New Mars Forums

T'is all in jest, Cindy!

    (At least, I'm only kidding .... not quite sure about CC though!!                )

Point well-taken, Byron!
    There's a lot to be said for the 'K.I.S.S. Principle'!   

I'm with you, Paul C.   :up:

    Once again, we are indebted to Cindy for (at least in my case, and I suspect one or two others) expanding our horizons and enhancing our general knowledge.

    Thank you.     

As far as hovercraft are concerned, I think Graeme Skinner's point about dust may be important. If we're going to start our own home-made dust storm every time we drive anywhere,  blasting fines into every crevice of every building and machine in range (including the hovercraft itself), or perhaps even blinding the hovercraft driver in a huge cloud of dust, is it worth it?

    A second point may be the hovercraft skirt. As you know, the skirt travels in close proximity to the ground. On Earth, we use hovercraft mainly over relatively smooth terrain and over open water or marshes; they've never really caught on as a means of transport over rougher country. How would the skirt stand up to the kind of jagged razor-sharp ejecta fields we've seen on Mars?
    Even the relatively smooth martian lowlands, such as Chryse and Utopia, have been shown to be quite rugged by the Viking lander photographs. It may be that there are few places on Mars where a hovercraft would be suitable.

    Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic?   ???

I got 19 points. (Soft core libertarian - just 19 points shy of "Nazi nut"!!!)
                                 

    [It's a pretty crude test, of course, because so many of the questions had me thinking "well, yes ... in certain circumstances, but mostly no". Many questions just don't have a sensible unequivocal yes/no answer.     ]

I agree, Atomoid. Two probes are better than one!
    I think the 2009 rover is going to be BIG, though, and therefore it may be too expensive to send two of 'em.
    Mind you, if it were up to me, I'd send six or eight ... or ten!! But then, I'm what you might call an enthusiast!
                                           

Excellent!
    Sounds like the whole process is further along the development path than I thought. And, when you consider that the cost of putting up the first space elevator is about the same as the amount of money American kids will spend between now and 2015 on chewing gum (! ), I'm very confident this dream will soon become reality.

    In the great scheme of things, $6 billion isn't really a lot of money to pay for a 'railway' to Low Earth Orbit.
    And when it comes to solar system travel, LEO is half-way to just about anywhere. The biggest impediment to our large-scale exploration and exploitation of the planets and asteroids will have been removed, opening up an almost limitless future for humanity.

    I just love it!!!                :up:   

Hi Dook!
    Your idea of pressurising the SUV and riding around in a shirt-sleeve environment certainly sounds simpler and more comfortable. But if you do that, the necessary modifications to the SUV become more problematic.
    We've discussed the ideal artificial atmosphere for martian habs here at New Mars over the months and we've almost come to an unspoken consensus (I think). Using the good old fashioned pressure units, a 5 lb/sq.in. atmosphere comprising 3 lb/sq.in. of oxygen and 2 lb/sq.in. of nitrogen seems to be a good compromise.

    I've just made a rough guesstimate of the glass area of a moderate-sized SUV in square inches and multiplied that figure by 5, to get the total internal pressure on the glass of your vehicle.
    I get a rough figure of at least 15 tonnes - and that doesn't include the pressure on the doors, the roof, and other thin metal panels. The outward pressure on the windshield alone will be on the order of 4.5 tonnes.

    It seems to me that if you want to pressurise an SUV cabin, you're going to have to reconsider the basic construction of such a vehicle. I think the changes required would be so fundamental that you might just as well purpose-build your Mars Car and forget your Jeep Cherokees etc.

    In any event, unless the MarsSkins being developed here in Australia are a success, can you imagine two adults eating, sleeping and attending to other bodily necessities, doing useful research, and also wriggling into and out of bulky pressure suits - all inside an SUV?!!
                                                   

    After two days of that, I think we could safely phone the martian homicide squad ... because there will be a murder to investigate!
                                     :bars2:       

As soon as I heard that the blueberries were concretions, which form slowly in water percolating through soft rock, I immediately thought of pearls. As you probably know, pearls form when shellfish such as oysters get an irritating grain of sand or suchlike into their soft inner parts. Their response is to coat the irritant in smooth material to ease the irritation ... et voila .. pearls!

    Now, I'm not trying to say the martian blueberries were created by martian shellfish, but I just imagined they would probably originate with a small particle of something around which a sphere would precipitate gradually out of the mineral rich water - like a pearl but without the biology.

    But then today I came across [http://www.desertusa.com/mag98/oct/papr/geo_conc.html]THIS ARTICLE, which contains some interesting information about concretions and the particles which form their nuclei.

    Here are a couple of the most interesting paragraphs:-

    I know these blueberries are martian and we have to consider the fact that the different environment on Mars may lead to geological features quite different to terrestrial ones. And I know that just because the most common nucleus for an earthly concretion is some form of biological detritus, doesn't mean the blueberries have to have biological material in their cores.
    But the above article has suddenly made me much more curious about the dark spot in the middle of ERRORIST's blueberry!!
                                              :;):

    It may just be a grain of haematite or basalt, I know, but what if it's something more interesting?
                                              ???

    Mad Grad Student is asking people to make bets on what we'll find over at Endurance crater. I might like to bet we'll find more and bigger concretions at the greater depths made visible to us by the bigger impact. And maybe we'll find a fossil ... who knows? (Wishful thinking, I suppose.)

Yeah! It is surprising that Deimos is so obvious against the Sun. It's such a tiny little satellite, after all.
                                       

    Thanks, Stu, for stating your position ... seated firmly in a canoe going the same way that is!!
                                      :up:   

Hi Jim!
    I've visited MarsNews.com innumerable times over the past year or two and I've found it to be very informative. Thank you.
    At present, though, I'm having trouble seeing the Headlines listed down the right-hand side of the page because the main items, on the white background, overlap them.

Thanks guys, for the encouraging comments! It can get quite lonely here on the sparsely populated 'Yes There's Life On Mars' side of the fence, and every so often I've had to examine my position and ask myself if I'm really being rational about my opinions. Your feedback is much appreciated because it helps me to calibrate my impressions of reality!
                                               

    Atomoid, I think your take on the martian situation is quite close to my own, the main difference being just how active any martian life may be under present climatic constraints. I have to confess, I probably tend to underestimate the probable effects on microbes of the appalling cold on that chilly little planet! But then again, terrestrial micro-organisms have shown us how tough life can be and we don't really know much about the temperature profile of the upper martian crust. There may be vast colonies of bacteria living in warmer conditions at depth in the crust, with populations becoming thinner and reduced to fewer and hardier species the closer we get to the hostile surface.
    Isn't it feasible, then, that certain very rugged microbes, capable of many months of cryo-hibernation if need be, might occupy the ecological niche immediately below the surface, where more thermophilic species fear to tread? These hardy creatures might spend much of their time totally dormant (as you suggest) and then pack "a lifetime into every minute" when ground temperatures rise fleetingly above freezing at certain times of the martian year and day.
    Terrestrial bacteria have taught us that wherever there's the remotest chance of life, there'll be life!

    Graeme, I understand where you're coming from, I think! You tend to take the purist's view of scientists; regarding them as selfless bastions of objective logic. I agree with you absolutely that that's how it's supposed to be!
    But over the years, I've come to realise that most scientists are as flawed as the rest of us and just as vulnerable to the 'dark side' of human emotions. I believe (though it's debatable, I know) that the way the Viking data, and Dr. Gil Levin, have been treated over the last quarter century is less than purely scientific. I daren't go into details again here and now because I've bored my other friends at New Mars too many times with the same refrain and I fear a lynching party would almost certainly be organised to shut me up for good!!      :laugh:
    Unfortunately though, there is such a thing as a 'paradigm edifice', established by the originally genuine efforts of a single scientist, or group of them, which gradually becomes holy writ and cannot easily be challenged. The longer such an edifice exists, the harder it is to break it down, no matter how shaky its foundations may have become over the years. Eventually, the only possible outcome is the complete collapse of the structure, rather than the more normal gradual remodelling which is to be found in the case of less emotive scientific hypotheses.
    As long as no life is discovered on Mars, the fact that so many eminent scientists have relied for so long on the data from an unsuitable instrument (the GCMS) will continue to be overlooked. The fact that this failure of logic was then exacerbated by a fruitless decades-long search for super-oxide soil chemistry to explain the Labeled Release Experiment results will also fade from memory. "What's the difference .. there's no life anyway. They got the main point right, didn't they?"
    But if active microbial colonies are found in the soils of Mars, including at Chryse and Utopia where the Viking probes still stand, how different the picture will be! "You mean these guys discovered life with the LR experiment? And that guy ... what's his name again .. Levin ... tried to convince 'em for over twenty years .. but they wouldn't listen? Sheesh! What a bunch of jerks!"
    What human being, whether an objective scientist or not, wants to be branded a jerk?

    Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. Just more musings!