New Mars Forums

In addition to the telescope thing, I read somewhere that there's a small lunar satellite in the offing which will be taking high resolution pictures of the surface for sale to interested parties.
    They plan to specifically target the landing sites because they figure those are some of the areas of most interest to the average person.
    I'm not sure just how good the resolution is supposed to be but, with any luck, it might perhaps pick up the tracks of the lunar rovers too. Then it will be interesting to hear how the naysayers weasel their way out of that one!!

Wow!!
    Pretty amazing stuff.

    Makes you grateful for our well-mannered star!
                                       

Hi NuclearSpace!

    I knew that nuclear rocketry held great promise for big improvements in Isp (specific impulse), but your post here has really whetted my appetite! I didn't realise how much further potential there was beyond NERVA's achievements. Great stuff!

    I remember seeing an article about the "straight through" Americium-242 rocket a year or so back. From memory, it was an Israeli team doing some research on it and there was talk of Earth-Mars transit times of two weeks. (I think I even mentioned it in these posts somewhere). I was delighted at the prospect of such an engine, but it seemed to just fade away and no more mention was made of it.
    I seem to remember somebody raising the objection that Americium-242 is too rare and expensive to be a realistic fuel.
    Is this true? (Hope not! )

                                             ???

Just a brief comment on a line of reasoning which appeared earlier in this thread regarding the Great Ocean Conveyor:-

    The argument was that melting of ice in places like Greenland, ostensibly caused by 'global warming' and therefore the result of manmade atmospheric changes, is altering the salinity of sea-water in the North Atlantic. The potential result of this would be to interfere with the flow of the Gulf Stream and, thus, lower average temperatures in Europe by as much as 18 deg.F.
    The point of the argument is that Europe's food production could be dramatically reduced, very quickly, and that starvation and social upheaval would follow. The worst case scenario, of course, would be the progression of this calamity to a full-blown ice-age.
    And all because of human-induced global warming. (I honestly don't wish to antagonise anyone, but the 'global warming movement' really does hedge its bets quite neatly. If the world is moving towards a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect, it's global warming. If we're heading into another ice-age ... well, that's global warming, too! )

    Some recent research, click here to view, now suggests that the Gulf Stream's influence on temperatures in north-west Europe has been greatly exaggerated. It looks like the Rocky Mountains in America have more effect!

    My position on 'global warming' is no secret. I'm not a paid-up member of any politically motivated group or cult in this matter - I simply look at the big picture in as neutral a frame of mind as I can muster.
    There is just too much we don't understand about Earth's climate to be able to formulate coherent views about whether or not human activity is having any effect whatsoever on long-term weather patterns.

    This latest research calls into serious question one of our most cherished climatic models - the model which ascribes Europe's climate, unusually mild for the latitudes concerned, to the Gulf Stream. Where does that leave us?

    In view of our almost total ignorance of how the climate works, how it changes, and the effect of higher or lower CO2 concentrations on temperatures, it is very obvious to me that the 'global warming movement' is based much more on ideology than it is on science.

    "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!", cried Chicken Little.

    It isn't.

P.S. I strongly support any serious and sensible moves to
      shift humanity away from reliance on fossil fuels. If safe
       nuclear reactors are the way to go, so be it. But, ideally,
       better solar energy technology is what I'd like to see
       developed as soon as practicable.
       I have no shares in oil companies and I'm not in love with
       President Bush! But I do object to science being
       prostituted for the sake of petty politics.

P.P.S. This has been slightly off-topic but could be related to
       Terraforming in as much as we need to understand our
        limitations as well as our capabilities when it comes to
        climate modification.

My apologies, Robert, for asking questions about clean exhaust from NTRs that you'd already answered elsewhere. I know how frustrating it can be to realise your well-intentioned arguments aren't getting through!
    And your well-set-out refresher on basic nuclear physics, appropriate to this subject, was most welcome. Thank you.
    I try not to ask too many dumb questions, but ... !!
                                       

    And, GDavid, despite your self-effacing comments, I strongly suspect your efforts have been instrumental in waking them up at TMS !
    Nice work!!
                                        :;):

I suppose the Luddites would go into overdrive at the thought of NTR ground launches, even if it were possible to demonstrate a zero impact on the environment!
    An NTR could probably be made less damaging to the surroundings than a Saturn V or the Shuttle, but just the word 'Nuclear' would be enough to get the usual knee-jerk reaction from 'The Mindless Ones'.

    As a matter of fact, I read recently that the international anti-nuclear brigade has already mobilised to protest against Bush's nuclear propulsion plans - and they haven't even heard the speech yet!!
    Where do they get 'em from?!
                                             

I've just read Soph's very interesting post over at 'Acheron Labs-Life on Mars' called 'Volcanic activity on Mars'

   The article Soph draws attention to, concerns a possible re-evaluation of the current wisdom on estimating the age of various regions of the Martian surface. Apparently, this may result in a complete re-think about the sequence of events in Martian history which shaped the surface over the eons.
    The article appears at this site.

    The reason I found Soph's post so interesting, is because it may be relevant to my first post here in 'Marsian Oceans'.
    Both Byron and I have a 'Sky and Telescope' topographic globe of Mars. And we both agree that the appearance of the surface features on this globe virtually screams WATER!!
    In my post, I bemoaned the fact that the currently accepted wisdom about erosional features on Mars seems to indicate that, essentially, erosion all but ceased about 3.5 billion years ago. Yet other evidence seems to show major water flows and sedimentation in more recent times, at odds with the present paradigm.

    Anyway, the point is, I'm hoping that a whole new scenario for the history of Martian volatiles may come from this - a scenario which will include much more surface water for much longer periods, and into much more recent times too!!
                                         

When the word came out of NASA about the vast quantities of water ice in Mars' southern hemisphere, there were many news articles about it all over the world.
    Now that the northern hemisphere has been found to have even more water ice than the southern hemisphere, we get a brief note from Dr.William Boynton of the University of Arizona ... and that's it! That's all she wrote!!

    Doesn't that seem odd to anyone here, other than me?

    The highly celebrated news about the southern hemisphere included scientific estimates that they'd found enough water to submerge the whole of Mars to a depth of hundreds of metres. If you add in the larger amounts of water now evident in the north, we must be looking at enough to theoretically put Mars under more than a kilometre of water!! And that's the entire surface.
    If you consider that this water would accumulate in the low-lying regions, i.e. the northern plains and impact basins such as Hellas, which probably comprise about 40% of the Martian surface, the depth of an ocean on a terraformed Mars would average something like 1/0.4 kms or more. That's over 2.5 kilometres! (Or about 8250 ft, if you prefer.) And that might not include the ice we can see at the poles.

    How come we haven't heard much more about this than the scant references made to it so far?
    Can it really be that, because the southern hemisphere water-ice news was leaked before the NASA press conference, and because reporters asked too many excited questions about the enhanced prospects for life on Mars, NASA is now sulking and rationing further news?!

    It makes you wonder, doesn't it?
                                                    ???

I agree with Clark.
    I don't know for sure how long it might take to create an 8-10 psi CO2 atmosphere on Mars, but if Dr. Robert Zubrin says 20 to 50 years, I'm not prepared to argue with him!

    However, creating a breathable atmosphere is entirely a different matter. Trucking in "several hundred tons of water Ice" and electrolysing it would have no measurable effect on the Martian atmosphere. If you'd said several hundred billion tons ... well, that might be a beginning!
    In any event, there's way more water than that on Mars anyhow - no need for any trucking.

    There's also the problem of releasing too much CO2 into the atmosphere to bolster the pressure. Human tolerance of CO2 is very limited.
    But CO2 may well be all we have to build an atmosphere on Mars. The nitrogen inventory seems likely to be quite low, and it looks like the O2 inventory in the regolith might only be released (if it can be released at all) by methods which will release huge quantities of CO2 at the same time. i.e. By wetting it. (And wetting the regolith will itself require liberating large volumes of CO2 in order to create a greenhouse effect to warm the surface! )
    And it doesn't make two cents worth of difference how much O2 you have in the air if you have even a few percent of CO2 mixed with it, because it won't be a breathable atmosphere.

    I'd love to believe we could have breathable air on Mars in only 10 years, but I just can't see how it can be done.
                                   

Hi AltToWar!
    Although your last post was addressed to Josh, it looks to me as though it answers some of the points I raised in my last offering.
    I believe there is merit in much of what you say and, as I intimated, I think there's probably less distance between us than there appears.
    My idealism is heavily tempered by a rather jaundiced view of 'human nature' (Stand back and get ready for Josh to tear his hair out and explain in an exasperated fashion that there's no such thing as human nature! ... I happen to disagree.)
    I may not know much, but I've learned that in this world, if nearly everybody is shouting the same things and running in the same direction, there's usually something wrong with their thinking! I'm very suspicious of the group mentality - it almost invariably leads to trouble. So my advice, for what it's worth, is to question even more thoroughly what everyone seems to think is right and needs no further analysis. This applies not just to demonisation of the U.S. by the 'pack' but to things like the global warming question as well.
    You present interesting notions about the demise of empires and superpowers. I'm less convinced than you are that they're things of the past. I think it comes back to the 'human nature' concept again. Once there was a 'war-to-end-all-wars' ... but nothing changed. I fear it's simply arrogance to assume we've evolved into better creatures than we were and, frankly, I don't believe we have. I hope I'm wrong.

Thanks Josh for taking the trouble to fish out at least one point we could agree on!
                                     
    I take that as a sign of our continued friendship despite our superficial differences.

    I've said all I want to say about this topic now and I'll leave you in peace to debate the issues further. Thank you for your responses to my posts - I've enjoyed reading them.

Phobos, I appreciate your kind comments.

    I'm fully aware, despite Josh's rather disingenuous insinuations otherwise, that Stalin, Hitler and Mao weren't socialists. Not in any real sense. But in name, they were.
    Mao presided over the ostensibly socialist People's Republic of China, Stalin over the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Hitler over National Socialist Germany. Cuba, too, is a socialist state and even Josh admits that, while nominally a democracy, its elections are meaningless because it's a "single system".
    Isn't it interesting how often the great revolution of the proletariat against oppression of one sort, almost inevitably results in more oppression of a different sort?

    No. The point of my post, which I'm inclined to think has been misinterpreted for purposes of convenience alone, was to bring some semblance of balance into the argument. That was obvious to Phobos, but not to our socialist friends, who are not really socialists, but who just happen to sound like all the left-wing anti-American choruses you hear day-in-day-out in the media. A curious though apparently unintentional resemblance, according to Josh!

    All I'm trying to point out is that all the world is a dirty place. AltToWar and Phobos have very high moral standards and are outraged at the political machinations of their own country. I do not condemn them for such sentiments - in fact I've said I encourage them to criticise, but again this has been conveniently overlooked. Why is so much of what I'm actually saying being overlooked? Because I'm not making the right noises - I'm not chanting the mantra, I'm not part of the chorus!

    Our not-really-socialist-but happen-to-sound-left-wing friends here (and I do mean friends, because underneath all the rhetoric our ultimate aims are not dissimilar) can list America's transgressions like a mullah quoting from the Koran. But even if all the sins were genuine and totally unmitigated, such a list is still misleading because it lacks balance.
    May we also have the benefit of a similarly detailed list of the transgressions of Iraq, Iran, Russia, China, etc.?
    If you are genuinely concerned about morality in politics, might we please learn of your anguish at the treatment of populations in different countries all over the world?
    Josh laments my ignorance of U.S. foreign policy. I confess his knowledge in this area must certainly exceed my own, not least of all because he lives there. But may we ask him to air his knowledge of atrocities committed in recent times by other countries, so that we can compare the details and see for ourselves just how evil America really is?
    Or is it no fun to acknowledge the relatively uninteresting fact that man's inhumanity to man is commonplace and not the sole prerogative of the U.S.A.?!

    Step back from the pack of dogs all around you, barking and baying at America's heels. Wake up to the manipulation of your mind by the insidious 'political correctness' virus which is distorting science as well as politics today.
    Question everything, even the 'liberalism' which purports to be the answer to everything. There simply is no answer to everything, any more than there's a "Great Satan".

    All I want is a little balance!
                                             ???

Josh writes:-

    Josh, if you've had no intention of demonising the U.S., then it's the most remarkable accident of verbalisation in literary history that you've managed such a good job of it without meaning to!!
                                   

    My intention here isn't to dissuade you from criticising America, and I'm reasonably sure Phobos probably thinks along similar lines.
    There is no doubt in my mind that numerous ill-advised, immoral, and odious acts of bastardry (an Aussie expression! ) have been committed by U.S. politicians and generals ever since 1776. There is absolutely no such thing as a wholly 'good' country. They've  all got skeletons in the cupboard and I have absolutely no candy-coated illusions about America in that regard.

    We're all stuck with having to choose among a plethora of evils in this world ... a sad and sorry situation to be in.
    It's just that I, and others like me, have learned to become heartily sick of dogmatic left-wing mantras that attempt to prove the moral bankruptcy of western civilisation - as though only white, anglo-saxon, protestants, in particular, epitomise all things nasty!

    Such views are painfully naive and unsophisticated to those of us who've been around long enough to see the bigger picture.
                                          ???

    P.S. No offense intended. And please excuse all my heavy irony! ... A poor literary device, I agree, but I've always had a weakness for it!