New Mars Forums

I think romance is very much part of this exercise ... YES!!
    My mother's grandfather was a sailor on the very clipper ships you base your futuristic romance upon. I'm quite sure he would approve!
                                                 

Yeah, if we're getting so good with air-bag landings within tight landing ellipses on Mars, maybe we could dump lots of equipment there before sending the crew!
    Not just the bare minimum, I mean a let's-do-it-in-style kind of effort as Michael hinted at here. We could stockpile large interconnecting inflatable habitats (including a spacious recreation hab with a swimming pool - to be filled with purified martian water), a large pressurised rover, large earthmover (mars mover! ), nuclear reactors, etc. We could drop off everything necessary for a serious martian village before sending the people if you really wanted to avoid the flags-and-footprints routine.
    The crewed lander could carry a lighter open rover in case the cargo landers didn't all land as close to their target as desirable. The crew could drive over to the marsmover, deploy it and use it to drag the other components to a suitable site for connection and inflation.
    The marsmover would then be useful for covering the habs with regolith for radiation protection and for other construction and heavy-lifting requirements.

    I know, I know!! It does sound like I've been drinking again!  :laugh:
    But if anyone here is prepared to humour me for a moment, is there a practical limit to how heavy an airbag assisted landing can be?
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I'm with Byron!
    I gotta hand it to you, Cindy. When you take an interest in something, you really take an interest!!  I admire your energy and enthusiasm.
                                     

It wasn't actually the sand in the spokes per se that worried me. It was the thought of the wheel rims and tyres sinking into the regolith and making pedalling so hard.
    Maybe we could make the tyres fatter to decrease the force per unit area(?). Perhaps, together with the lower martian gravity, that would be sufficient to solve the problem(?).

    This whole question of mobility on Mars is certainly an interesting one. Experiments have shown that while the human form under terrestrial gravity of 1g is most efficient in a walking mode (i.e. more kilometres per gram of sweat ... miles per ounce for our American cousins! ), in 0.38g on Mars a loping run is easiest.
    A bicycle ride on Earth certainly beats trying to run at a similar pace, assuming the ground is smooth enough, but is that necessarily the case on Mars? Might the lesser difference in energy expenditure there between loping and pedalling make the bicycle redundant?
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Forgive me if this is a dumb question but I haven't studied the situation in northern Iraq in any great detail. (All I know is that Turkey doesn't want an independent Kurdistan; on the contrary, as I understand it they have designs on Kurdish territory. ... I think! )

    The last part of the report by that journalist Bill likes says:-

   "The Kurdish leaders immediately pledged in Salahuddin to support Iraq's unity and territorial integrity -- but neither agreed to go along to the United States to discuss Iraq's future directly with Kofi Annan or George W. Bush."

    This was the Kurds' response to the 'get in or get out' message from the Iraqi Governing Council.
    I don't understand this reply. Are they 'getting in' or 'getting out'?
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It seems there's not much point in stressing over the ethical implications of introducing terrestrial life into the martian air and soil and thus destroying indigenous life forms. It's probably much too late for should we or shouldn't we? and it's looking more and more likely that we already have!

    I came across an article from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called "Space probes let earthly germs make themselves at home on Mars."
    For the full story, take a look at [http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opin … sbugs.html]THIS SITE.

    But some of the main points are:-

    700,000,000 terrestrial spores!! And that's on a craft deliberately and carefully 'sterilised' by U.S. scientists in 1999.
    What of the Soviet-era probes which crashed on Mars in the 1960s and which weren't 'sterilised' at all?   ???

    Any apocalyptic battle for survival between terrestrial bacteria and truly indigenous martian bacteria, if such a battle were ever to be, must surely have occurred already! It may well have been raging for 40 years.
                                                     

    Naahhh!!! Just kidding. The above article and its scenario ignore impact transfer completely, as do most of them. The chances of Mars having remained quarantined from Earth, and vice versa, for 4.5 billion years are effectively zero. The frequent mass transfer of viable spores in both directions by impact ejecta has surely seen to that.
    Any life found on Mars will be built from the same basic building blocks as you and me. The only question will be: Did it start here and go there, or did it start there and come here?
                                               

Nice link to Huygens' instruments. Thanks Cindy! 

When I was a kid, we would ride bikes on roads and paved paths and we'd even ride on grass if need be. But we'd never ride on sand because the wheels would sink in and the effort of pedalling would become too great.
    I'm trying to imagine cycling on Mars but all I can see is dust and sand and bicycle wheels bogged down to the spokes.   

    We may need to characterise the nature of the martian surface a little better before sending bikes and, even then, I think we'd need to consider things like much wider tyres to decrease the force per unit area and prevent bogging.
    But I'm not saying it won't work.
                                                   

Hi SaorsaDaonnan!
    That was quite a first post you graced us with, and laden with worldly wisdom and political savvy, too!
    I tend to agree with you (perhaps because I want to) that there is a 'crazy like a fox' element to President Bush's initiative. Considering that this is 2004 and we possess 21st century technology and we're talking about not getting back to the Moon before 2015, which is 11 years hence, while our forebears gave themselves 7 years (possibly 8) to get to the Moon with mid-20th century technology ... there must be as much political input into the timetable as technical! (Though I admit Kennedy didn't have to worry about commitments involving an international space station!)
    As I've outlined elsewhere, I'm hoping that once this plan gets rolling we'll see shortenings of the timeline and modifications of the sequence of events as practicalities assume precedence over politics.
    As a best-case scenario, I'm hoping the crewed lunar flights will begin a couple of years earlier than planned, around 2012, and that they will blend into, rather than precede, the Mars missions. I don't see any fundamental impediment to staging the construction of a large lunar outpost between 2012 and 2020, while beginning human Mars missions by 2018 at the latest.
    If NASA gets just a 5% annual increase in funding, it will be on roughly $24 billion p.a. by 2012, with no shuttle and no ISS obligations.
    I feel confident Dr. Zubrin could achieve all manner of human Mars missions with just a fraction of that sort of money and it doesn't come close to the kinds of outrageous figures quoted by politically motivated journalists these days.

    Ah well. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.   

I see your point, Cindy, it would certainly be a 'rich man's diversion' for quite a while.
    But then air travel was the same for a while after it was pioneered but now most people in the western world have travelled by air at least once in their lives.
    I think the ideas Bill outlined might work and I think they could lead ultimately to more and more ordinary people getting a chance to fly in space - if not in the near term, then in few decades from now.
    You have to start somewhere.   

I agree with Byron to a large extent but I don't see why we shouldn't start terraforming Mars while we're still learning how to manage our home planet. I think we can do both simultaneously.
    The industrial revolution began in the late 18th century and world levels of pollution arguably reached their maximum in the 1970s and 80s. Since then, despite an increase in the human population of about 2 billion, the burgeoning conservation movement and a greater awareness of the fragility of our planetary environment have brought about improvements. (If you don't believe me, read some of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg, a book whose author has been lambasted by doomsayers but whose guardedly optimistic message remains unrefuted by objective observers.)
    While Cindy is certainly quite right, of course, to watch with dismay the numbers of certain familiar species such as orangutans dwindling towards extinction, we have moved forward in as much as we're now knowledgeable in such things. 30 or 40 years ago, nobody would have been aware of such a scenario but at least today our collective consciousness has risen to a critical level at which we can bring pressure to bear and hopefully avoid such disasters.
    I don't say all is well with the world, far from it, but the wheels are turning and the human race has never been more aware of its effect on the world around it. I'm hopeful that it's not too late to improve things and I think technological progress will help enormously over the next fifty years. (Yes, Cindy, I realise such a timeline may be no use to species like the orangutan and that would be tragic.     )

    As far as recycling goes, yes we do sort our rubbish into two separate wheely-bins; one for the recyclables. And our Cairns City Council has been very forward looking in building a state-of the-art waste disposal facility, where the non-recyclable garbage is sorted, compacted, and otherwise processed in order to minimise the final volume and toxicity of the waste.
    But I believe some European countries are probably among the most advanced recyclers and the most environmentally sensitive of peoples. I seem to remember one European country (was it Sweden?), where even flashlight batteries had their own special collection system to avoid dumping them as landfill and having their heavy metals leak into the ecosystem.

    Terraforming Mars is going to take a long time, maybe centuries. The initial phase involves a 'simple' warming process to bring the average surface temperatures and pressure up to a level at which liquid water is stable. Doing that much is a bare minimum and will take anything from 50 to 150 years, depending on which books you read. By then, we'll either have solved our environmental problems here on Earth or we'll be in urgent need of Mars as a lifeboat!!
    In any event, I think we should begin the terraforming process on Mars as soon as we can.
                                                   

Where is that 'leaf-like' thing supposed to be, on the dirt at Spirit's feet?
    Won't it be a scrap of something off the lander?

    Those speckles are probably magnification artifacts in the image, I would guess.
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