Wind Power on Mars Can Power Human Habitats, Scientists Discover (vice.com) 86
A new study published in Nature Astronomy assessed the viability of turbines as an energy source for future Mars missions, and "the results hint that wind power could be an important pillar of energy generation on the red planet, assuming humans are able to successfully land there in the coming decades," reports Motherboard. From the report: Scientists have generally written off wind power as a key energy source for Mars missions, compared to solar and nuclear power, because Martian winds are extremely weak. Now, a team led by Victoria Hartwick, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, has used global climate models of Mars to show that, contrary to past assumptions, "wind power represents a stable, sustained energy resource across large portions of the Mars surface," according to the study. "Using a state-of-the-art Mars global climate model, we analyze the total planetary Martian wind potential and calculate its spatial and temporal variability," Hartwick and her colleagues said in the study. "We find that wind speeds at some proposed landing sites are sufficiently fast to provide a stand-alone or complementary energy source to solar or nuclear power." "Wind energy represents a valuable but previously dismissed energy resource for future human missions to Mars, which will be useful as a complementary energy source to solar power," the team added.
To assess whether wind power could fill that gap, Hartwick and her colleagues used the NASA Ames Mars global climate model to estimate wind speeds across the planet. Since Mars' atmosphere is very thin, with only 1 percent the density of Earth's atmosphere, Martian winds are pretty wimpy everywhere. Even so, the researchers found that several tantalizing locations could theoretically use wind as the only source of power, and that a combination of solar and wind power would unlock sites across a huge swath of the planet -- including icy locations at the poles.
To that point, the team identified several sites that would be particularly conducive to wind power, including locations within the icy northern regions of Deuteronilus Mensae and Protonilus Mensae. The researchers envision setting up medium-sized turbines, measuring 50 meters (160 feet) tall, to catch the stronger winds in these areas, allowing astronauts to subsist in the strange glacial terrain of an alien world. Turbines could also be effective if placed near topographical gradients, such as crater rims or the slopes of ancient volcanoes, to catch the gusts generated by these landscapes.
To assess whether wind power could fill that gap, Hartwick and her colleagues used the NASA Ames Mars global climate model to estimate wind speeds across the planet. Since Mars' atmosphere is very thin, with only 1 percent the density of Earth's atmosphere, Martian winds are pretty wimpy everywhere. Even so, the researchers found that several tantalizing locations could theoretically use wind as the only source of power, and that a combination of solar and wind power would unlock sites across a huge swath of the planet -- including icy locations at the poles.
To that point, the team identified several sites that would be particularly conducive to wind power, including locations within the icy northern regions of Deuteronilus Mensae and Protonilus Mensae. The researchers envision setting up medium-sized turbines, measuring 50 meters (160 feet) tall, to catch the stronger winds in these areas, allowing astronauts to subsist in the strange glacial terrain of an alien world. Turbines could also be effective if placed near topographical gradients, such as crater rims or the slopes of ancient volcanoes, to catch the gusts generated by these landscapes.
How will they build this? (Score:2)
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The idea of “colonizing” other planets always seems so bizarre to me. We are talking about environments a thousand times more hostile than Antarctica, and no one moves there either for fun or thinks about terraforming it and the only people there are for research missions, not for the sake of someone moving there and as soon as robots do that better than men, no one will send a man there anymore.
Whatever vast amount of capital and energy would be used to colonize mars, supposedly to combat overp
Re:How will they build this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever vast amount of capital and energy would be used to colonize mars, supposedly to combat overpopulation
Ok, you lost me. How did you ever get the idea that this could have any effect on the population? Did you think a billion people could conceivably be shipped off to Mars? No one has ever suggested anything like this, aside from one charming old SF story that suggested sending all the idiots into the sun. It ain't nohow practical.
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Ok, you lost me. How did you ever get the idea that this could have any effect on the population? Did you think a billion people could conceivably be shipped off to Mars? No one has ever suggested anything like this, aside from one charming old SF story that suggested sending all the idiots into the sun. It ain't nohow practical.
That has been suggested many times. What purpose do you see to put men on mars aside from combating overpopulation
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not to mention the ethical concerns of giving birth to children in a prison who are expected to now fulfill a function they never signed up for.
No child is born into a life they signed up for. Every person born must live within the confines of the resources they have available. For people born hundreds or thousands of years ago it meant a life of sustenance farming, a life of planting crops every spring, harvesting food and fuel in the fall, and hoping to have piled up enough of each for the family to survive until spring. Then when spring comes the cycle continues, though with more daylight and less cold in order to hopefully be able to bring a
Re:How will they build this? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are parts of North America that nobody wants to colonize. Parts of Maine, North Dakota, Montana, and Arizona; most of the Rockies, most of Northern Canada, the Okefenokee swap, the Appalachians, Detroit, etc.
From a practical perspective we'll eventually need to spread humanity to other planets and star systems, in order to avoid extinction from impacts or gamma ray bursts. We're technologically a long way off from colonizing planets. I think with Mars we can theorize how it might be done, but we shouldn't really bother doing more than experiments there right now.
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The idea of “colonizing” other planets always seems so bizarre to me. We are talking about environments a thousand times more hostile than Antarctica, and no one moves there either for fun or thinks about terraforming it and the only people there are for research missions, not for the sake of someone moving there...
No one moves to Antarctica to live there permanently because it's illegal. There are certainly people who would do it if they could. International treaty forbids it. There are humans living in equally extreme conditions in the other hemisphere already. Everybody from Laplanders to Inuit to Yakuts and Nenets live in conditions identical to Antarctica, a world population of over a hundred thousand such people. Just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
An even more bizarre idea that I often see posited is a generational ship to colonize another planet with humans. The supposed idea of a man boarding a tiny moving prison away from all the comforts of home to live and die there for the goal of putting his descendants on another planet. He will not even live to see that goal and dies a lonely death for it...
A man boarding a generation sh
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No one moves to Antarctica to live there permanently because it's illegal. There are certainly people who would do it if they could. International treaty forbids it. There are humans living in equally extreme conditions in the other hemisphere already. Everybody from Laplanders to Inuit to Yakuts and Nenets live in conditions identical to Antarctica, a world population of over a hundred thousand such people. Just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
No one moves to those conditions either. They live there because they were born there and they tend to move out more than stay there, but the difference is that the climate might be the same, but there are still buildings and schools.
They were born there because ancestors moved there before the time of modern civilization when the difference was not as big. No Helsinki-born Finn decides at one point to pack up and go live alone in the snow away from civilization. – And Mars is again, a thousand times
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Well the study [nature.com] is just looking at, is the wind dense enough and fast enough to support such. The economics or logistics is entirely a whole different problem. That said, wind and solar are good sources for 22nd century Mars where it's expected to be mostly on it's own for industrial purposes. So far enough down the road, the answer to the question is "from the planet they're on". Nuclear on Mars might be limited to RTG. Pretty much all of our nuclear fission requires turbines at some point and water is
Re:How will they build this? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mars colonization presents multiple problems, yes. Some of these problems are common to the Moon, while other are unique. None is technically unsolvable (unlike the case of Venus).
Anyway, Mars and the Moon are much better than an isolated space station. You have native resources, lots of room, and moderate gravity. So, if mankind is to make the jump and conquer the final frontier, these are our stepping stones. We just need to focus on the problems, and solve them. I firmly believe it can be done.
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Venus is, as you say, entirely a lost cause with the technologies currently available. (The surface of Venus, that is. In principle we could put something in orbit around Venus, but the payoff likely wouldn't justify the expenditure on that one. If we could go to Venus orbit, we could go to Mars orbit, which has a markedly higher payoff because it puts us much closer to putting people on the surface of Mars.)
The surface, maybe, for some time to come, but the Venusian clouds are the most habitable location in the solar system, off Earth. At the right height in the atmosphere, it's warm and sunny enough without being too sunny, and damn near exactly 1 Earth gravity. Very comfortable. Your habitat needs to float, and resist the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere, but that's not hard. The acid concentration is low enough it's easy to manage, and you'll use it as a raw material to make stuff. We could live in the
Radiation (Score:3)
Radiation really isn't that big a problem on planets or asteroids. It does mean you don't want to spend large amounts of time outside, but when you have endless piles of sand and gravel available locally it's relatively easy to keep a meter or two of it between you and a direct line-of-sight with the sky, reducing radiation to Earth-like levels. There's already a large number of concept designs for open, airy habitats that still provide the necessary shielding. Heck, we use a lot of similar designs in mo
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Re:How will they build this? (Score:4, Funny)
Amazon, they have 1-day shipping.
Kites (Score:2)
Seems like the various kite-based wind generating technologies might be a good fit for Mars. Inflatables also have potential. As do sparse metal towers. Much lower gravity and much weaker wind open up a lot of options. Heck, you're likely to have a whole bunch of 100m tall towers strewn around the base from day one, what with all the Starships you don't have enough fuel to send back to Earth. Yeah, I know Musk wants to bring them back, but it's likely to be a long time before enough fuel can be generat
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This.
Watch turbine blades be trucked to a new wind turbine site and ask yourself how you would you get something like that on the mars surface... Would you ship it in tiny sections? Would you ship them whole, but small (2-3 meter blade length)? Or would you assemble a turbine blade on the mats surface by shipping raw materials and manufacturing machinery to mars?
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Or would you build a mine on Mars for the raw materials?
Use nuclear batteries (Score:4, Insightful)
It is beyond stupid to spend a lot of effort trying to harness the power of wind in an atmosphere as thin as Mars has.
Mars is the idea situation where you can use a nuclear battery that goes for years or decades without replacement, failure, or relying on a fickle environment in any way. That you can use to power any level of equipment you like instead of having a tiny power budget your device must live within.
And when used up you just designate some cave as a nuclear disposal site and dump it in there, since there is no active life that could possibly be harmed nor risk of it spreading. Or heck a nuclear rover can just sit dead on the surface when power is expired, since nothing is within hundreds of miles of it.
Just sad to see perfectly good rovers fade away like WWII survivors because the solar panels got too dusty (dust that would get into and destroy any turbine you might build for wind I might add). Enough
Re: Use nuclear batteries (Score:2, Troll)
So a nuclear powered mars rover? Great idea! Minor problem if the landing fails and it impacts the surface at high speed (Beagle) or breaks up in the atmosphere (Climate Orbiter) spreading nuclear waste all over the surface but hey, it's only Mars, no one is there and you have inside information that theres no microbial life there, right?
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So a nuclear powered mars rover? Great idea! Minor problem if the landing fails and it impacts the surface at high speed (Beagle) or breaks up in the atmosphere (Climate Orbiter) spreading nuclear waste all over the surface but hey, it's only Mars, no one is there and you have inside information that theres no microbial life there, right?
... and it's not like a certain boundless business genius and social media business wunderkind and newly crowned icon of the American right-wing is planning to settle a million of his cultists on Mars.
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So a nuclear powered mars rover? Great idea! Minor problem if the landing fails and it impacts the surface at high speed (Beagle) or breaks up in the atmosphere (Climate Orbiter) spreading nuclear waste all over the surface but hey, it's only Mars, no one is there and you have inside information that theres no microbial life there, right?
... and it's not like a certain boundless business genius and social media business wunderkind and newly crowned icon of the American right-wing is planning to settle a million of his cultists on Mars.
In 2050 no less! But it ain't happening. He's doing a Howard Hughes on us, (mentally deteriorating) and even if he isn't, (he is) the math doesn't add up.
And his N1 Rocket copy is going to have the same problems it's predecessor had, too many of the explodey bits. Certainly computer control is much better than the 1960's control systems the Soviets used, but The complexity is at the wrong end, and it won't take many of the explodey bits going south to mess up to ruin your day.
I'ma gonna make one of
Re: Use nuclear batteries (Score:4, Informative)
Since mars has no magnetosphere to write home about the surface is already heavily bombarded by radioactive particles. A sudden unscheduled disintegration of an earth craft won't have any meaningful effect on the conditions of mars surface.
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Incidentally, this is the reason why "habitats on Mars" will remain the dreaming of rich recipients of huge government grants for a long time.
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Not entirely true.
Sure, the surface of Mars is something of a radioactive hellscape, but only when you have direct line-of-sight with the sky. Put a meter or two of sand and gravel between you and the sky, as is planned for virtually all Mars habitats, and radiation levels fall to Earthlike levels.
That changes though if you spread radioactive dust all over your colony site - as soon as the dust gets inside, or incorporated into your radiation shielding, you've just made the interior of your habitats radioa
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Of course, nuclear fuel isn't actually particularly radioactive - if it were it wouldn't still be around after sitting in the ground for 4.5 billion years. It's the nuclear waste that's a problem, and you won't be trying to land that.
For a normal reactor this is true. However, the RTGs that will probably be used have very radioactive fuel (Pu-238). Much more radioactive than the fuel that goes into a nuclear reactor here on earth. It isn't as radioactive as the fuel becomes inside of a running nuclear reactor, but that fuel will also cool quickly to be much less radioactive than the Pu-238 inside of the RTG. Also, the Pu-238 used by RTGs is in short supply now. We can make more but it requires reprocessing used fuel rods here on e
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And as I replied to the other post "nuclear battery" does not mean RTG, which are only one of the most popular styles.
Which yes, use fuel that is much more radioactive than reactor fuel - but reactor fuel is negligibly radioactive so is a very poor yardstick to measure against.
Even as far as RTGs go, Pu-238 is preferred in many situations in large part because it's a strong alpha emitter, meaning the radiation-absorbing layer can be quite thin and shielding is a non-issue - almost anything will block it. E
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To be clear since I didn't say it explicitly - RTGs can and are made from a wide range of other isotopes, and are currently one of the leading uses for high-level nuclear waste, when it's not just buried in a hole to kill future generations.
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>So a nuclear powered mars rover?
Yes, there have been several of them as I recall. But we're not talking rovers - we're talking full-scale power-a-city nuclear reactors.
The good news though is that nuclear fuel isn't actually particularly radioactive - if it were then there wouldn't be any left after sitting in the ground for 4.5 billion years. It's the nuclear waste that's a problem, and you won't be trying to land that. Ship in the fuel, fuel the reactor, and produce your nuclear waste on-site wher
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Nobody in the direct thread history I replied to said anything about RTGs. They said nuclear batteries, of which RTGs are only the most commonly used style - the name can also be applied to a wide range of other technologies, up to and including closed-system SMRs (usually of the automatically self-regulating, non-refuelable variety)
SuperKendall's top post seems to be wandering all over the place from rovers to refuelable reactors, so I see no reason to assume they were referring to RTGs specifically.
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Hmm, you mean a nuclear-powered rover like Curiosity and Perseverance? You bet. We already know it works.
The surface of Mars is already 50 times more radioactive than on Earth. I don't think you'd even notice a crash of a nuclear-powered rover spreading a tiny bit of low-grade isotopes over a tiny area. I doubt you'd even notice it on earth for that matter.
Re:Use nuclear batteries (Score:4, Insightful)
It is beyond stupid to spend a lot of effort trying to harness the power of wind in an atmosphere as thin as Mars has.
Nope. It is beyond stupid to assume these people are clueless and have not looked at actual facts. As usual, you have no idea what you are talking about but have some deep desire to push a completely irrational "Nuclear is great!" narrative. A nuclear battery is problematic in several aspects. The first one is transport. The second one is shielding during transport. Then there is weight. And you cannot simply build more of it. You cannot repair it when it fails. And so on.
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You cannot repair it when it fails.
But with wind turbines you'll be repairing 24/7 due to the dust on mars. It is a very fine, sharp and absolutely omnipresent dust that eats away anything mechanical like it's nobodies business.
It is beyond stupid to assume these people are clueless and have not looked at actual facts.
It's even more stupid to assume they have...
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You cannot repair it when it fails.
But with wind turbines you'll be repairing 24/7 due to the dust on mars. It is a very fine, sharp and absolutely omnipresent dust that eats away anything mechanical like it's nobodies business.
It is beyond stupid to assume these people are clueless and have not looked at actual facts.
It's even more stupid to assume they have...
These Aren't Musk employees, you know.
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These Aren't Musk employees, you know.
Well, there are countless people that think Musk is really, really smart and so must be his employees. When in actual fact, Musk is pretty dumb as can be deducted from the last few weeks. That probably was just less visible before.
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These Aren't Musk employees, you know.
Well, there are countless people that think Musk is really, really smart and so must be his employees. When in actual fact, Musk is pretty dumb as can be deducted from the last few weeks. That probably was just less visible before.
Musk is going insane in front of us.
And the people who worship him are dwindling, as he has become a MAGA. The true believers might end up doing a Jonestown moment with him in the end, because his deterioration is not going well. Or perhaps Heaven's gate, which is more on topic for the Space Karen.
But all that aside, yes the physics of wind turbine on Mars are solid, and the second the little drone lifted off, I knew that instantly. I wasn't completely certain, even Thunderfoot thought it wouldn't, bu
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Musk is going insane in front of us.
Bizarre as that is, it does look very much like it, agreed.
Agree to the rest of your posting as well, especially the time-scale.
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I wasn't completely certain, even Thunderfoot thought it wouldn't, but he was obviously wrong.
Even Thunderfoot you say? That fuckwit couldn't do an integral if you gave him a textbook, Mathematica, and a map. If you're getting your assessments of engineering possibilities from fucking Thunderfoot, it's no wonder you're confused.
Will send magnets to provide a magnetosphere and park them in LaGrange orbits...
Powering a Mars-shielding electro-magnet will require a whole complex of nuclear reactors bigger than any humanity has ever built. All the various bits for getting humans onto Mars and providing them with vehicles and habitats are quite well understood. ISS has been good
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Will send magnets to provide a magnetosphere and park them in LaGrange orbits...
Powering a Mars-shielding electro-magnet will require a whole complex of nuclear reactors bigger than any humanity has ever built.
No it won't, not at all. A 1-2 Tesla Magnet placed about 320 Mars radius' away (Lagrange L1) will suffice. I don't know where you got the idea that it would take humongus Nuclear Reactors to create a magnetosphere. You can even buy permanent versions of them them here on earth. https://smmagnetics.com/blogs/... [smmagnetics.com] Anyhow, that's just an example of a 2T magnet, it's not the type we'd use in orbit.
I've worked with much bigger magnets, from Bitter magnets to liquid Helium magnets, and none require the energy
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I don't know where you got the idea that it would take humongus Nuclear Reactors to create a magnetosphere.
Because planets are big. Mars is little compared to Earth but it's still big. It isn't the flux density that takes the power. It's the necessity of generating that flux density over an area big enough to shield a planet.
I've worked with much bigger magnets, from Bitter magnets to liquid Helium magnets, and none require the energy you are talking about.
You've worked with much higher flux density magnets. You have not worked with magnets anywhere near physically as big as needed to shield Mars. There aren't any on Earth that big.
What probably confuses people is the size of planets. Earth's field is indeed exceedingly weak in density.
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I don't know where you got the idea that it would take humongus Nuclear Reactors to create a magnetosphere.
Because planets are big. Mars is little compared to Earth but it's still big. It isn't the flux density that takes the power. It's the necessity of generating that flux density over an area big enough to shield a planet.
Here ya go, Muskovite, Fight with NASA https://phys.org/news/2017-03-... [phys.org]
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Here ya go, Muskovite, Fight with NASA https://phys.org/news/2017-03- [phys.org]...
Yeah, that's a nearly content-free press release about the paper I cited. And provided a link to. The press release has no power numbers in it. It does have an illustration in it showing how huge the magnetic field has to be graphically. Which you ignored or didn't understand.
So not only have you failed to read my citation, you have failed in your own professional specialty. Yay for incompetence.
And wtf does Muskovite have to do with anything?
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Here ya go, Muskovite, Fight with NASA https://phys.org/news/2017-03- [phys.org]...
Yeah, that's a nearly content-free press release about the paper I cited. And provided a link to. The press release has no power numbers in it. It does have an illustration in it showing how huge the magnetic field has to be graphically. Which you ignored or didn't understand.
So not only have you failed to read my citation, you have failed in your own professional specialty. Yay for incompetence.
And wtf does Muskovite have to do with anything?
As I told you - fight with NASA. Your so right that they will gratefully explain just how wrong they are.
I did read your cite, I rejected it, because it is wrong. TTFN, muskovite,
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You cannot repair it when it fails.
But with wind turbines you'll be repairing 24/7 due to the dust on mars. It is a very fine, sharp and absolutely omnipresent dust that eats away anything mechanical like it's nobodies business.
That is a baseless claim. Ever been to a deep fine-sand dessert on a planet called "Earth"?
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It is beyond stupid to spend a lot of effort trying to harness the power of wind in an atmosphere as thin as Mars has.
Nope. It is beyond stupid to assume these people are clueless and have not looked at actual facts.
It became obvious that wind power would be possible the second the little drone copter took off.
Now the towers and turbines are the devils in the details though. How are the huge things going to work well?
It's a technology problem, not a possibility problem. Given the size they would be, it's probably a bootstrapping option, start small with something that could be carried on a ship, then build larger ones with local materials.
Probably won't be ready for Musk's million people on Mars by 2050 though.
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What's the problem with transport? Even if for some reason you're using a "battery" rather than a proper refuelable reactor it's not *that* heavy, especially without significant shielding, which can be produced locally on Mars. And if it's throttleable, just throttle it down for the trip. You're already flying through the radioactive hell of space, and there's no reason to have anything else on the ship that would be bothered by a modest increase in radiation. It's not like you're going to try to land
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The original claim basically was "nuclear is so great it is stupid to even look at wind". See my answer in that context.
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The problem is that they don't scale well. They are okay for rovers, but one large enough for a manned base would be difficult to manage and a lot of mass to get to Mars. It also wouldn't be very portable.
Solar panels are fine if they can be cleaned. Having lots of them also means no single point of failure.
Both will probably be used. The mistake with the rovers was not giving them any way to clean the panels.
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The problem is that they don't scale well. They are okay for rovers, but one large enough for a manned base would be difficult to manage and a lot of mass to get to Mars. It also wouldn't be very portable.
Solar panels are fine if they can be cleaned. Having lots of them also means no single point of failure.
Both will probably be used. The mistake with the rovers was not giving them any way to clean the panels.
A learning experience. But Since you mention it, imagine a hinged solar panel, you position it vertically, then have it vibrate to make the dust fall off.
I'm not certain of the adhesion nature of the Martian dust though, so it might not work.
Method 2 - a roller curtain over the panels that slowly rotates and the dust is brushed off on the underside of it. Hell, it might be interestinf to analyze the composition of the dust as an experiment.
Nuclear options (Score:2)
A (bunch of) small, proper nuclear reactor(s) makes FAR more sense than nuclear batteries. And conveniently we have several companies already building SMR factories, though I don't know if any of their reactor designs are suitable for use in the lower gravity of Mars without extensive reworking - the buoyancy of hot liquids is often used to power passive "failure proof" circulation within the reactor, but the resulting flow rates depend on local gravity.
NASA has their kilopower reactors suitable for practi
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A (bunch of) small, proper nuclear reactor(s) makes FAR more sense than nuclear batteries.
You cannot cool them on Mars. So, no, does not work.
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What? Sure you can. SMRs typically operate in the 10s-100s of MWt range - not a ridiculous amount of heat, and you've got countless cubic miles of ice that you want to melt anyway. And melting ice is an *incredible* heat sink, just like with boiling the phase transition alone consumes roughly as much energy as heating water by 100C.
You could potentially also go with ground-loop cooling systems to dump heat into the rock, for small enough reactors or large enough ground loops. That could raise the micro-cl
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A (bunch of) small, proper nuclear reactor(s) makes FAR more sense than nuclear batteries.
You cannot cool them on Mars. So, no, does not work.
Works fine. Closed cycle radiators are well understood, even in a vacuum. ISS uses a whole array of them to cool itself. Martian habitats would have to be similarly cooled. Sizing those coolant loops to handle a nuclear reactor in addition to the habitats is just a question of scale, not unobtanium. For that matter, waste heat off of the reactor would be highly beneficial for the habitats at night. The Martian day gets quite warm, but the Martian night is ridiculously cold. Running a secondary coolan
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Not really. For example NuScale reactors need to be refuelled every two years.
The weight to output ratio is very poor too, compared to solar and battery. You will need batteries anyway, even if you take a nuclear reactor.
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And? Other models are designed to run for decades and be returned to the factory for refurbishing and refueling after an extended cooldown period.
And if you do refuel it every few years, so what? Shipping a few more kg of fuel to Mars now and then (until a local source is established) makes FAR more sense than shipping a whole new reactor every time.
Once you posit a large, manned outpost, a whole lot of our current "no maintenance" preconceptions about space hardware cease to be relevant.
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Those are paper designs, nothing prototyped or likely to be available for the next few decades. NASA looked at them but cancelled the programme due to massive cost overruns.
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The problem is that they don't scale well.
Did you just say nuclear doesn't scale well? Nothing scale better. Nothing is even close to scaling as well. Nothing is even close to as energy dense. We have numbers for all of these things. Do you see why we don't take you seriously?
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They aren't going to build a full size nuclear reactor on Mars. For space applications they use RTGs and other small thermal systems.
The problem with scaling them is that they can't be controlled like a reactor. The heat output is constant. There is no control mechanism, no moderator, they are just a lump of some material like plutonium, and a thermoelectric converter.
Efficiency is typically 3-4%, so for 1kW output you need a 30kW heat source, and 29kW of heat has to be dumped somewhere.
Dumping 29kW of heat
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They also needs cooling and that is going to be a real problem with no bodies of water and thin air. Even an RTG needs significant cooling and does not work at all without it. There is a reason the rather large RTG on Perseverance only produces a puny 110W at 45kg weight and a useful lifetime of just 15 years.
Re:Use nuclear batteries (Score:5, Interesting)
A nuclear battery like the one powering Curiosity and Perseverance costs on the order of $100 million and provides 150W of power when new, slowly degrading over time.
150W is not enough to power Curiosity, so the RTG charges a battery which is used for the high-power activities like driving. This limits the amount of driving you can do (3 h/day for Curiosity).
They make sense when you have a huge financial budget but a limited weight budget, but the cost per kWh is enormous. RTGs don't scale well. Small fission plants are better in this regard (see the Kilopower project NASA is working on now) but the one advantage of a Pu-238 RTG is that the entire decay chain of Pu-238 is alpha particles, making shielding easy. A fission plant has to deal with Uranium and its fission products, multiplying the radiation hazard by millions.
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A nuclear battery like the one powering Curiosity and Perseverance costs on the order of $100 million and provides 150W of power when new, slowly degrading over time.
The Curiosity MMRTG cost $82 million in 2015 inflation-adjusted dollars [inl.gov] to design and $109 million to produce. Yes, they're stupidly expensive. It was also one-off, built via a cost-plus contract by Rocketdyne. Of course they're stupidly expensive. Build more than one and the cost per unit comes down drastically. The plutonium in them is just $4 million (after NASA spent over $41 million getting plutonium production restarted).
A conventional gas cooled reactor fueled by uranium and designed for Mars wo
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" a nuclear battery that goes for years or decades without replacement"
That's an important criterion if you have a mission that could last decades that cannot receive any maintenance. However, the topic is about a human habitat which implicitly includes maintenance capabilities. A nuclear battery may still be the best choice, but not for the criterion you named.
"Just sad to see perfectly good rovers fade away like WWII survivors because the solar panels got too dusty"
How many rovers failed due to reduced so
Science Shmience (Score:4, Funny)
From the Summary:
and
I don't know where these so-called scientists get their notions from. I saw a documentary way back in 2015 that was shot on location [wikipedia.org], that shows winds on Mars can be pretty powerful and even destructive.
and I think its gonna be a long long time (Score:3)
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
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Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
It should be great. No illegal immigrants carrying drugs and diseases. There's no whining indigenous peoples nursing some 400 year old grudge.
No blacks twerking n the McDonald's. A Republican heaven. If managed properly, no European socialists, just mom and apple pie Americans.
OTOH, the penalty for violating the dress code is brutal.
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Violating the dress code...as in going outdoors without your protective suit and air or O2 tanks?
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They will have to test it on Earth first. (Score:1)
Whatever power sources get sent to Mars will be tested on Earth first. One they are already testing is the portable nuclear fission reactors needed to get humans across that vast void that separates Earth from Mars.
In interplanetary space there's no concern of night, dust storms, or so many other things that could interfere with solar power on Earth or Mars. Of course in this void there's no flowing wind or water from which to turn a turbine for energy. In this space all they have for energy is the sun o
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Maybe you missed the news last week. At any rate, it wouldn't take a lot of mass to ship a sufficient quantity of deuterium or tritium (or lithium, etc.) to Mars that would last for a century. A lot less mass than shipping solar panels or wind farms.
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Still not enough energy to power the lasers, only more energy then the lasers put into the reaction.
Just one problem (Score:2)
Not-too-distant future... (Score:2)
CO2 (Score:2)
It's not like Mars couldn't do with a little global warming, which you could get by burning carbon.
Except there's no oxygen to burn the carbon with... unless you separate the oxygen from the existing CO2. Now there's an idea :!