. Stabilising the Middle East was always the ultimate goal for me and Afghanistan and Iraq were the obvious places to start. A festering hotbed of extremists in the first and a genocidal maniac in the second were reason enough, after 9/11, to go in and try to clean the place up. If the new policy of pre-emption made a few arab countries nervous, so much the better. Decades of pussy-footing around only seems to have encouraged the most militant among them. With the arab world, it looks like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, so why not get tough and see what the shake-out brings? At least the Taliban and the systematic mass murder of Iraqis are things of the past.

    I, too, reiterate that 'heads would roll' if I were in charge, over this appalling treatment of prisoners in Iraq. I haven't the words to describe how I feel about this betrayal of Western liberal standards at this critical time in history. What were these criminals thinking of?!
                                                   ???

Thanks, CM. This isn't the first time you've added a scholarly note to these discussions about martian surface features. Very interesting input and much appreciated.