Mars Explorers Face Huge Radiation Problem 283
astroengine writes "A radiation sensor inside NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows that even under the best-case scenario and behind shielding currently being designed for NASA's new deep-space capsule, future travelers will face a huge amount of radiation. The results, based on Curiosity's 253-day, 348-million-mile cruise to Mars, indicate an astronaut most likely would exceed the current U.S. lifetime radiation exposure limit during one round trip mission. "Even for the shortest of missions we are perilously close to the radiation career and health limits that we've established for our astronauts," NASA's chief medical officer Richard Williams told a National Academy of Sciences' medical committee on Thursday."
Hasn't Comic Book taught you anything. (Score:5, Funny)
Radiation only has positive outcomes!
Re:Hasn't Comic Book taught you anything. (Score:5, Interesting)
So let's turn a problem into a solution. A lot of radiation, add a layered antennae tuned to the radiation to convert the energy into usable power. Nano structures can absorb and convert a lot of energy, it only remains to engineer the right one that can absorb and convert the most problematic frequencies. Often just attempting to block specific frequencies is less efficient than absorbing and converting to use full energy and then absorbing and converting to heat.
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Has nobody read Joe Haldeman's Marsbound? Clearly the solution is to set up a camp under ground. It's obviously working well enough for the Martians.
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If you dig a bit, her "logic" is more or less akin to: The more you hit a spot on your head with a hammer, the more it swells up such that subsequent blows are padded by the swelling, doing less damage on each blow.
Re:Hasn't Comic Book taught you anything. (Score:5, Insightful)
her "logic" is more or less akin to:
Actually I think this is Ann Coulter's logic: ... which generates lots of outrage among liberals ... which generates publicity ... which generates traffic and hits to her blogs and videos ... which generates income and talk show invitations
1. Say the most outrageous thing she can think of
2.
3.
4.
5.
6. Goto 1
Dig a hole (Score:3)
Piece of cake, right?
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Dig a hole in space?
The results, based on Curiosity's 253-day, 348-million-mile cruise to Mars
Re:Dig a hole (Score:5, Funny)
What, you expect me to RTFA?
Yes digging a hole in space is a dumb idea.
I have noting further of value to add to this conversation.
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Yes digging a hole in space is a dumb idea.
. . . not if it's a wormhole. It would help you get there faster, and skip the long space radiation part of the trip.
Assuming that wormholes are radiation free . . .
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...... and real
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Lets not get into semantics of fact versus fiction.. Just because we've never seen a wormhole, and have no evidence one could even exist, doesn't mean that there isn't one..
You can replace wormhole with all kinds of things. It's a lot of fun. :)
To Boldly Go... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd personally be happy with some 21st century 'tang.
Re:To Boldly Go... (Score:4, Funny)
Hi, I'm Chris Hansen.
Why don't you have a seat right over there.
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We need 21st Century TANG!!!!
Who needs Tang? If astronauts could somehow feed off radiation, we'd be all set, and solve the food problem, too!
"Hello, Houston? This is Mars Sprinter 3. We're all feeling hungry, so we're going to plop ourselves into the nuclear warp drive pool for a snack. Be back in a few minutes."
Re:To Boldly Go... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame so much of NASA's human exploration has been cut back.
I wish I could agree, but I can't. I hate to say it because I grew up on the manned space program. As a kid I saw Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon (yes, that means I'm over 21) and thought what an historic moment it was. One of the things that we learned in those early days though is that people are fragile and manned space flight is horribly expensive. For a fraction of the price (10%?) you can send an unmanned mission. Frankly a lot of the support for manned space flight is that people want to see Buck Rogers, but almost all important scientific and practical work has been done by unmanned spacecraft. Please don't respond with examples of the work done in manned space flight. I know there's been some stuff, but it's tiny compared to the cost and what's been done unmanned. Also our ability to create robots (or whatever you want to call them) has increased dramatically since the early days.
Sure we could develop some cool tech for manned missions, but there are cheaper ways to do it. We could also create some cool robotic tech for unmanned missions. Before we send anybody to Mars, let's at least do an unmanned round trip.
Never send a man to do a robot's job.
Re:To Boldly Go... (Score:4, Insightful)
The things you say are true, but I still want to go to Mars. Even if being the first man on Mars means being the first man to die on Mars, that's totally fine.
We've gotta get off this rock eventually, let's go now.
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You will never exceed the benefits of having a tool wielding human in-situ with robotics.
If it took the same amount of time to develop the equipment for the missions, and they cost the same, you'd be absolutely right. But how many robots could you send to Mars for the price of sending one person?
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It isn't the future, of course, which is why this focus shift to what is theoretically achievable - Mars. Mars (and possibly Venus) really represent the limit of practi
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purple
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Green. Soylent, specifically.
wait... (Score:2)
Didn't we just have a slashdot article about how US radiation limits are ridiculously low and need to be re-assessed?
Re:wait... (Score:4, Informative)
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My personal limit is none. None radiation.
Re:wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you're already over your limit then.
Re:wait... (Score:4, Informative)
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Well if he's breathing in radioactive Carbon-14 right now, shouldn't exhale and then not breath in?
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PUT DOWN THAT BANANA! -The Nuclear Regulatory Agency.
Re:wait... (Score:4, Funny)
To get that, you'd need to be surrounded by a substance that was so black that you'd think to yourself "How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black."
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Astronauts play by different rules, because they're comparing the odds of cancer from radiation exposure against the odds of dying in a fiery rocket explosion. Their lifetime limit (1 Sv) is 1000 times the yearly limit for the general public.
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I'd prefer my odds on a rocket. If all goes well, I'll be visiting another freakin' planet. If it doesn't go well ... well ... it'll be a pretty quick ending.
Hitch a ride: (Score:5, Interesting)
Just find a small periodic asteroid going approx. the same way, or make one go the same way using the slingshot affect, bore a hole into it via robots and explosives, and then the "roidnauts" and their ship could hop in the hole when it passes by Earth.
Re:Hitch a ride: (Score:4, Informative)
Given that attaining suitable velocity to get there in a reasonable timeframe with manageable fuel loads is probably one of the big issues of Mars travel, how does hitching a ride become advantageous? The differential velocity between you and the space rock would be way too high to dock, and even if you could 'grapple' it, you would likely slow it down too much.
To match its speed to board it would require just as much energy as accelerating yourself to the required travelling velocity in the first place.
Maybe a grapple with a winch could be a solution so that you can grab it while the velocity difference is high and apply a braking force to the winch mechanism until your speed matches. Then you could slowly wind yourself in. Would have to be a very long winch though. We'd probably have space elevator tech as a prerequisite to this.
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I took the point of his post to be that sitting inside a rocky/iron asteroid, you'd be significantly more shielded from ambient radiation.
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In this case it's Preparation A
And once you get there... (Score:4, Informative)
http://mars-one.com/en/faq-en/19-faq-health/185-will-the-astronauts-suffer-from-radiation [mars-one.com]
However, I would still go. I mean, if we can actually get people to Mars, we shoudl have no problem getting around the radiation problem.
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Oases of magnetism (Score:2)
http://www.universetoday.com/30538/was-mars-magnetic-field-blasted-away/
What is the protection at 180E60S, if compared to Earth?
risk low compared to mission as a whole (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
Current U.S. standards limit an astronaut’s lifetime radiation exposure to 1 Sievert, or 1,000 milliSieverts, which equates to about a five percent chance increase in developing a fatal cancer.
A new study shows that with currently available propulsion technologies and similar shielding to Curiosity’s, astronauts on even the shortest roundtrips to Mars would get radiation doses of about 662 millisieverts and that doesn’t include radiation dosages for any time spent on the Martian surface.
Sounds like a rather low risk compared to that of the mission as a whole.
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Wasn't the magnetic shielding problem basically solved [physicsworld.com], at least in lab simulations, many years ago, using materials that are well understood and well within our ability to carry into orbit? So how is this still a "huge problem"?
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First, cosmic rays aren't "the real problem". They're a tiny part of the problem. AFAIK, there's a general consensus that high-speed particles are of lower concern than the low-speed particles that this magnetic shielding blocks, for precisely the same reason that the high-energy particles that pass through us every day even on Earth's surface aren't a big deal. Yes, the energy threshold below which particles are deflected is likely lower in the design described by this article, but the biological impor
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Whyever would we limit ourselves to Curiosity's shielding? It's not like Curiosity was alive or anything?
Just start breeding radiation resistant humans (Score:3)
Like, feed babies a diet of magnetized iron, so that they develop their own radiation shield in their blood. Or something like that. Let science fiction be your guide.
Cockroaches can withstand radiation . . . maybe modern gene therapy could help humans to replicate that process in themselves . . . ?
Hopefully, without turning them into cockroaches . . .
Re:Just start breeding radiation resistant humans (Score:5, Funny)
Cockroaches can withstand radiation . . . maybe modern gene therapy could help humans to replicate that process in themselves . . . ?
Hopefully, without turning them into cockroaches . . .
Too late. We call them lawyers
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We could just send the cockroaches instead and hope that in a thousand years, they'll turn into humans. Or something like that.
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We could just send the cockroaches instead and hope that in a thousand years, they'll turn into humans.
It can be done overnight [wikipedia.org].
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I for one welcome our human-cockroach hybrid overlords.
For crying out loud, we have people marching against GMO foods, I can only imagine the outrage if we did that on people.
Shielded enclosure (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think this is new - surely we have enough data to know the interplanetary radiation levels. In some of the old Mars mission designs there was a shielded "shelter" on the spacecraft that could be used during times of high radiation from solar activity. This of course adds weight - but if its located in the center of the spacecraft, or maybe shielded by fuel it might not be too bad.
On the martian surface it would seem fairly straightforward to make a covered trench. Most of the work could be done by robotic equipment before the manned mission arrived.
Putting people on mars isn't easy - if it were, much of the point would be lost.
spf 2000 (Score:3)
asymmetric electrostatic radiation shielding (Score:2)
Easy solution... (Score:2)
"Even for the shortest of missions we are perilously close to the radiation career and health limits that we've established for our astronauts,
Easy solution -- just raise the limits.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
http://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]
I guess he has to update that chart now to account for trips to Mars...
use water (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, they already know how to deal with this, and discovered that hydrogen neuclei are ideal for absorbing high energy cosmic rays, since they produce a minumum of secondary high energy particles from the interaction. This means a substance with lots of hydrogen in a small volume makes the best shielding.
This leads us to the most abundant, hydrogen dense material available, which would also be necessary for the trip, and colony operations: water.
Basically, put the crew capsule inside the water storage tank. Radiation problem solved. You have to send the water anyway. Make the most of it.
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Re:use water (Score:4, Informative)
Certainly.
Now, calculate that your average human requires approximately 2 liters of water daily for proper renal function (though they often do drink less, and it is unhealthy.) Also factor in the scarcity of the material on mars, and the feasibility of sustainable agricultural activities without that large quantity of water.
Now, let's also think about the secondary particles generated when heavy and complex lead neuclei are exposed to iron neculei traveling at near C, and the subsequently exponential impact that this secondary radiation will have as the shielding becomes more and more radiological from constant exposure.
In other words, yes, water has serious issues. You still have to bring it with you if you are really serious about a martian colony. There is no discussion there. You HAVE to take it. It isn't optional. Since you already have to tae it with you, using the absurd cost to orbit it as a canard is moot. Adding the water AND the lead will always cost more than launching just the water.
The water does not have the same problem with producing dangerous secondary radiation, and does not become radioactive itself at near the same rate as will the lead rad shield. The water is already required, and is not optional.
Why not just use the water, then?
You can resolve the "water expands, dumbass!" Problem by freezing it already prior to launch. This also makes it much safer to transport in the event of a micrometeorite puncturing the containment vessel, and believe it or not, ice can be quite insulating, and can serve other functions for regulating the capsule's environment.
Can't see the forest through the trees... (Score:2)
...said a million Slashdotters sporting Tinfoil hats.
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Huge Radiation (Score:3)
Do normal size radiation protection methods not work against Huge Radiation?
that doesn't sound too bad (Score:2)
If it's close to lifetime exposure limits, that means it's still fairly safe, since our limits are very conservative. Astronauts might have a slightly elevated risk of cancer and probably shouldn't have kids, but they are still much more likely to die during takeoff and landing.
In other words: Forget Mars (Score:2)
Not a surprise. This is not the only hard show-stopper. Fantasy alone is not enough to make something difficult a reality, it must at least me feasible in some real sense as well.
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solar radiation is not a hard show stopper, we know how to shield against radiation
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You are right that space is hard. Flight was hard, many of the early pioneers of flight died in the attempt. Crossing oceans was hard, climbing mountains was hard, exploring the poles was hard. It is in the nature of exploration that it is difficult, otherwise it would have already been done.
In the end though you are right - going into space doesn't get us anything. Unless you see it as a goal, rather than a means, there is no point. There are plenty of resources here on earth for hundreds of millions of hu
The Problem (Score:2)
with TFS is that they assume a round trip right off the bat. How bad is it if we send people one-way?
What about a magnetic field generator? (Score:3)
All I'm hearing is (Score:4, Interesting)
"We'd better develop mature gene therapy soon". Cancers, aging, congenital defects, HIV, Lupus, psoriatic eczema... the list goes on and on.
Effective medicine will open the cosmos to post-humans. It's just silly to pretend we have to leave our little egg before we've developed enough to survive in the outside world.
So... (Score:3)
You're telling me that you got 660mSieverts behind shielding designed to protect a nonliving robot with at least somewhat rad hardened electronics? (And was traveling in a fairly quiet solar period.)
And (though I don't see the specifics to back up the shielding info for the deep space capsule in TFA) that a capsule that's largely a follow on from Orion that was mostly designed for a few day trip for a return to the moon provides inadequate shielding for deep space or Mars missions? Especially when they're limited in speed because they're only powered by chemical rockets?
Who'da thunk it.
This is why I'd rather go back to the moon to learn how to run space bases only a couple days away from home where there's lots of nice lunar soil to hide from the radiation under.
Then, design much larger more heavily shielded Mars and deep space craft once we have the easier challenges of lunar operations understood.
Mars the vacation spot (Score:2)
I can just see the brochures.
Go to Mars on a one way trip.
Live in close proximity with the same few people for the rest of your life.
Never again feel real sun or wind on your skin or swim on a natural body of water.
Spend most of your life underground.
Continually hope that funding does not get cut and the supplies keep coming from earth.
Hope that there are no problems with the shipments or you may starve.
Never be able to touch most of the people you love.
Probably die of cancer due to radiation.
Realize that t
Radiation exposures not "huge" (Score:2)
"astronauts on even the shortest roundtrips to Mars would get radiation doses of about 662 millisieverts"
That is simply *not* the "huge amount of radiation" the article claims. It won't even cause any effects that can be tied to the radiation...it'll increase the long-term risk of fatal cancer by a few percent (for the 1000 mSv, 5% increase in cancer risk limit, that means you're still 20 times more likely to die of cancer from something else), provided the models are even accurate for such low exposures. R
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"astronauts on even the shortest roundtrips to Mars would get radiation doses of about 662 millisieverts"
That is simply *not* the "huge amount of radiation" the article claims. It won't even cause any effects that can be tied to the radiation...it'll increase the long-term risk of fatal cancer by a few percent (for the 1000 mSv, 5% increase in cancer risk limit, that means you're still 20 times more likely to die of cancer from something else), provided the models are even accurate for such low exposures.
The problem is that the radiation levels can vary by several orders of magnitude depending on what the sun is up to. If you're unlucky, you get 10 or 100 times that; if you're really unlucky, lethal levels. It's a significant problem even if most of the time you aren't getting much of a dose.
Re:Mutants. (Score:5, Funny)
Won't this just turn people into mutants like in Total Recall?
That's once they get their asses to Mars! Before that, they'll be in space, and they'll be more like the Fantastic 4.
Re:Okay (Score:5, Informative)
Best source I can find is this [space.com] article, which lists the surface radiation as around .7 millisieverts a day, or around the same as low Earth Orbit (Mars atmosphere is extremely thin, so it doesn't give as much protection as Earth's does from cosmic rays). This is vastly more than people are exposed to on Earth, and could definitely pose long-term health risks for a colony or other one-way mission.
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Agreed, I wonder if there's something that can be done about the atmosphere itself. If not, this may all be for naught, as its not easily habitable if massive amounts of shielding are required to form even a basic settlement.
Re:Okay (Score:5, Funny)
Ya, there's something that can be done. The government is being very hush-hush about it. Until now, only those "in the know" have been told.
Just under the surface of Mars is a vast quantity of water ice.
In the Cydonia region of mars, there is an ancient pyramid. Deep within the pyramid is an alien device which will turn the water ice into a Earth-like breathable atmosphere.
There is a catch though. There are agents already on-planet who will stop at nothing to keep you from activating the machine.
It would take a madman to even consider it. More specifically, a madman who's mind has already been scrambled by a dramatically failed lobotomy. That man may be you.
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Ah, that's what that face is for.
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Wow, that's a great story. You should sell it as a movie script!
Re:Okay (Score:4, Funny)
My eyes just popped.
Re:Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
So limit outdoor activity, and bury the colony shelters so that you can leverage inxpensive dirt for shielding.
Say, with sandbags packed with martian regolith.
(With a solar sintering machine, and "refined 19th century tech*", you could produce all the glass fiber sandbags you could possibly ever want on mars.)
* 19th century version [blogspot.com]
*refined modern and cheap consumer version [blogspot.com]
[For the imagination impaired, you use the solar sintering machine to produce a small, stationary bead of melted glass from abundant martian regolith, use a steel mandril to pull several glass fiber pulls off that bead, thread them through some eye-hooks in a halfcircle around the bead, then thread them through one last eye-hook as a bundle, and then feed the bundle into the knitting machine. Turn the crank, and a continuous tube of knitted glass fiber gets pooped out. Cut the "sock" at desired lengths, and use more glass fiber in a handheld bag stitcher to close the end, and stuff them with martian regolith. You can then stack them up to make 1950s style bunkers around the the habitat structures, which will not only keep the wind off of them, but also provide radiation shielding on the cheap for the colony. The total equipment needed would be well under 20kg, and would allow unlimited sandbag production at the colony site.]
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Re:Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
Solar sintering machine.
http://www.markuskayser.com/work/solarsinter/ [markuskayser.com]
Instead of attempting to use it as a 3d printer, you keep a fixed focal point, and simply melt the regolith into a small (US quarter sized) bead of hot glass.
You use a small metal mandril to pull glass fiber pulls off of that. The drawing of the glass shrinks the bead, but the sinter just makes more to replace it. Multiple pulls are made from the same bead, at different angles, then combined into a bundle.
Note how the 3d printer version fits in a suitcase.
Mars has 1/2 the solar irradiation as earth, so it will need a larger fresnel lens. Otherwise, same setup, minus the build table mechanics.
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Note that the earth's atmosphere, at ~15psi sea level pressure, is equivalent to being under ~10m of water. While there's less solar irradiation at the surface of Mars, there's also not much of a magnetosphere to divert lots of charged radiation. So, to rough order of magnitude, one would need about the same amount of shielding as offered by Earth's atmosphere: about fifteen pounds of material per square inch, requiring a shell on order of 10 meters thick. That's a lot of material to melt/form! We're not ta
Re:Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
With that kind of negativity, of couse you won't look for sensible options.
Like, using marsian weather to deposit the dirt for you, or noting that martian surface gravity is 1/3 that of earth, and that a "50lb bag of sand" will weigh only 16.6lbs on mars.
Don't let those little things trouble your already made up mind though. (Like how at that kind of mechanical strain reduction, glass fiber tethers can hold up loads that you need high grade steel cables for on earth, and all the engineering tricks this simple fact would let you get away with on mars, that you simply would be unable to do on earth in any of the other harsh environments you cited, especially the ocean floor, where you would need a habitat made of pure premium unobtanium to hold back the hundreds of tons of pressure per square meter of water overhead.)
If you approach your problems with the preconception of "Its hard, and can't be done, and isn't worth the time!", then it will never be done, even when conditions have changed, and it most certainly can be done.
The purpose of building a colony outside of the earth is NOT to solve word overpopulation. The purpose is to put our eggs in many baskets. Or did you learn nothing from the celybinsk(sp?) Meteor incident?
Life doesn't have to be fun, glamorous, easy, or desirable there. The reason for putting life there isn't to crow about accomplishments, to solve some "overpopulation problem", or due to some science fiction fantasy utopian ideology or dream. Those are all popular canards used by people who hold your viewpoint, but none of them are the reasons why we should build a martian colony.
So, why then? Ask Mr Sagan. The basic gist is that keeping all the humans in one basket (earth) is a recipie for extinction on the long term. We have had at least one mass extinction event on this world. (And likely many others.) If it has happened once, it can and eventually will happen again. Refusal to accept this as a rational reason to expand our holdings as a species in favor of petty indulgences and empty arguments about difficulty are not founded on reason. Or did the recent russian meteor event not provide enough impetus for you?
No-one is saying a martian colony will be anything but a torturous, inhospitable, and eternally drudge-infused effort to barely survive. We are saying that the adversities that would be present are not insurmountable, and that you only truly fail when you fail to try, and are offing suggestions on how those adversities could be effectively overcome.
Take your recent one: moving hundreds of tons of dirt on top of the habitat's dome of sandbags.
Here's an inexpensive way to do it, that makes use of the martian environment, rather than fighting it:
Mars has seasonal winds that blow the powder fine regolith all over the place, and routinely move huge dunes of the stuff around. You build a wind control wallaround the leeward sides of the dome, so that the dust carried by the winds gets dropped. Mars itself willdump the dirt you want if you are patient.
You can test this out in earth based deserts right now if you want. It's how lost cities in the sahara from antiquity get buried over.
When faced with a very daunting engineering challenge, don't work hard and go nowhere; work smart, and get shit done.
Re:Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
The "avoid mass extinction event" reasoning is basically rubbish. If we have the technology to survive on the surface of Mars --- no water, air, or food except what you bring and raise in your sealed habitats; open a window and you die --- then we can survive the very worst planetary extinction events right here on Earth. Giant meteor smashes into the planet; toxic dust cloud blocks out 50% of sunlight; ecosystems thrown into havoc; flaming ashy death raining down from the skies for decades? *Still* easier to survive than Mars. The engineering know-how to create sustainable human habitats on Mars could do much more on Earth, even in such a worst-case scenario.
All the recent Russian meteor did was remind me of how gigantic a panic is made over extremely rare events, causing very little harm, while millions of people are dying from much easier to fix problems. We can start worrying about once-in-a-million-years vague possibilities after we've solved the issue of murdering each other for profit on a daily basis.
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Wait, what's this?
http://applicants.mars-one.com/ [mars-one.com]
A website with almost a quarter million people wanting to go build a martian colony, and willing to pay with their own money and lives for the mere opportunity!?
Clearly, that website and that project must be a pure fabrication! It couldn't possibly be real, when no such effort to create thse "oh so much easier!" Earth shelters has even been seriously proposed by *ANY* nation capable of carrying out such a plan!
Because that would mean that a martian colony is
Re:Okay (Score:4, Interesting)
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There's still the problem of constant lack of sunlight inside the habitat. Therefore we need to send only Slashdot users. These colonists will be well-adapted to the circumstances, and there will be no risk of them approaching the harmful "daylight radiation".
I think we should start with users with six-digit or lower IDs, to be on the safe side.
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Why pick and choose? It is perfectly sensible to do both!
Use the caves and lava tubes for the main structures, and use sandbags around entrances, exits, and surface structures. (Like the communication antennas, wind generator foundations, etc. Things that can't sensibly be underground, but still need protection from wind erosion.)
The ability to make inexpensive glass fiber cloth has other ancillairy uses besides the obvious as sandbags. It is also a very good structural material in a number of other situati
Re:Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't care. Put me on that rock. Hell, I'll go tonight. Let's do this.
Get me there, let me walk on Mars. The rest is details, nothing that happens after taking a step on another planet could possibly ever matter to me ever again, and whatever was done, whatever was sacrificed, whatever the cost, it would be worth it. I don't care. Let's go.
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Re:Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
The simplest solution is to use astronauts who are immune to lifetime radiation exposure.
I am serious.
An astronaut who is 65 years old is safe from radiation damage that will kill him 40 years later. He or she is relatively immune to radiation damage that would be a threat to their health 20 years down the road. Not only that, but the corps of potential astronauts is expanded to include all the women who are post menopause.
I doubt that there would be much problem recruiting astronauts from the pool of USA retirees. Since computerization has also pretty much eliminated the need for astronauts with fast reflexes, there is no reason at all not to do this.
As a possibly major fringe benefit, the possibility of aging into the USA Astronaut Corps would encourage a lot of the middle aged to fight harder against that midriff bulge. We would have a much healthier populace.
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Well then, if we send enough people to colonise the planet, some of them will be more likely to not die from radiation poisoning. Those ones get to reproduce and, over time, you select for radiation resistance.
Then after a few hundred generations we can ship them back to work inside our reactors without suffering any side effects!
Nope. It can be done in a single generation. Simply send the cyborg and organic astronauts both to Mars, the latter as more of a symbolic gesture really... There will no doubt be volunteers. The humans, heavily dosed with radiation and now sterile, can help establish the cyborg procreation instead. After the organics are dead, the cyborgs can continue to live on and establish a human colony on mars, for the good of mankind.
P.S. Your definition of "human" is probably out of date.
human - /'(h)yoo-mae
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Yeah, NASA needs to get with the pop-culture... Mars One, one-way trips and reality TV.....
They should do their best to support such a project.
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Of course lead lining fixes this, as will any number of materials (water is also a great radiation shield)... if you have enough of it, that is. The issue has always been:
"Our rockets suck, we cannot put large payloads into orbit, so our Mars capsule is going to have to be less than X kilograms and our radiation shielding can weigh no more than Y kilograms".
Re:Lead Lining? (Score:5, Informative)
The heaviest material? Really compatible with space travel fuelled by some of the world's most expensive fuel at great expense. Part of the problem of space is not that "we can't do that", it's that "it's so FECKING expensive to do it the way we would on Earth".
There's nothing stopping us shipping an entire biodome up to Mars, with enough food for a million people. It's just a question of weight (and, thus, cost). The point of the very first manned Mars mission is going to be to get there, not to prove we can start industry there. As such, things like huge amounts of lead are a luxury we can ill afford.
That, and most of the radiation that's damaging can actually be stopped by a bit of aluminium foil. The problem isn't that we *couldn't* shield from it, it's that we can't afford to. And pioneers often have to suffer for the title of being "first", I'm afraid (e.g. Madame Curie).
The bigger problem is the legality over what is basically a health and safety issue that, if we'd worried about it in the past, we'd never have let anyone go up Everest, fly to the Moon, etc. etc. etc.
These people are going to get irradiated. There's nothing practical that we can do to stop that. Many of the Apollo astronauts had eye problems related to radiation exposure in later life, it's just a simple fact of going outside the Van Allen belts (and, hell, flight attendants probably get more radiation in a year than ANYONE who works in a radiology department).
We just have to make sure they understand the risk. But I'm sure that Scott understood the risk of the Antarctic, that Hillary understood the risk of Everest, and so on. There will be people more than willing to do it. And in 100 years time, in any luck, space travel could be commonplace to the point where we finally do "solve" most of those problems through finally getting the money / incentive to actually prevent them. But at the moment, it's just a legal issue to make sure these people understand just how much simple things (like invisible radiation) can scupper their lives on a remote planet.
Re: (Score:2)