Scientists Say They Have Come Up With a Potential Way To Make Oxygen On Mars (cnn.com) 122
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: In a high-stakes mission that could take five years to complete, NASA wants to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s. Transporting enough oxygen and fuel on a spacecraft to sustain the mission for anywhere near that length of time, however, isn't currently viable. The way NASA plans to address this problem is by deploying MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen in Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This system is in the testing phase on the Mars Perseverance rover, which launched in July. The apparatus will convert the carbon dioxide that makes up 96% of the gas in the red planet's' atmosphere into oxygen.
On Mars, oxygen is only 0.13% of the atmosphere, compared to 21% of the Earth's atmosphere. The MOXIE system essentially produces oxygen like a tree -- pulling in the Martian air with a pump and using an electrochemical process to separate two oxygen atoms from each molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2. The experimental technique proposed by Vijay Ramani and his colleagues uses a completely different resource -- salty water in lakes beneath the Martian surface. "The presence of the brine is fortuitous because it lowers freezing point of the water. You take the salty, brackish water and electrolyze that. Our process takes the water and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen," Ramani said. The method proposed in the new paper, however, assumes that these brines are readily available on Mars, said Michael Hecht, NASA's principal investigator for MOXIE and associate director for research management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory. The study has been published in the journal PNAS.
On Mars, oxygen is only 0.13% of the atmosphere, compared to 21% of the Earth's atmosphere. The MOXIE system essentially produces oxygen like a tree -- pulling in the Martian air with a pump and using an electrochemical process to separate two oxygen atoms from each molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2. The experimental technique proposed by Vijay Ramani and his colleagues uses a completely different resource -- salty water in lakes beneath the Martian surface. "The presence of the brine is fortuitous because it lowers freezing point of the water. You take the salty, brackish water and electrolyze that. Our process takes the water and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen," Ramani said. The method proposed in the new paper, however, assumes that these brines are readily available on Mars, said Michael Hecht, NASA's principal investigator for MOXIE and associate director for research management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory. The study has been published in the journal PNAS.
Looks like ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Looks like ... (Score:1)
Re: Looks like ... (Score:3)
There are actually solutions for this, though they require a lot of power. However, the article doesn't say they wish to put the oxygen in the atmosphere. Instead they are just purposing to make oxygen on the red planet which could simply be used in self-contained environments.
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The lack of power is a devastating power. Solar power sources are much less effective at Mars orbit. Nuclear tends to be massive, though I suspect the neighbors would not demand as much shielding or the control of nuclear waste or run the "NIMBY" protests that hinder nuclear power on Earth.
Nuclear power spacecraft since 1961 (Score:2)
Correct me if I get one if these years wrong.
The first satellite was 1958.
First person in space, 1961.
Started using nuclear powered spacecraft in 1962.
First person on the moon 1969.
The Apollo 13 nuclear power source is currently near the Marianas trench.
Most spacecraft have had RTGs. As far as "massive", maybe 100 pounds or so for a spacecraft one. The ones that used to supply power to pacemakers for somebody's entire life are a bit smaller, since they get implanted in the patient's chest. :)
The Russians
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That's news to people, because everyone's seen Apollo 13 the movie by now.
The Apollo capsules were powered by a mix of fuel cells and batteries - the service module contained the oxygen and hydrogen and fuel cells and provided the power for most of the trip (or it was supposed to, in the case of Apollo 13). This provides heat (it's quite exothermic thus providing a convenient heat source), produces water and power.
The batteries are whe
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https://rps.nasa.gov/about-rps... [nasa.gov]
https://www.spacesafetymagazin... [spacesafetymagazine.com]
https://www.realclearscience.c... [realclearscience.com]
But you saw a Tom Hanks movie, so of course you know more about it than NASA does.
Re: Looks like ... (Score:2)
I was mainly talking about the power to shield against solar winds blasting away the atmosphere which is best solved with an orbital facility. Specifically I think you park a large magnetic at Mars L1. So the power facility is very different.
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The ancient magma flows have enough iron in them to have their own magnetic fields and act to protect anything under them from radiation
Between that and the large lava tubes that appear to be present, makes for an attractive human environment
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>Solar power sources are much less effective at Mars orbit
Actually that's not quite so clear cut. Yes, solar power is considerably less effective in Martian orbit than in Earth orbit - Mars is ~1.5x further away, which means orbital solar energy density is only ~44% as high.
Things change on the surface though - on Earth the atmosphere blocks ~30% of the solar energy that reaches our orbit, while Mars has negligible atmosphere. So on a clear day a solar panel on the surface of Mars will actually produce
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run the "NIMBY" protests
In the case of spacecraft, the NIMBY problem is one of where the reactor will land if the launch fails.
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The solar power situation isn't really that bad on Mars. Less solar irradiance than earth, but still enough to make plenty of power. The lack of clouds helps and the kind of dust storm that will actually block out the sun only comes around once every few years.
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I'd be concerned about dust storm _damage_ to the solar cells, and about dust accumulation.
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The dust in martian dust storms tends to be very small particles. I don't think it's likely to do that much damage compared to say rain or hail, or indeed dust and sand particles carried in wind storms on Earth. Dust accumulation could be an issue, but it's not like there aren't methods to remove dust.
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It certainly was for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, but it wasn't, in itself, a killer issue. They had to do things like making sure the rover was parked facing the equator through the winter, which were certainly constraints on operations, but not killers.
There was a lot of abuse directed at NASA by armchair engineers (many of them with 7-digit UIDs here) for not including some panel-cleaning mech
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It certainly was for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, but it wasn't, in itself, a killer issue. They had to do things like making sure the rover was parked facing the equator through the winter, which were certainly constraints on operations, but not killers.
It certainly was, but they had relatively tiny solar arrays. For a large solar array, there would be a lot more extra space for a mechanism to clean the panels. Since the dust in Martian dust storms is almost all both electrostatically charged and magnetic, most of it can be removed through contactless methods. A small wheeled robot with a cleaning wand on an articulated arm could keep hundreds of panels clean.
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They had panels large enough to charge the batteries they carried. Not relatively tiny, nor relatively huge.
The relative in "relatively" referred to the size of the solar arrays on the rovers and the size of a fixed-position solar array for powering a base on Mars. Compared to a fixed array for powering a Martian base, the solar array on a rover is relatively tiny. You seem to be trying to claim that I was saying that the rover should have had a cleaning wand. I did not say that. I said that a fixed array for a base should have something like that. One cleaning instrument could service a surface area of panels eq
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Ah, I was misunderstanding you. Yes, a cleaning device for a power array on the ground would probably be worthwhile. On the remote/ semi-mobile bases. Or a cleaner for when you're packing up camp to move to the next base.
... which there is a mission en route to collect, Plus, of course, we've got the min
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No, we know that a large proportion of the dust grains can feel and respond to contactless forces. Whether those forces are stronger than the forces of attraction between dust grains and panel surfaces needs to be established.
Fair enough. However, on the cleaning side, you can make electromagnets almost arbitrarily strong. Coatings can also be chosen for the panels themselves to reduce the attraction of the dust particles. Ultimately, even if a cleaning wand won't work, although I think it probably would, compressed air should still work, it would just require a cleaning tool where the dust is blown into a dust trap. The trap could use electrostatic and magnetic forces to trap the freed dust. If all else fails, a brush would wor
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s/better/essential/
And we still haven't learned how to handle the consequences of agriculture, 10kyr ago. Gives a pretty clear indication of what the "Great Filter" is (in the context of "where is everyone?"
Regardless of which, in terms of "saving the species from choking
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s/better/essential/
I think with robust enough power storage, you could make to with just solar or, indeed, just nuclear or wind or geothermal, etc. It's not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket though. I'm hesitant to outright say that it would be impossible without multiple power sources though. I am including a generator that you could run off rocket fuel in the power storage category rather than as an actual power source.
And we still haven't learned how to handle the consequences of agriculture, 10kyr ago. Gives a pretty clear indication of what the "Great Filter" is (in the context of "where is everyone?"
I fear you may be correct about that. Still, I think the best way to proceed as an individual
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I've killed too many people by being optimistic to want to kill another. That tends to make me careful with other people's lives - even people I don't know.
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Forgive me for sounding like a retard here, but...
Wouldnt the perchlorate mineral salts be a much richer source of oxygen? As I understand it, getting them wet and heating them will release copious quantities of the gas.
If you used them in combination to treat habitat wastewater, they would be a potent decontamination agent (for harmful fecal bacteria), in addition to generating oxygen.
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The planet is made up in a large part from oxygen. The problem is to retrieve it easily. Retrieving oxygen from sand is also possible, but you have to dig it up and then use more resources to extract the oxygen. Extracting oxygen and carbon from the atmosphere does look like a resource friendly approach.
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By volume, the non-gas giant bodies (planets and not-planets) in the solar system (and, as best we can tell, the rest of the universe) are 40-60% by volume oxygen. That doesn't mean that it is an easily-exploited resource.
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Volunteers to sit on the surface while under bombardment are idi
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Untrue. The composition of the asteroid belt is fairly close (within a couple of percent) to solar composition, minus most of the hydrogen and almost all of the helium. That's a sufficiently frequent need that I keep it in my "astronomy notes" grab-bag : [H 27900, He 2720, O 23.8, C 10.1, Ne 3.44, N 3.13, Mg 1.074, Si 1, Fe 0.9, S 0.515, Ar 0.101, Al 0.0835, Ca 0.0611, Na 0.0574, Ni 0.0493, Cr 0.0135, P 0.0104, Mn 0.00955, Cl 0.00524, K 0.0
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Hmmm, what prompted that? I've travelled that railway line - well for a couple of days of it's length - but didn't see anything particularly attractive. Apart from my to-be-wife, that is.
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Four trains a day when I was there, and it'd been like that since the early 70s, according to my friends who built the city (Noyabrsk, not Norilsk, but some of them had worked in Norilsk too. The arctic pension was always attractive.)
No planes beyond Noyabrsk though, unless you've got a military passport. Something to do with the nuclear silos in between the oilfields which fuelled Russia.
Not, of course, the non-existant "Trans-Siberian railway" ;
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The answer is to simply produce the oxygen faster than the solar wind strips it away. Given how weak this process is this is not an insurmountable problem. That is if we were talking about terraforming Mars, which we are not. MOXIE is a project to produce oxygen for a manned mission to Mars. The oxygen is so people can breath in their habitat and to fuel the rocket home.
If the goal was to terraform the planet then they'd use something far more powerful and less delicate. Something like dropping nuclear
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Except before you get through a portion of the population decides they like old mars better and blows up your stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The stripping of Mars atmosphere by the solar wind operates on the timescale of hundreds of thousands of years, humans rarely think that far ahead
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To be really clear on this, MOXIE is especially not a system for terraforming, because it produces carbon monoxide as an exhaust gas. That's all well and good if you're pumping the O2 produced into a habitat and the CO back into the atmosphere. It doesn't really matter that it's a poison gas because no-one is breathing the atmosphere anyway. If you're dumping the O2 directly into the atmosphere to make an O2 atmosphere then you have to do something else with the CO. Also, there clearly isn't enough CO2 to m
Re: Looks like ... (Score:5, Funny)
"How will they solve the problem with the lack of poles"
Poland is part of NATO these days, they should be able to get some volunteers.
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Pretty sure they aren't looking to terraform with this thing. They're looking to put the oxygen they produce into bottles and sealed habitats. And, if the process works good enough, condense it into LOx to use for rocket engines. We can already use that brine they also talk about to electrolyze into diatomic hydrogen and oxygen - capture both and you have a gas station for methane / LOx powered rockets with a byproduct of water, which can either be electrolyzed for more hydrogen, or used as water.
In fact
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1. This is talking about producing oxygen for a closed habitat, not terraforming the entire planet. It's just a way to supply oxygen to astronauts while on the surface without having to bring it all from Earth.
2. The process of the sun stripping away oxygen is rather slow by human standards. If we got air dense enough and with sufficient oxygen content for humans to breath on the planet it would remain for hundreds of thousands of years before the sun stripped it away again. By solar system standards tha
Nothing to see here (Score:5)
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Informative)
our perchlorate brine electrolyzers are more efficient than state-of-the-art alkaline water electrolyzers under terrestrial conditions, providing a pathway to utilize suboptimal input feeds to produce ultrapure hydrogen and oxygen.
That's why.
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Clearly methano's cake recipe needs to use big words like "perchlorate" and "suboptimal" and "ultrapure."
Re: Nothing to see here (Score:2)
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There is no cake. The cake is a lie.
Re: Nothing to see here (Score:2)
And were I them, I'd have NASA triple verify about there being enough accessible brine before even contemplating using such a solution.
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Before contemplating *relying* on such a system, definitely.
But since such a "system" is just a pair of electrodes and some very basic plumbing that could be used for other things, it could make good sense to take them along as a supplemental system. If it works well you use it as your primary oxygen source and free up a ton of extra power for other uses. If not, you wasted a few pounds of payload on the electrodes, no huge loss.
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Why would they interact? Pretty much any electrolysis system is going to capture the generate the oxygen and hydrogen in different places and collect them separately. Maybe you vent the hydrogen back into the environment, store it, or burn it in a CO2 atmosphere to produce methane and pure water, but the one thing you defiinitely aren't going to do is mix it with the oxygen you're trying to breathe.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Informative)
The key is that electrolysis gets you hydrogen as well as oxygen. The hydrogen can then be used with the Martian atmosphere in a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction [wikipedia.org]Sabatier reaction to make more oxygen as well as methane (rocket fuel). So the electrolysis gives you:
4H20 -> 4H2 + 2O2
And you use the 4H2 plus atmosphereic CO2 thusly:
CO2 + 4H2 -> CH4 + 2H2O
Final result gives you pure water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the trip home. If there's no water on Mars you can throw a container of H2 from Earth and run the reactions in the opposite order. As a bonus it's an exotheric reaction.
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That's also totally obvious and nothing new, just like the Mars cake proposal. ISS uses exactly that and I believe it also was one of the secondary reasons SpaceX switched to methane as a fuel for their Starship.
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>If there's no water on Mars
And if there's no water on Earth we can just drink beer.
We *know* there's water on Mars - we've measured the brie, and have mapped the ~820,000 cubic kilometers of water ice in the north polar ice cap alone, to say nothing of the south cap and scattered glaciers around the planet.
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That translates to about 34m water depth on the surface of the planet, assuming that not one drop sinks into the porous bedrock (which isn't going to happen). The comparable figure for the Earth is about 2700m of water depth, evenly distributed over the planet's surface.
Being optimistic, that "34m" of water is going to be distributed, patchily, through the top 3 or 4 km of regolith. (Pessimistically, the top 10km of regolith.) If it were distributed like oil is t
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You're not getting any substantial quantity of liquid water on the surface without massive terraforming efforts to dwarf any human endeavor to date, so that's about as relevant as how many Libraries of Congress it would fill.
Near-surface brine may prove useful in some contexts, particularly expedition vehicles and resupply depots - but I seriously doubt the flow rates will be sufficient for any industrial-scale applications. Which makes it irrelevant for colonization purposes (though potentially useful for
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Speaking as a geologist with 30-odd (sometimes darned peculiar) years of searching for, finding, evaluating and exploiting the Earth's sub-surface "lakes", "pools", "ponds" and other accumulations of hydrocarbons ... really that simile is so wildly inaccurate as to be just misleading. Even the very best of reservoirs are still 70% by volume solid rock, and more typical reservoirs are 90%+ solid rock.
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Does subsurface water accumulation follow the same tendencies as hydrocarbon accumulations though? At first glance the source and behavior (both mechanical and chemical), of the liquids are very different, so you wouldn't necessarily expect to be able to generalize much of anything between them.
Either way, I would regard any exploitation of large subsurface reservoirs as a longer-term proposition. You're almost certainly going to want geologist boots on the ground before you even consider trying to exploi
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Both are fluids moving in an approximately rigid mineral matrix, through pores with "throats" of various sizes between them. So, the physics involved are going to be those of gravity, differential gravity (buoyancy,
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>none of these forces are significantly different between the surface chemistry of mineral grains in a terrestrial environment, and grains of comparable composition in a Martian environment.
I would assume that deep underground water on Mars behaves similarly to water on Earth. I was thinking more the differences between water and hydrocarbons here on Earth. Viscosity is very different, as is source and flow - water tends to flow continuously, causing erosion, while hydrocarbons slowly accumulated in geo
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Water flows take millions of years too. There were reasonable arguments (not wholly convincing, but certainly worth consideration) a few years back for people having tapped water pockets dating back to the Proterozoic from IIRC Witwatersrand sandstones in South Africa. That's 2 billion years, give or take a billion.
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>Water flows can take millions of years too.
FTFY
Typical water flows are considerably faster than that, otherwise water wells would rapidly become useless. Of course, with a much smaller surface-level water cycle, the underground water cycle may well be much slower on Mars.
>And these chemistry aspects differ between Mars and Earth ... how?
My point is that they probably don't, and thus underground water features on Mars probably span the full range that they do on Earth - including "open water" undergr
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That's surface water. Very near surface - within a few hundred metres.
Anyway, a few hundred metres is well within the permafrost range. The few seeps that do happen may be propelled by unusually warm brines, unusually slaty one, or some deep hydrothermal system. But they're still spaced several thousand kilometres apart on the surface. Maybe when the INSIGHT probe gets drilled to target depth (several
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Okay, I see your points, don't really have the knowledge to discuss them in detail. I will say that a quick search for "Mars subsurface lakes" turns up several articles, including some on Science, that specifically mention the radar "flat spots" - I kinda doubt that's something the "science writers" would know to add themselves.
>Why waste innumerable efforts on colonising another planet when, as an intermediate stage to the "colonisation" we will have to build reasonable comfortable habitats in space. I
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Spot on.
No new chemistry here (at least at the moment), scientists have known how to make oxygen on Mars for quite a while (and there is more than one way).
The very method is being tested on ISS, which recycles most of it's water and for some time now also CO2 (Sabatier reaction [slashdot.org]).
The only difference with regard to Mars is that there is a rover on the way, which actually have a testing device to do it (MOXI [wikipedia.org]).
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not sure why this is news? (Score:2)
So... I don't understand... Did Andy Weir scoop NASA?
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Oh wait wait... salty water below the surface. Always good to read the whole article.
So... given that, the discovery is how we can make oxygen on Mars, the exact same way we make hydrogen on Earth.
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The beauty of it is they will want / need the hydrogen as well for creating methane rocket fuel with a byproduct of water in a fairly simple and well-understood catalyzed reaction.
They get this kind of thing efficient enough and we're closer to being able to create water, breathable atmosphere, and return fuel on site. That would dramatically reduce the amount of shit that needs to be carried on a mission if you can pre-land equipment that can start creating tanks of O2, H, H20, and CH4 to be ready when so
Re: not sure why this is news? (Score:2)
the reason why I wonder why this is news, The Martian had all of this stuff. Life imitates art?
How about methanol (Score:2)
How about extracting hydrogen (to make methanol) from the water ice that is in the Martian soil? The whole SpaceX Mars landing mission is hinged on that being possible. Frankly it seems absurdly difficult just to dig up the soil and process it seems like it would require robotic heavy equipment that we donâ(TM)t even use on Earth for mining. It seems like we need to people working on that ASAP.
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There's solid CO2 there because it's so COLD. It's already cold enough at the equator, the poles are no place to build a settlement let alone a rocket launch facility. And I'd place a large wager that magic gold box of theirs won't work at those low temperatures. That just increases your need to collect more solar power to run the thing, (heat it up to operating temperature and keep it there, while it literally eats ice cubes) and of course if you're at the pole your solar does a whole lot worse than the
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Vacuum pumps are tricky things to maintain - particularly ones that can go down to the level of the Martian atmosphere.
It would be simpler to flood the "airlock" with water from the bulk storage tank (displacing the Earth-grade atmosphere into storage - perhaps in the headspace of that same tank), then displace the
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LOL I type methanol instead of methane twice wow. Thats what happens being in a bio lab too much.
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Mars colony? (Score:3, Insightful)
Remind me once again why do we need to spend half a trillion dollars to build a colony in that shitty place?
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We need some place to escape to from the morons on Earth. I just hope they require an IQ test from everyone anyone allowed to board a rocket.
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The question is what they're looking for from the IQ test - are we looking to offload maintenance of stupid people by loading the left side of the curve into the rocket, or only send the "best and brightest" from the right-hand side.
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Remind me once again why do we need to spend half a trillion dollars to build a colony in that shitty place?
Because it's fun.
What, you rather we continue spending halves of trillions of dollars on warfare here on earth?
Re:Mars colony? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's what's next.
Beginning with the first people who set off into the uncharted wildlands outside of the village, humanity has been explorers. We've crossed oceans and mountains just to see what's on the other side, and build settlements there. Why would you think that would stop with "well, guess we've seen all there is to see on this planet, better give up this core behavior that makes us who we are."
Discovery and recording of knowledge for future generations is one of the main things that separates humanity from other primates. Not really sure why you're trying to suppress it, since that single trait is responsible for literally every single thing in your daily life.
Extreme climate stopped us in our track (Score:2)
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And yet there are still people living above the arctic circle, and in research stations on Antarctica.
By your own logic, that would mean that a maintained and occupied research station on Mars is fine.
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Because Venus is way to hot, and all the other planets/moons are too cold.
Oh and Luna has no atmosphere at all.
There probably are better planets around other stars, but we don't have {insert your favourite FTL method here} yet.
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And if they're as hospitable as Earth, there's a high probability (order 0.5, not 10^-5, not 10^-0.005) that they're already inhabited by beings pretty much as intelligent as us, and with a huge home-ground advantage.
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Much like biological evolution accelerates when things get hard and stagnates when things are easy, so to goes technological evolution. Great leaps of progress are a result of having to solve difficult problems. JFK spelled it out clearly in his speech about going to the moon: we do it not because it's easy, but because it's hard and doing hard things improves us. And Apollo proved it with the technologies it helped accelerate.
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Remember when making comparisons like that, that you're talking about changes in the culling rate. There is little evidence of large variations in the rate at which variation is generated. What happens in "tough times" is that the only-marginally less-well adapted get slaughtered (or leave no descendants - same thing) which in more clement times may have survived (or had 9 o
Truly a Non-Story But There Are Things To Say (Score:2)
Using electrolysis to breakup H2O into H2 and O2 is, of course, anyone can easily do with efficiency at home. The fact that there are hypothesized to be salt water reservoirs at places under the surface of Mars is not relevant. There is plenty of salt and water ice particles in the regolith everywhere on Mars. If I remember correctly, there's about 2 liters of water ice in every cubic meter of regolith. So getting salty water is going to be just a matter of scooping up some regolith and warming it.
I was
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If I remember correctly, there's about 2 liters of water ice in every cubic meter of regolith.
I am skeptical of this, at least for anything near the surface, near the equator... but don't have a counter, as I know practically nothing about Martian geological processes... if you can find a source, I'd be interested in reading it.
Also, it seemed like they were exploiting the oxygen content of the perchlorates that primarily make up the brine to increase the amount of oxygen coming from it, though it's definitely possible that I'm way off base. I will try to read more into it tomorrow.
I suppose y
2030's mission has a huge boost to success (Score:2)
NASA wants to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s.
I think NASA has a pretty good shot at having this mission work out, as ahead of time the Musktronauts on Mars can bulldoze a nice flat landing pad for them, and have medical staff standing by in case anything goes wrong - and have some Mars Coke on hand carbonated from Mars pole water!
Nothing beats a refreshing Coke(tm) after a hard, dangerous mission.
Living in a near vacuum (Score:2)
Somebody's cheap vacuum pump might not be able to get that much air out of the vacuum chamber...
That system is going to have to have one freaking heck of an intake system to bring that up to human pressure levels.
Don't forget that the scientists and engineers working on this have a lot to work out, especially with all the substances that act different in those dr
Just bring some plants. (Score:2)
not the priority (Score:4, Interesting)
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Great. Now what about the radiation you need a magnetic field the size of a planet to stop?
Easy - You just build a track around the entire planet. You build the entire base on the track. The base slowly trolls along staying just beyond the the reach of the sun.
Re: Why not do this on Earth? (Score:2)
Because itâ(TM)s far cheaper to pull the methane out of the ground. There would have to be a global ban on fossil methane extraction for chemically produced methane from CO2 to be competitive.
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Or, we could just switch to a non-carbon fuel economy for everything except rockets.
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Let's assume it is possible to switch to a non-carbon fuel for our ships, trains, trucks, cars, and aircraft. Why keep using a carbon based fuel for rockets? If there is a fuel that can make a passenger jet fly across oceans as good as or better then kerosene then why not use this same fuel in rockets?
Lets see, maybe because that plane only uses thrust to create lift, at (relatively ) slow speeds, not thrust AS lift to go to extremely high speeds - in an area where a large chunk of the time there is nothing to provide lift.
Rockets don't matter if they are hydrocarbon fuel based anyways. They will always be designed to burn as cleanly as possible - into water and CO2. The less clean your engine is, the more energy in your fuel is wasted, the more fuel you have to carry, the less payload you can have. Less
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I did nothing of the sort, at least not in the way you are trying to frame it.
I said that there was no point, which is regardless of this planet turning to crap or not. I ALSO said, that the science is cool.
You were wrong on both counts.
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Nah, we're not moving Earth's entire population. We'll toss a few higher level working class folks at Mars to prepare somewhat comfortable living conditions, then send our elites, rich and ruling classes off to live the good life while the rest of us plebes stay here and burn.
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While it does make sense it will not happen.
#1 thing to do for terraforming is to establish a magnetic shield at Mars' L1. It will need a nuclear source of power so it wont happen until NIMBY-ism ends.
So the next best thing to do is make O2 and Methane on Mars as its atmosphere continues to fly away. Just like Venus.
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There is nitrogen on Mars, and relatively available in the volatile-rich asteroids (as ammonia, not dinitrogen, but that's a chemist's "meh"). But you're going to need a lot of some diluent gas (argon would work pretty much as well as nitrogen) in your habitat.
Sufficient nitrogen to give the planet an earth-like atmosphere is unlikely to exist this side of Saturn. If you took the whole of Titan's atmosphere, you'd get about 1/3 of what you need (to one significant figure). But that's standard "
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The air in Earth's atmosphere is made up of approximately 78 percent Nitrogen and 21 percent Oxygen. So where's the Nitrogen going to come from ? Is everyone on Mars going to be breathing pure Oxygen, aging prematurely, and living in an explosive environment ?
I'm a little late replying to this, but might as well. You don't need the nitrogen. What's important is the oxygen partial pressure. At sea level, the oxygen partial pressure of the atmosphere is about 21% of the atmosphere. So that's about 3.1 PSI. A pure oxygen atmosphere at that pressure will provide plenty of oxygen to breathe and won't cause premature aging and also won't promote combustion any more than regular Earth atmosphere. The oxygen content can be even lower than that and humans can still survi