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Science

NASA talking again about manned mission to Mars 80

Posted by Hemos from the one-small-step-for dept.
NASA has flirted on and off again with the notion of a manned mission to Mars. It appears again that this may be a reality, with JPL physicist Mark Adler pushing ahead on this. Interesting stuff to read-and hopefully they won't make the same network mistake as the space station did.
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NASA talking again about manned mission to Mars More

NASA talking again about manned mission to Mars

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  • nasa web site (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    check out http://station.nasa.gov/mars/

  • NIML (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While it would be desirable to limit the travel and mission times, it's not really feasable. Assuming a six month travel time (if you leave at the optimal time,) you'll be six months FARTHER AWAY from earth by the time you get there. Assuming a two month mission, your return trip is now 12 months (you've gone past the point at which earth and mars are furthest apart.)

    The biggest thing to avoid in a long duration mission is exposure to radiation. Since the greatest amount of radiation is absorbed while in deep space, we want to reduce this time. The best way to do this, is to stay on mars longer.
    Check out Zubrin's book. It's pretty good.
    Keep in mind that my estimates for travel time are rough numbers I pulled out of my ass. I'm no expert. I just read Zubrin's book, thought it was pretty cool, and am trying to remember pieces from when I read it. No flaming! Please! I can't take it!
  • More important things? Like what? Paying for unwed mothers to plop out children to get more child support? Paying for crooked politicians to flaunt each other's wickedness on national TV? Paying for the creation of stupid laws? Paying for Special Interest Groups fighting over which minority group can claim the most special benefits?

    Sheesh.

    If our money is going to be forcibly taken from us, the two best things that can be done with it are the military and scientific research. And we can't have enough of either.

  • I can't belive I'm first to offer to go! (No, not first post dummy)

    I've got in mind a couple different females with a technical bent who I could try to talk into going with me. There is no true geek out there that wouldn't want to brag "My kid was born on Mars!" I think that will be the biggest achivment, getting people born up there. Soon were on our way to a perminate colony.

    Personally I don't belive life will be found on mars, other then life we bring from earth. I could be wrong though.

    So, I'm open to either group if they need more people to go.

  • Looks like two different groups will land people on mars the same year. Good for them, I hope both groups try ot out do each other, and in the end both have people on Mars at the same time.

    If that happens, some advice: Agree that if one group has problems all compitition is off, both coopoerate to solve the problem. This is on mars of course. What I'm getting at is if one group loses both habitation modules, agree to live togather (very crowded) as best you can. If it turns out that both groups have problems mineing fuel, agree to share what cuelf you have made, so that some people stay for 4 extra years until a rescue mission can be launched, and the other group goes. In the case that one group can't return as planed, agree to get those who have had the most problems (health or personal) off of Mars first even if it means one entire group goes up in the other's rocket. There are more ways to cooperate, agree in an emergency the priority for both groups is solving it for whichever group has the problem.

    When there isn't an emergency, compete at all costs. Don't let the other group out do you! Work long and hard to make the biggest best modules (NASA which is planning bigger ones) or the largest rockets (other group) Compete to get the best people for the job, the best test equipment.

  • The integrated circuit industry growth was much more closely tied to military research, rather than NASA research. Admittedly, there's overlap between ICBMs and Saturn Vs, but it really was more a result of keeping the Reds at bay than achieving "One small step for a man..."

    I'd rather have a cure for cancer, AIDS, paralysis and/or Alzheimer's than a couple of people dancing on the surface of Mars.

  • Perhaps, but in the end we'd still have a moonbase, where we could build telescopes that would put the Hubble to shame, launch other planetary probes, etc.

    Don't send up Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, though, I don't want that nuclear dump exploding and...
  • I thought the Mars project was always being considered. The space station was eventually supposed to turn into an assembly point for building interplanetary spacecraft in space.
  • Even DOS has too much baggage. Multitasking in and of itself is not a problem since anything that responds to interrupts is fundamentally multitasking. Most real time OS/app failures revolve around a failure to respond to some stimulus(interrupt) in time. IOW, can we guarantee that the proc will get the data and produce the proper response in time, every time, in every situation.

    There are hundreds of OSs available for embedded apps that have a wide range of features, facilities, and no surprise, response times. Some have disk/file i/o modules, some do virtual memory, some do networking...

    None that I know of are called win* or *nix or *nux.

  • The X prize organization is offering 10 million dollars for the first commercial agency that can get 3 people in to orbit and back again safely.

    http://www.xprize.org/
  • I'm sure anyone who gave NASA flack about this was just uninformed...

    10base2 can be used with cable which is quite well shielded, and thus less susceptible to interference. (Of course I'm sure you could build a 10baseT cable with similar properties) and whats the last time you saw a BNC connector's retention mechanism break off? The clips on RJ45 can be kind of fragile. And of course, as the previous poster said, you don't need power, and theres no hub/switch to fail. I believe there are some products which offer protection against disconnections/loss of termination by auto terminating the cables somehow, not sure of the specifics.

    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  • From what I understand (from people I have talked to who worked on it) all of the critical stuff on the station runs on dedicated real time controllers over MIL-STD-1553 buses. This is hardly a mistake. Maybe they are running NT and ethernet on the user end for non-critical functionality, but no one is dumb enough to try anything like that for safety critical functions.

    Besides, trying to use NT for any real time control would never pass any formal qual tests.
    /dev
  • Stop the madness!!!
    Keep PC OSes out of rt apps!!!

    blatant RTEMS plug.

    /dev
  • No one seems to realise that a manned mission is foolish, if not a big waste of money. Its true you can learn alot from designing systems to support human life, but when you do that you lose the chance to increase the knowledge in AI, and alternative methods to get things done. NASA seems obssesed in "manned" missions. If they want to test their theories out, they can get together with some of the best software and hardware experts, ship them off to different locations on our planet and get them to design robotic systems that can work and adapt to these conditions. Then send a coulpe of the robots on to mars or whatever planet they choose to send them on. I am sure that if they can extract enought fuel from the martian planet to get the astronauts back home, they create enought fuel to propel some small robots for a very long time. Couple this technology with alot of other technology that NASA has been fuxing around with and you can have a network of semi-intelligent robots scouring the planet surface within a maximum of 5 years and collecting more information than any manned mission could ever hope to accomplish in 50 years.
  • Thats why its called AI!
    fool....

    People don't seem to realise the capability of AI right now. You see, you don't need "human like" AI to do a scientific mission. In fact, humans cannot gather the sort of information that is needed in any space mission. Did you know that alot of systems practically run themselve right now? and most of the software was based on 5 to 10 year old technology? Trust me, if NASA spent even a fraction of the money that they currently spend on shuttle missions in R&D of AI robotics that can think and react on their own, you would be surprised that we even thought about ever using humans to explore anything. The human mind may be one of the most amazing computer system ever designed, but when it comes to exploration, it has its limits. As we decide to explore furter into space, manned missions would be a waste of time. Robotic probes are the only way to do deep space exploration and research. We may as well start using them now, insteading of waiting till later on.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Science is a Good Thing(tm) to spend money on! Would you rather they spent all your tax dollars on continuous and ineffecive bombing in Iraq? Paying for a congressional circus that proved nothing? Funding stupid laws? Buying the NSA new crypto-crackers? A manned (and womaned) mission to mars is the next step forward for us. We landed a man on the moon in 1969. That was 30 years ago! The fact that we haven't already been to mars is mildly pathetic.
  • I think for such a long trip it's important to have good food. One way to add variety is to have some good beer. I would like to improve my brewing skills and expand general brewing knowledge by experimenting with brewing on Mars. After all, humans will eventually colonize Mars. Might as well start on the right foot....

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
    "We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
  • The wheel on the rover falls off, and the axel gets stuck in the soil. How does AI solve the problem of putting the wheel back on?

    My main point is with humans you can decide real time which rocks might reveal the most science and make the most observations.

    Again, AI is only a tool. It can help with automation and extending human capabilities. But I've yet to see AI do "exploration" in the true sense of the word.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
    "We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
  • If this is the stuff they are just starting to do
    the best is yet to come. I wish I could live forever!! Hey, maybe by the time I'm an old fogie I could transfer my brain to another body!!

    (Plug for my project).
    http://members.xoom.com/Lycadican
    ************* *******************************

  • I didn't see anyone else mention it, so...

    TCP/IP can't be used between Earth and Mars. The time lag is too great - all your packets would be considered to have timed out by the machine on the other end before they got to there.

    I guess someone's going to have to come up with a new protocol.



  • NIML (Score:1)

    by Keel ( 11611 )
    Read the article.

    ----

  • on a manned mission to anywhere. What do they expect to find there?? I could just see the scientists: "Oh look! Another rock!!! and we're spending $10,000 per minute finding it!!" Sheesh.

    To the USA: spend the money on more important things.
  • Absolutely.

    What else of use did we find there?
  • In addition to all the mylar, integrated ciruits, etc. listed above, some of the biggest things to come from the space program has been in the field of medicine. Anything from tools like medical imaging, air tables for burn victums, & various medical sensors, to basic understanding of many biological functions. All came from all that poking and prodding they did to the astronauts for the moon missions. When your trying to solve how to keep humans in space for extended peroids of time you tend to learn a lot.
  • I am a systems analyst and work at JSC and I helped an engineer convert some animations to Quicktime of the Solar Electric (Ion) Propulsion system ("tug" as mentioned in the article, SEP as we know it, or as we sometimes refer to it as the "batwing" from the way it looks).

    Kinda interesting, the SEP slowly spirals up the Mars Transfer Vehicle from a circular orbit to a highly elliptical, high energy orbit. The orbit stays above ~1000mi limit at closest approach until the very end. This is to avoid the space debris at these lower levels. The orbit is then tightened down into this area to rendezvous with the crew taxi.

    The crew taxi on this model was a X-38 with an attached booster engine. For those who don't know, the X-38 is the crew return vehicle for the space station. It's a small lifting body shuttle-like vehicle. It has been designed to fit on top of an Airane rocket. Nice to see it reused here.

  • datazone is completely right. All you engineers and computer nerds have done too good a job. Making a robotic mission will give much much more bang for the buck than trying to life support humans and get them back to Earth.

    Speaking of such things, I had to chuckle when I watched "Deep Impact." For the time and money they spent on that manned space ship, they could have sent up enough nukes to vaporize a small state.
  • Ehh, what network mistakes did they make on the Space Station?
  • This was the cover story for the Feb. edition of Popular Science. This was on the magazine stands a month ago...
    It's still interesting, but I think most of the /. audience already knew about it at _least_ since last month.


  • As in many things, the journey is the reward. The whole miniturization trend (tubes to transistors to high-density chips) came out of the sixties space program. You do like your PC, portable CD player, and affordable stereo? These things would not exist if it wasn't for the first space program. They weren't the goal. They were byproducts. We're guaranteed to learn interesting things if this project proceeds.

    On another note, it would be great to have a new frontier. It might even kindle a new spirit of hope and cooperation. Anyway its better than just sitting around just selling each other things. (what the world is basically doing now).

  • NASA seems obssesed in "manned" missions.


    i think the old cliche still applies. no buck rogers, no bucks. nasa needs to send humans to make it glamerous enough to make joe sixpack not bitch too much about the cost of it. personally, i think sometimes the human race, just like an individual, needs to do things just so it can say, 'hey! i can do that!' i think a manned mission to mars is a good thing. my two cents worth.
  • Which desktop OS is going to be the first to get to Mars ?

    Just curious... does anybody know what the Pathfinder robot was running ?

  • All these NASA plans for Mars are just one-shot wonders, brought to you by the ones who left footprints in the lunar dust like so much Killroy-was-here political graffiti.

    The only way to do it properly is to colonise our Moon first and use the cheaper materials from a shallower gravity well, together with orbital construction, to manufacture large craft, and hit Mars with dozens of people with thousands of tonnes of supplies to estabish a spacefareing colony there.

    There is already an organisation which wishes to do this. It is called The Artemis Project [asi.org] and it is pretty much as close as you can get to an Open Source space effort.

    Vik :v)

  • I wanna go to .... though I wouldn't want to have a child with anyone else up there! Sorry!

    Do computer people ever get to go on these missions? Or just the military/scientist type people?
  • Well the spinoff's were/are the biggest things to come from that little mission to the moon. I can only imagine what kind of cool toys we will have as a result of the mission to mars. besides, I like velcro, and kevlar is hugely important (good chunk of my family are cops)

  • Yeah sure, I think quite possibly the most important task of this is race is to develop interplanetary travel. Without it we are just a overcomsuming and overwasting creature, taht willl soon deplete what is left of this world.

    With the ability to leave the planet we are now tied to, we could possibly survive the next millenium.

    So if you think that wasting money on developing travel to other planetrs, you must not care about your grandchildren, or there gradchildren.


    Read some Heinlein.
  • Yeah... and what was the deal with those stupid Apollo missions? What did we ever gain by going to the moon? Excuse me while I go MICROWAVE this burrito...

    What's that Chris? You say you want to sail around the world? Don't be silly, you'll only fall off the edge of the earth!

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