NASA, European Space Agency Want To Go To Mars 129
coondoggie writes "NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are aiming to cooperate on all manner of robotic orbiters, landers and exploration devices for a future trip to Mars. Specifically, NASA and ESA recently agreed to consider the establishment of a new joint initiative to define and implement their scientific, programmatic, and technological goals for the exploration of Mars. The program would focus on several launch opportunities with landers and orbiters conducting astrobiological, geological, geophysical, climatological, and other high-priority investigations and aiming at returning samples from Mars in the mid-2020s."
China/Japan/russia (Score:5, Interesting)
China seam to have more money to throw about, I hear Japan are pretty good at technology and russia seam to be the goto guys if you want something launched. If getting to Mars is a serious scientific venture and not a cock swinging contest, why not work with them as well?
Re:Did NASA take their stupid pills again? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, you can conceivably build things in zero G. The question would be whether it's easier to build things in zero G or where there's a bit of gravity. Gravity has some advantages: Drop something and it will hit the ground, rather than floating away. While building stuff in zero G looks way cool, I'm more interested in efficiency.
The problem with getting stuff from Earth is that it's at the bottom of a really deep gravity well, which limits how much stuff we can get out of it. So shipping water and building materials up to Earth orbit is expensive. Remember that, for x amount of fuel, you can ship 6X the weight from the Moon than you could from Earth.
The problem with getting stuff from Asteroids is political: you have the "what if something goes wrong?" crowd. "Let me get this straight--you want to go find an asteroid and send it toward the Earth?! What happens if you can't control it?! What happens if something goes wrong and it crashes into the Earth?!? Won't somebody think of the children?!?!"
You could mine it and process it on the asteroid and then ship it to Earth orbit for assembly. But we're back to the gravity issues: Mining and processing in negligible G (eg Ceres, the largest asteroid, is 0.03G) will have it own issues as well. On the moon, we have to deal with dust--imagine how much dust mining an asteroid will generate? This a problem we have to solve anyway, whether it's on the Moon or an asteroid.
As for water, I may be wrong but space is not only pretty darn cold, it's pretty darn hot. The ISS temperatures range from -250 F to +250 F, depending on whether it's in direct sunlight. So I would think water would melt. But I may be wrong.