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The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment can make oxygen at anytime during the Martian day or year.
We spent a day with Ridley Scott et al in Toronto to hear how the film came to be.
I actually had an interesting conversation with Elon Musk about this. The question was, what would it take to build a self-sustaining settlement on the surface of Mars? It would take one million metric tons of stuff, propellant, the 3D printers, the stock for the 3D printers, food, agriculture, domes, wherever you're gonna live, all of it, to get to the point where you could have all that on Mars and those people could then survive without intervention from Earth. So one million metric tons, if you think about that, it takes a very large rocket and a whole sort of sophisticated spacecraft. The Curiosity mission was what, a couple billion dollar mission to get to Mars? And that Rover was one ton. That's the challenge we're talking about, sending one million Perseverances or Curiosities worth of mass to Mars. It's an enormous challenge. //
Right now we're focused on stepping one foot on Mars and then 10 and then a hundred, slowly building up to have a permanent human presence. There's no physics reason preventing us from inhabiting Mars, it's a matter of technology and engineering and patience, and most importantly, money. But there's no reason why we can't eventually be on Mars. Humanity will have a presence on Mars. Well, I'm not going.
Mars bears little resemblance to the primordial planet it must have been. Mars’ atmosphere is a fraction the density of Earth’s — air pressure at the summit of Mount Everest (the highest point on Earth) is 4.89 PSI, while the air pressure at the bottom of Mars’ Hellas Planitia (a 23,465-foot deep crater) is just 0.168 PSI. In other words, the air pressure at the highest point on our planet is 29x higher than the air pressure at the lowest point on Mars.
There have been three main hypotheses for how Mars might have lost its atmosphere: It’s possible that Mars’ atmosphere was eroded by solar wind, that much of the atmosphere was torn away by a cataclysmic impact, or that the low gravity of the planet allowed atmosphere to blow off and dissipate over time. These conditions are not mutually exclusive, and it’s possible that all three of them played a part, but NASA believes it has found sufficient evidence to assign a primary cause. The culprit? Solar wind — particularly the types of energetic blasts emitted by the sun during periods of unrest.
From this article at extremetech.com:
"The problem is, today’s Mars bears little resemblance to the primordial planet it must have been. Mars’ atmosphere is a fraction the density of Earth’s — air pressure at the summit of Mount Everest (the highest point on Earth) is 4.89 PSI, while the air pressure at the bottom of Mars’ Hellas Planitia (a 23,465-foot deep crater) is just 0.168 PSI. In other words, the air pressure at the highest point on our planet is 29x higher than the air pressure at the lowest point on Mars."
IOW, Mars' highest atmospheric pressure is almost 30 times lower than the air pressure at the top of Everest. Just think of how much gas you'd need to bring the surface of the entire planet up to just half the air pressure of Everest's peak - about 2.9PSI.
NASA has previously discussed how nuclear propulsion technology could allow the agency to send humans to Mars more quickly than by using traditional chemical rockets.
"Nuclear electric propulsion systems use propellants much more efficiently than chemical rockets but provide a low amount of thrust," NASA has said. "Nuclear electric propulsion systems accelerate spacecraft for extended periods and can propel a Mars mission for a fraction of the propellant of high-thrust systems."
There are multiple types of nuclear propulsion that could be used in space technology. With nuclear electric propulsion, thermal energy from a nuclear reactor is turned into electric energy that powers whatever type of electrical thruster or propulsion tech that a spacecraft uses. With nuclear thermal propulsion, reactors heat up propellants like hydrogen and then the gas from that reaction is ejected, creating thrust. This can create a lot more thrust than electric propulsion systems.
Between 2007 and 2011 the European Space Agency worked with Russia to simulate the conditions of a trip to Mars, particularly as a psychological isolation experiment. Called Mars500, the longest part of this study ran between 2010 and 2011, and revealed a significant degradation of the simulacral explorers’ sleep patterns. While on wide-body airliners a business class cocoon seat can deliver comfort (and even luxury) during an overnight flight, such ergonomic palliatives won’t be as easy for a year-long journey. Space travel to Mars is supposed to be a bold and daring adventure. But what if it ends up feeling more like a super long red-eye flight? //
If the dream of space travel involves new horizons and feelings of unbound freedom—to explore, to discover, to spread humanity—a nightmare lurks just around the corner of consciousness. There will be no real “arrival” on this fantasy trip: It’s enclosures and pressurized chambers all the way down. When it comes to human space travel, the destination really is the journey. And the journey will be long, and claustrophobic. As far as “quarantine” goes, spacefaring may feel familiar to those who lived through the COVID pandemic—and certain survival tactics may crossover. //
The wish image of habitations on other planets is for simulated environments that feel as good as—if not better than—our home planet. The reality is bound to be precarious and highly contingent—no matter how awesome and intact space settlements might appear in artistic renderings. The motivation for spacefaring is, at least for Musk, premised on a desire to escape a planet in limbo; but the alternative is hardly a safe haven. This is the paradox of spacefaring: it’s a lose-lose proposition.
As anthropologist Lisa Messeri has found in her research on planetary scientists, ideas about inhabiting outer space can tend to revert back to making sense of our place on Earth. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, one of the arguments for space exploration is to improve life back home.
A Cornell University geneticist posits that life discovered on the red planet might have actually originated on earth in NASA labs, despite thorough on-site cleaning procedures and spacecraft assembly in specialized rooms. //
Amid the latest exploration and search for life on Mars, a Cornell scientist wonders what humans could have accidentally “carried into space and survived the trip to make its new home on Mars”
"Microbes have been on Earth for billions of years, and they are everywhere," Mason wrote.
“They are inside us, on our bodies, and all around us. Some can sneak through even the cleanest of clean rooms.” //
"It turns out that clean rooms might serve as an evolutionary selection process for the hardiest bugs that then may have a greater chance of surviving a journey to Mars," Mason wrote.
Researchers' findings, according to Mason, might cause what is called "forward contamination." Forward contamination is where travelers take something intentionally or unintentionally from one planet to another. Mason adds that new organisms "can wreak havoc" on a new ecosystem.
Flying Ingenuity in Mars’s atmosphere is therefore the equivalent of flying a helicopter on Earth at a height of 100,000 feet. //
Then there’s the Martian gravity to consider, which is about one-third the strength of gravity on Earth. This actually gives us a slight advantage. If Mars had the same atmosphere as Earth, it’s lesser gravity means we’d be able to lift Ingenuity with less power than would be required here.
But while Mars’s gravity works to our advantage, this is offset by the lack of atmosphere.
Ingenuity’s success marks the first time such a flight has even been attempted outside of Earth. And the reason for this may simply be that, as laid out above, this task is very, very difficult. //
There are two main ways Ingenuity was able to overcome the hurdles presented in Mars’s atmosphere. Firstly, to generate lift, the two rotors (made from carbon fibre) had to spin much faster than any helicopter’s on Earth.
On Earth, most helicopters and drones have rotors that spin at about 400-500 revolutions per minute. The Ingenuity’s rotor spun at about 2,400 revolutions per minute. //
As a touching tribute to the first powered flight on Earth, scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory added a historic artefact to the Mars helicopter. Attached to a cable underneath one of its solar panels is a small piece of the wing from the Wright brothers’ 1903 Wright flyer.
This item of flight history is the second piece of an Earth aircraft to go into space; a similar piece of the wing was taken to the Moon during the Apollo missions.
NASA's Perseverance rover just notched another first on Mars, one that may help pave the way for astronauts to explore the Red Planet someday.
The rover successfully used its MOXIE instrument to generate oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere for the first time, demonstrating technology that could both help astronauts breathe and help propel the rockets that get them back home to Earth.
The MOXIE milestone occurred on Tuesday (April 20), just one day after Perseverance watched over another epic Martian first — the first Mars flight of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, which rode to the Red Planeton the rover's belly.
"This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars," Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a statement today (April 21). "MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars." //
The toaster-sized MOXIE (short for "Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment") produces oxygen from carbon dioxide, expelling carbon monoxide as a waste product. The conversion process occurs at temperatures around 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius), so MOXIE is made of heat-tolerant materials and features a thin gold coating to keep potentially damaging heat from radiating outward into Perseverance's body.
The MOXIE team warmed the instrument up for two hours yesterday, then had it crank out oxygen for an hour. MOXIE produced 5.4 grams of oxygen during that span, about enough to keep an astronaut breathing easily for 10 minutes, NASA officials said.
That first effort didn't max MOXIE out; it can generate about 10 grams of oxygen per hour. The instrument may reach such levels eventually, for the team plans to conduct about nine more runs over the course of one Mars year (about 687 Earth days).
tokamaks are reactors which use thermal input and super-powered magnets to convert a cocktail of relatively abundant hydrogen isotopes into a self-sustaining plasma of unimaginable heat and radiance. Researchers are fine-tuning tokamaks at various labs around the globe, hunting for energy breakeven, the tipping point where the plasma in the tokamak generates at least as much energy from fusion as it requires in externally supplied thermal energy. Once breakeven has been achieved, mankind will be on the cusp of a limitless source of clean, self-sustaining energy, which for any number of reasons will be extremely bitchin’, at least until the science is bought by venture capitalists and sold back to the public at a price that effectively makes its owners gods. //
We have been assured by several researchers that whatever else is true about the development of tokamak science, the jillion-degree star juice in the core of the reactor can not be fired or ejected or otherwise expelled from the torus, due to physics or chemistry or whatever, and therefore cannot cause Chernobyl-like cataclysms. //
But now a PPPL researcher—one Fatima Ebrahimi, pictured above (right)—has designed a new “plasmoid rocket” concept which applies the ultra magnets and so forth of tokamaks in such a way that superheated plasma is used to generate thrust and propel a rocket through space, thus solving one of the most vexing challenges associated with manned travel into deep space: storing enough fuel to power a spacecraft all the way from Earth to Mars. Ebrahimi’s rocket concept harnesses both the juice of the Sun and the mechanics of solar flares to do magical magnet things and go vroom through space.
The new Princeton concept works by using the same mechanism that helps to blast solar flares away from the Sun. These flares consist of charged atoms and particles called plasma, which are trapped inside powerful magnetic fields where complex interactions take place.
For propulsion systems, Ebrahimi is particularly interested in one type of interaction called magnetic reconnection, which is where magnetic fields in highly charged plasmas restructure themselves to converge, separate, and re-converge. As they do so, they generate large amounts of kinetic energy, thermal energy, and particle acceleration. It’s a phenomenon not only seen on the Sun, but also in the Earth’s atmosphere and inside Tokamak fusion reactors, like PPPL’s National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX).
https://newatlas.com/space/magnetic-reconnection-rocket-thruster-concept-spaceflight-mars
The red planet's red looks different to a robot with hyperspectral cameras for eyes. //
Those colors are a geological infographic. They represent time, laid down in layers, stratum after stratum, epoch after epoch. And they represent chemistry. NASA scientists pointing cameras at them—the right kind of cameras—will be able to tell what minerals they’re looking at and maybe whether wee Martian beasties once called those sediments home. “If there are sedimentary rocks on Mars that preserve evidence of any ancient biosphere, this is where we’re going to find them,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and the principal investigator on one of the rover’s sets of eyes. “This is where they should be.” //
That’s what they’re looking for. But that’s not what they’ll see. Because some of the most interesting colors in that real-life, 50-meter infographic are invisible. At least they would be to you and me, on Earth. Colors are what happens when light bounces off or around or through something and then hits an eye. But the light on Mars is a little different than the light on Earth. And Perseverance’s eyes can see light we humans can’t—light made of reflected X-rays or infrared or ultraviolet. The physics are the same; the perception isn’t.
How many images are we expecting to get back from Percy covering the landing? About 28,470 according to this paper
From communists on Mars to 'The Expanse' in real life, the questions about the future of Musk's Mars are huge. Here's what you need to know.
In 2015, Oak Ridge National Laboratory produced the first plutonium fuel in the US in nearly 30 years. Now it’s headed to another planet. //
At the heart of Perseverance is a small “nuclear battery” the size of a beer keg called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG. Unlike the nuclear reactors that create electricity on Earth, RTGs don’t have to initiate or sustain a fission reaction to generate power. They don’t even have any moving parts. Instead, they passively harvest the natural heat produced by the decay of plutonium-238 and convert it into electricity. They can reliably provide energy and heat to a spacecraft for decades—the two plutonium-powered Voyager probes launched in the late 1970s are still transmitting from interstellar space—and have been NASA’s go-to power source for more than two dozen deep-space missions.
“Plutonium-238 is a unique isotope of plutonium that principally decays by alpha radiation, and because of that, it generates a lot of heat,” says Robert Wham, the plutonium supply program manager at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is now responsible for making the stuff for NASA. “For a small spacecraft like Perseverance, you don’t want fission power. You just want thermal decay.” //
When the US got out of the plutonium business, it left NASA with a cache of a few dozen kilograms of plutonium-238 to ration for all future missions. It wasn’t much; the Perseverance rover alone uses nearly 5 kilograms of plutonium. At some point, this stockpile was bound to run out; a 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences predicted that the US had only enough plutonium for a few more deep-space missions. That left the US with a few unpalatable options: Abandon exploration of the outer solar system, purchase plutonium from abroad, or start making it again domestically. //
With concerns about a plutonium shortage mounting—Russia was also running low—NASA policymakers decided the agency would foot the bill on its own. And since 2011, NASA has borne almost the entire cost of producing plutonium at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The investment soon paid off. By 2015, chemists at Oak Ridge produced the first sample of plutonium-238 in the US in nearly 30 years. At the same time, the lab invested heavily in automated production systems that would allow it to produce enough plutonium to meet NASA’s future needs. //
The process starts when researchers at Idaho National Lab send neptunium-237, itself a radioactive metallic oxide, to Tennessee, where automated machines press it into pellets the size of pencil erasers. Next, 52 of these pellets are stacked into metal rods called targets and placed in a nuclear reactor at either Oak Ridge or Idaho National Lab, where they are bombarded with neutrons to produce plutonium. After it’s left to cool for a few months, the plutonium is shipped to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where another machine presses the small plutonium pellets to form larger ones the size of marshmallows. Then they’re ensconced in a casing made out of iridium, a virtually indestructible metal that would prevent radioactive contamination in case of an accident when the rover is launched. Finally, the armored plutonium is shipped to Idaho National Lab, where 32 pellets are loaded into the rover’s nuclear battery before it’s installed on the vehicle.
Today, Oak Ridge is only producing about half of its target of 3.5 pounds of plutonium a year, a milestone Wham and his colleagues plan to hit by the mid-2020s.
The Mars Trace Gas Orbiter spotted a phenomenon on Mars that has also been observed around Earth. A green glow outlining the planet is the result of charged oxygen atoms gradually calming down. The…
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NASA's Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019. A version without the rover contains nearly 1.8 billion pixels; a version with the rover contains nearly 650 million pixels. Both versions are composed of more than 1,000 images that were carefully assembled over the following months.
The rover's Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama and relied on its medium-angle lens to produce a lower-resolution panorama that includes the rover's deck and robotic arm.
NASAs Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama of the Martian surface between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019.
See Mars like never before in this highest-resolution panorama ever from the Curiosity rover | Space
The Curiosity team just released a 1.8-billion-pixel panorama that features "Glen Torridon," a region on the flanks of Mars' 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has snapped its first photo of Earth from the surface of the Red Planet, an amazing image that also includes the moon. See the photos here.