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So New Horizons took nine years to get to Pluto with a Jupiter gravitational assist and no slow down. So if we were to send people there, we would need advanced engines to accelerate and slow down such a ship. Once every 12 years, Jupiter is positions to provide a gravity assist to Pluto. I think we should shoot for a transit time of about a decade. So any 30 year olds we send there will by 40 when they arrive. Pluto appears to have a lot of ice on its surface. Perhaps initially the colonists will bring a fission reactor with enough fuel to last 20 years, after that a fusion reactor can arrive by slow boat, or the colonists can build one, but perhaps it would be easier to send a fusion reactor separately, as soon as we get one that is small enough to send to Pluto.
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We think the ship for the cycle for Mars is huge one for Pluto is near Dearth star size.....
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Basically it would be a colony ship that is itself a colony. I think at a minimum, such a ship would have about 100 passengers. The Death Star is quite large, about 200 miles in diameter if I recall correctly.
So a colony ship would need accommodations for 100 people and agricultural growing areas to feed 100 people. Probably frozen human egg cells would be stored to provide for genetic diversity and expansion of the colony through natural child birth once pluto is available for construction materials. I would suggest if fusion power is not immediately available, the ship would first be sent out with a fission reactor with fuel for 20 years, 10 for the outbound journey and another 10 years to wait for fusion power to become available. Probably 3-d printing would take care of the parts needed for the fusion reactor.
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Pluto has ice, ice which could be sent Marsward with very little delta v. Pluto has a low escape velocity, and its orbital velocity around the sun is slow too, cancel out both and chunks of ice will fall sunward. I think it would take about a century to reach Mars if we just let it drop.
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Pluto has ice, ice which could be sent Marsward with very little delta v. Pluto has a low escape velocity, and its orbital velocity around the sun is slow too, cancel out both and chunks of ice will fall sunward. I think it would take about a century to reach Mars if we just let it drop.
The delta V would be large. Remember anything travelling from Pluto to Mars will be picking up a lot of kinetic energy from the sun's gravitational potential. You would need some impressive engines just to slow it down.
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Tom Kalbfus wrote:Pluto has ice, ice which could be sent Marsward with very little delta v. Pluto has a low escape velocity, and its orbital velocity around the sun is slow too, cancel out both and chunks of ice will fall sunward. I think it would take about a century to reach Mars if we just let it drop.
The delta V would be large. Remember anything travelling from Pluto to Mars will be picking up a lot of kinetic energy from the sun's gravitational potential. You would need some impressive engines just to slow it down.
If a planet gets in the way, that will slow it down real fast, in some cases we can spread the area if impact by blowing it up before it hits the planet. Mars could use a bunch of water and methane from Pluto, Venus just needs a lot of water. Perhaps we could send two chunks of ice on separate paths to Mars and Venus and have those chunks collide and spread out just prior to impact. Frozen nitrogen, we should probably cover up to protect it from the Sun, let it boil off just prior to impact so it collides with the planet as a gas cloud instead of a ball of frozen ice.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2015-07-16 09:44:20)
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Mars has enough water. Measurements published by the European Space Agency from the ground penetrating radar (MARSIS) show the south polar ice cap alone has enough water if melted to cover the entire planet Mars 11 metres deep. And of course it wouldn't cover the planet evenly, the tops of mountains would stay dry while low lying areas like the dried up ocean basin would flood more deeply. And that doesn't count the northern polar ice cap, various glaciers that have been found, or permafrost. Mars has enough dry ice for 30% of Earth's atmospheric pressure, and enough water. All it's missing is nitrogen. And many people suspect sub-surface nitrate beds.
Europe's Mars express also found traces of ammonia. A tabloid reporter tried to claim the only way of producing that is microbes. Well, that's one way, but there are others. I've explained that decomposition of nitrate by UV in sunlight, then liquid water, will produce ammonia and leave metal oxides. So most likely the reason probes haven't seen any nitrate is that surface nitrate gets broken down.
No need to bombard Mars with artificial comets from Pluto.
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Though they would provide a large amount of heat to Mars...
If - or rather, when - we colonise the outer planetary systems, we'll have the expertise and technology required for settling the Kuiper Belt. Now that would be a fine setting, given paraterraformed worlds lit by fusion power and fast beam-riding vessels connecting them. Can you imagine sitting back on Charon, watching the forests and fields of Pluto looming large in the sky above you, thinking about your next trip to Orcus?
Use what is abundant and build to last
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I see that to do timely exploration of Pluto's system requires a lot speeder ship to get probes and rovers to the surfaces of each and a means to break them into orbit that would use less fuel to slow it back down....this is technology that would benefit man's exploration of the inner planets greatly.....
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Mars has enough water. Measurements published by the European Space Agency from the ground penetrating radar (MARSIS) show the south polar ice cap alone has enough water if melted to cover the entire planet Mars 11 metres deep. And of course it wouldn't cover the planet evenly, the tops of mountains would stay dry while low lying areas like the dried up ocean basin would flood more deeply. And that doesn't count the northern polar ice cap, various glaciers that have been found, or permafrost. Mars has enough dry ice for 30% of Earth's atmospheric pressure, and enough water. All it's missing is nitrogen. And many people suspect sub-surface nitrate beds.
Europe's Mars express also found traces of ammonia. A tabloid reporter tried to claim the only way of producing that is microbes. Well, that's one way, but there are others. I've explained that decomposition of nitrate by UV in sunlight, then liquid water, will produce ammonia and leave metal oxides. So most likely the reason probes haven't seen any nitrate is that surface nitrate gets broken down.
No need to bombard Mars with artificial comets from Pluto.
Mars is short of nitrogen however, and Pluto has nitrogen ice on its surface. Bombarding Mars with Nitrogen would do a lot of good. We just need to shade the nitrogen ice from the Sun so it doesn't evaporate before it gets there Oxygen too, oxygen can be separated from the water ice and sent to Mars in solid chunks of oxygen ice, they hydrogen can be dumped on Venus, though solid hydrogen is at a much lower temperature than solid oxygen.
Liquid oxygen has a density of 1.141 g/cm3 (1.141 kg/L or 1141 kg/m3) and is cryogenic with a freezing point of 54.36 K (−361.82 °F, −218.79 °C) and a boiling point of 90.19 K (−297.33 °F, −182.96 °C) at 101.325 kPa (760 mmHg).
The surface of Pluto, in comparison, can range from a low temperature of 33 Kelvin (-240 degrees Celsius or -400 degrees Fahrenheit) and 55 Kelvin (-218 degrees Celsius or -360 degrees Fahrenheit).
It appears Pluto is just the right temperature for storing solid oxygen
Liquid nitrogen freezes at 63 K (−210 °C; −346 °F). Despite its reputation, liquid nitrogen's efficiency as a coolant is limited by the fact that it boils immediately on contact with a warmer object, enveloping the object in insulating nitrogen gas.
So it appears nitrogen is a solid on Pluto too.
So what we need to manufacture balls of frozen Nitrogen and frozen oxygen, shade it from the Sun as we hurl it sunward, using the vacuum of space as an insulator. Just before impact we expose these balls to the Sun to create a wide impact footprint. Add enough nitrogen and oxygen to Mars atmosphere leaving the carbon dioxide the same, and you get an Earthlike atmosphere.
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The CO on Pluto may be a useful 'fossil fuel' for future colonists, as it reacts exothermically with steam.
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Probably we'll need fission or fusion, or perhaps whatever is heating the interior of Pluto. I have a theory that Pluto is an escaped satellite of Neptune, something must have happened 100 million years ago, so back then Pluto had tidal heating, and doesn't now!
Otherwise, what is heating Pluto's interior, maybe there's a higher than usual amount of radioactive elements in its core, but then that would lead to another mystery as to why that is?
Do you have any theories?
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I wonder if the Pluto-Charon orbit has only recently circularised, within the last 100 million years. Alternatively, if an impact spun up Charon, that could potentially do it. Or even if Charon was a fairly recent capture.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Maybe there was a collision, parts of Pluto may have cooled before others, and thus we have mountains and few craters. A recent planetary collision in the last 100 million years! That would be something. If two Kuiper belt objects collided, I wonder if the Dinosaurs would have seen it? Pluto would then have cooled from the outside in, and ice expands when it crystalizes, how to explain all the nitrogen and methane on its surface though! a planet the size of Pluto wouldn't be good at holding on to these gases at room temperature, they would have to freeze pretty quickly before they escaped into space, the water on the other hand would hold onto the heat for quite a long time as it cooled. Would it cool of fast enough before all the light gases in its atmosphere escaped into space and allow them to freeze on its surface? Maybe Pluto has an extremely radioactive core, that seems unlikely too. One unlikely possibility is that Pluto swallowed a microscopic black hole originating from the Big Bang, that would heat its interior. Another possibility, Pluto is a spaceship, a very large spaceship buried under ice, heat from its reactor might be creating an internal water ocean, a little way out there however.
You know that would make sense from the point of view of the starship builders. Water ice has the useful characteristic of freezing from the out inwards, that way it makes its own fuel tank, as such you would not want to bring it too close to the Sun. Water ice also makes a good radiation shield, and of course if the ship ran on antimatter, it would need to keep its power plant running to maintain the antimatter containment system, the water of Pluto would therefore be the reaction mass, and it would need a lot of that! Perhaps the aliens mined the water and gases from Neptune and gathered them in Pluto.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2015-07-18 06:34:45)
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Probably we'll need fission or fusion, or perhaps whatever is heating the interior of Pluto. I have a theory that Pluto is an escaped satellite of Neptune, something must have happened 100 million years ago, so back then Pluto had tidal heating, and doesn't now!
Otherwise, what is heating Pluto's interior, maybe there's a higher than usual amount of radioactive elements in its core, but then that would lead to another mystery as to why that is?
Do you have any theories?
A porous, icy crust which is highly efficient at insulating the mantle. The mantle itself is probably saturated with ammonia and salts which lowers the melting point of the ice. In addition, the low gravity suppresses convection and further reduces heat loss.
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Tom Kalbfus wrote:Probably we'll need fission or fusion, or perhaps whatever is heating the interior of Pluto. I have a theory that Pluto is an escaped satellite of Neptune, something must have happened 100 million years ago, so back then Pluto had tidal heating, and doesn't now!
Otherwise, what is heating Pluto's interior, maybe there's a higher than usual amount of radioactive elements in its core, but then that would lead to another mystery as to why that is?
Do you have any theories?
A porous, icy crust which is highly efficient at insulating the mantle. The mantle itself is probably saturated with ammonia and salts which lowers the melting point of the ice. In addition, the low gravity suppresses convection and further reduces heat loss.
Over billions of years, that is not enough, some energy source is required to keep the mantle liquid, because the natural temperature is such that water should remain a solid. Small bodies like Pluto should lose their heat more quickly because they have more surface area to volume than larger bodies. A planet the size of Earth could still have a molten interior even if it was at the distance of Pluto. The Moon is geologically dead, its core has cooled, the Moon has lots of craters, where are Pluto's, seems that Pluto's surface is younger than our Moon's and its smaller than out moon, it should have cooled off faster than our Moon. So what keeps Pluto's geography active, Scientists say the tidal forces exerted by Charon and its other moons are not enough to do this, so what is it? That is the main question. If it is radioactive decay, then Pluto's core must be more radioactive that Earth's. There is an element called Plutonium that is highly radioactive, I don't suppose there is any of that in Pluto's core, do you?
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Uranium is a relatively rare element in the solar system. But potassium is common and relatively light. Perhaps Pluto's core and mantle are potassium-40 enriched compared to Earth and Mars?
With such an abundant internal energy source and liquid interior, could there be life on Pluto?
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Uranium is a relatively rare element in the solar system. But potassium is common and relatively light. Perhaps Pluto's core and mantle are potassium-40 enriched compared to Earth and Mars?
With such an abundant internal energy source and liquid interior, could there be life on Pluto?
That would seem to argue that Pluto originated from outside the Solar System. Pluto could have bee captured with the help of a gravitational assist by Neptune in the recent past. Would that have perhaps corresponded with the extinction of the dinosaurs? Pluto's orbit does crisscross Neptune's, thought orbital inclinations don't match at the present. Maybe there is a chance of Pluto colliding with Neptune at some point in the future.
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