Manned Mars mission in 2019?

FredGarvin

If they are correct about finding perchlorates in the water at the pole, that may be a very tough thing to do.

LowlyPion

Not to be contentious here but after you have some weed growing in a 4 sq meter pup tent with some as yet identified moisture and atmosphere, what is your plan for the remaining 1.43 x 10^14 sq m of the planet?

frankinstein

I'm not casting aside anything. You've taken personal offense to my postings, so be it. If you can't see how resources such as the Saturn V, Saturn 1b, Skylab, Lunar Module, etc could have been used differently, its your lose. Not seeing how political pressures thwarted the moon missions while ironically being the impetus for them proves I'm right about you. If the approach I describe were taken how likely would it have been that the US tax payer would have allowed a resource floating in space to just linger doing nothing? How much more likely would international involvement be requested by congress to sustain the lunar missions?

When the car is parked in the garage you're more likely to drive it than if you had to build a car every time you decided to take a trip....

If you need a feasibility study for that one then you truly are lacking common sense. :-)

Frank

Topher925

I'm sensing some skepticism about my brilliantly thought out plan? Basically assuming a hybrid plant can be manufactured to thrive on Mars all you would have to do is plant it and let it grow. Basically the same thing that happens on earth with crab grass or dandelions. Just plant it and hope it lives, and over a period of several years/decades/centuries and maybe a few more species introduced the atmosphere should start to look similar to earths. Algae did it to earth, why cant grass do it to mars?

LowlyPion

Do you have any candidates for what you would plant? I mean even crab grass needs a little water.

And I ask not so much out of skepticism (of which I have more than enough for both of us) so much as interest in commercializing it.

Think of all the fun you could have just terraforming the Atacama - the desert in Chile - right here on terra firma - where the Nasa Mars explorer types go to try out equipment and practice searching for life. Not to mention turning the areas around Las Vegas into a savanna.

I surely hope the 2019 landing won't be counting on a splashdown on a soft grassy field.

Topher925

Pion, I have no idea. I am certainly no biologist. But assuming there is a soil that can grow plants, I'm sure it can be done. After all life can thrive everywhere from volcanic vents 20,000ft deep in the ocean all the way to the Himalayas. What kind of plant or w/e can do it, I have no clue. Some kind of fern or something?

Mech_Engineer

I haven't assumed anything, I simply showed you that the United States' manned mission to the moon returned a factor of 1000 more material than the Russian robotic missions did, and at a cheaper "dollar per pound." You however are assuming that a robotic mission can be designed which collects the same amount of material a human could (while having the same inductive reasoning dictating sample collection) in the same weight taken by a Human pilot. This assumption is contradicted by historical precedent.

People are the most adaptive system you can put on a ship. Their power source is independent of the ship's power source, and they are much more likely to be able to overcome and/or fix unforseen problems on the ship, they are energy efficient, and can be used for a variety of roles.

LowlyPion

This may be true - historically. However advances in technology and computing and communication have given us tools to manipulate, perceive, project, interact, over vast reaches of space - how ever slowly - the speed of light notwithstanding.

I think you may over value human presence weighed against the cost, when the human would have to be provided for and sustained over a period of many months. When the cost of transport is essentially doubled by the requirement to bring the human back alive as opposed to the economy of bringing back any sampler material - should the decision even be made to do so.

LowlyPion

All of the things you describe require some sort of exchange media with its environment. With the atmosphere of Mars standing at about 1% of Earth already and air density on Earth already at 1/1000 the density of water, and the water media apparently (at the surface anyway) currently locked up in permafrost, it seems that the real problem to overcome in order to support life process, is the development of an active and effective media for transferring nutrients and waste with the environment.

This lack of reactivity with a potent media, or if there may be a sustainable reaction exchange with the Martian atmosphere, at best it may be conducted in an cold environment, with an atmosphere 1/100 th of Earth, with only 1/2 as much sunlight as Earth to support chemical processes. I'd say whatever the chemical reactions, one should require patience, as whatever reaction may occur would likely be in slow motion with Earthly expectations.

ct_sigchi@yah

I did my thesis on a mission to Mars. Ours, and many other proposals, involve technology still being developed (namely propulsion systems) and employ their theoretical capabilities once fully R&D'd.

There is a few of us that think sending an automated green house, with robots to "man" it, would be a wise decision before we start setting people down on that harsh planet. It's fairly straightforward:

Capsule that lands on Mars IS the green house. Plant growing stations are already set up and ready to be seeded, watered, monitored by the robot(s).

It will start producing vegetation within 6 months that is ready to eat... IF all works well. The robots will monitor the plants, recycle them in compost piles, etc... via remote control from Earth. From this, we may decide to send people in afterward.

Meanwhile, I sent (in my report) two rovers. One big one, and a smaller one who is like the "baby" to the mother, going where she can't, to provide simultaneous research for plant growing possibilities in our green house. Will the wind storms knock out too much sunlight? will other factors prove it near impossible to grow in our green house? etc...

Emreth

The reason why there is no life on mars is because it's not sustainable. No atmosphere, no liquid water,etc..but there's a bigger problem that nobody mentions in the terraforming discussions..no magnetic field.The surface is constantly bombarded with radiation. Even if you get an atmosphere, it will dissipate into space quickly because of this. Thats the one thing that makes it impossible to terraform mars.

sigma143

Thank you Emreth! I was getting tired of reading the super-ego disputes, and then there it was. The first thing on my mind, no magnetic field. Do we know if plants need a magnetic field to grow?

Astronuc

Please note that the post to which one responded is 2 years old.

sigma143

Yea. Emreth brought a good point and nobody responded...