Big Water On Mars!

[Justin Swanton]

If it's going to cost something in the region of several hundred billion to a trillion dollars to get a handful of astronauts to Mars for a short stay then I can't conceive how the Earth's economy could sustain terraforming the planet, keeping in mind it would be a gigantic expenditure of resources for no returns for hundreds of years. I just can't imagine the political will to do it, barring certain knowledge the Earth was going to die in a few centuries.

We love Mars basically because it's close and on ground level it looks rather like the Earth (love those Martian sunsets). One forgets that Mars is just as hostile to life as the Moon, and the Moon is far better for us as it is close enough to Earth for rescue missions to get there in time. It's just that there's all that white-grey rock bleached in harsh sunlight with razor-sharp black shadows, under a black and starless sky. Yuk.

 

[Vertigo]

Until I hear a good explanation of where the life came from that inhabits deep sea hydrothermal vents I am inclined to believe there is some kind of life under the surface of Mars, the Moon and a few other locations around the gas giants.

The life systems at hydrothermal vents make the life living in the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park look like child's play. Extremophile just means living in a place we can't live in. It's ordinary life in extreme conditions for us, not for them. The narrow range we live in could be the exception, perhaps a place where all the rules get broken.

The hydrothermal life either adapted to the situation, which seems likely, for how could similar looking life pop up like that. Or they started from scratch and developed without ever having seen a molecule of free oxygen, right from the get go they were using chemosynthesis to get what was available. Either way it shows a versatility we're having a hard time imagining. That's the problem, it's there whether we can prove it or not. If you want cold with some pressure there's always the life carving out an existence in the undersea methane hydrate deposits.

Once life gets started it might be very hard to kill it at the single cell level. Macro stuff like us are probably just flowers off a budding blob that's been in existence for 4 billion years. The smaller stuff might have builtin genetic libraries that can function and adapt to changes most anywhere in the solar system where there is water in some form, even thick perchlorate sludges that were once salty waters.

The flip side is that this particular underground sea will turn out to be like a coal or oil deposit containing once living matter. If so, I will just continue figuring you just got to go deeper below the surface to find something living. Maybe the deeper you go the more water you find. If nothing else, they should have no problem constructing fuel cells the size of small skyscrapers on Mars. Then the contamination will follow in our footsteps the same way it ended up inside nuclear facilities and loving it.

I can only recommend you read The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane which addresses a number of your questions with regard to hydrothermal vents and that it is quite likely they are where life originated. The book explains the biochemistry of it far far better than I could attempt. Lane posits at the end of the book that life will be likely anywhere in the universe that has (or had) the equivalents of our hydrothermal vents (more specifically alkaline hydrothermal vents).

If it's going to cost something in the region of several hundred billion to a trillion dollars to get a handful of astronauts to Mars for a short stay then I can't conceive how the Earth's economy could sustain terraforming the planet, keeping in mind it would be a gigantic expenditure of resources for no returns for hundreds of years. I just can't imagine the political will to do it, barring certain knowledge the Earth was going to die in a few centuries.

We love Mars basically because it's close and on ground level it looks rather like the Earth (love those Martian sunsets). One forgets that Mars is just as hostile to life as the Moon, and the Moon is far better for us as it is close enough to Earth for rescue missions to get there in time. It's just that there's all that white-grey rock bleached in harsh sunlight with razor-sharp black shadows, under a black and starless sky. Yuk.

I think @Venusian Broon quite clearly explained why Mars is less hostile than the moon. Still hostile, yes, but much less so. Another reason for that hostility would be the unweathered dust found on the moon that can be so injurious to our health, causing significant problems for all the astronauts that visited the moon's surface. As highlighted in a recent thread here on Chrons.

 

[Serendipity]

I really don't understand that notion. Mars is a terrible place to live. It has no magnetic protection against cosmic rays and the atmosphere is too thin to make good use of aerodynamic lift devices while being just thick enough to make ballistic space launches impractical and sandstorms a reality. The gravity is too low to effectively trap an atmosphere.

As off world bases go, the moon or other airless bodies would be better choices due to the relative ease of travel to and from and the lack of weather. If you have to live under heavy shielding anyway, why choose such a difficult place like Mars?

I think Mars is just low hanging fruit - Venus is too problematic to explore, Europa and Ganymede are in Jupiter's radiation belt, but Mars is close and presents few hazards. And we can't quite shake the feeling that it had canals and Martians - the only specific alien life word that has ever stuck. I really think the Mars thing is romantic tomfoolery. Ceres would be a much more interesting place to put people if you feel the need to get out of town.

I'd like to see more robotic exploration of Mars while we build some actual infrastructure someplace useful.

What about Callisto?

 

[Serendipity]

If it's going to cost something in the region of several hundred billion to a trillion dollars to get a handful of astronauts to Mars for a short stay then I can't conceive how the Earth's economy could sustain terraforming the planet, keeping in mind it would be a gigantic expenditure of resources for no returns for hundreds of years. I just can't imagine the political will to do it, barring certain knowledge the Earth was going to die in a few centuries.

We love Mars basically because it's close and on ground level it looks rather like the Earth (love those Martian sunsets). One forgets that Mars is just as hostile to life as the Moon, and the Moon is far better for us as it is close enough to Earth for rescue missions to get there in time. It's just that there's all that white-grey rock bleached in harsh sunlight with razor-sharp black shadows, under a black and starless sky. Yuk.

I don't dispute your current costs for getting a handful of astronauts to Mars and back in the near future.
Farther into the future, I suspect it'll be another matter. For instance we could at the appropriate time hitch a ride on Cruithne or similar for a large part of the journey to Mars - which mitigates quite a few problems of space travel etc.
As for terraforming Mars - it depends how long you can allow it take as to how expensive it will be.

 

[Justin Swanton]

I think @Venusian Broon quite clearly explained why Mars is less hostile than the moon. Still hostile, yes, but much less so. Another reason for that hostility would be the unweathered dust found on the moon that can be so injurious to our health, causing significant problems for all the astronauts that visited the moon's surface. As highlighted in a recent thread here on Chrons.

Well...

Mars' soil contains water to extract, it's not too cold or too hot, we can use solar panels there because there's enough sunlight and it has a day/night cycle that is very similar to ours.

The Moon has plenty of water as well. If one can profitably extract from Mars one can profitably extract it from the Moon.

On top of this, although the atmosphere is thin, that still offers a modicum of protection from cosmic rays and sunlight compared to somewhere as barren as the moon/Ceres.

Mars has no magnetic field and its atmospheric pressure is 1% Earth's, which means it provides virtually no protection against Cosmic rays and Solar flares. You might take fractionally longer to die unprotected on Mars but that's about the only difference.

The gravity, again quite low, is still sufficiently large so that humans may actually be able to adapt to. Again a place like the moon may just be far too low for us to ever be healthy on - therefore a place like Cere's would be a permanent hospital for us.

We don't actually know the long-term effects of low gravity on human health, just the effects of zero-gravity. Does the body cope better in 1/3 gravity or 1/6 gravity? The jury remains out.

Mars has one real problem: its soil. Less abrasive than lunar regolith it contains significant amounts of highly-reactive perchlorate that is probably toxic for humans (sorry Mark Watney). You don't want to breathe the stuff in for any length of time. Lunar regolith is chemically inert but very abrasive, however the lungs can cope with it at least for a few days.

 

[Justin Swanton]

I don't dispute your current costs for getting a handful of astronauts to Mars and back in the near future.
Farther into the future, I suspect it'll be another matter. For instance we could at the appropriate time hitch a ride on Cruithne or similar for a large part of the journey to Mars - which mitigates quite a few problems of space travel etc.
As for terraforming Mars - it depends how long you can allow it take as to how expensive it will be.

All scenarios for terraforming Mars involve landing a lot of large machines on the Martian surface that are capable of transforming the atmosphere - and maintaining those machines for decades or centuries whilst they do the job. I can just imagine the President's televised Message to the Nation:

"Good news folks, your taxes are going up 50% with immediate effect. At the same time we're canning public health care and anything else that looks too expensive, to initiate a two-century-long Martian terraforming project that will see your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren live on Mars! Make America the Greatest Nation in the Solar System! Vote Trump!"

 

[Vertigo]

As I understand it, the Moon is thought to have a fair bit of water but mainly at the poles and it's yet to be determined just how much. The presence of some water has been determined but not the quantity.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Enceladus or Europa the most likely, imo.

 

[Onyx]

I don't why having a place that can ballistically launch space craft easily makes it easier to live on. The Earth is pretty shockingly bad in this regard.

We're already on earth. And the earth is shockingly bad to get out of its gravity well. But it does have a thick enough atmosphere to assist in returning.

The ability to receive materials and to engage in trade is going to be vitally important to establish a colony of any size. A moon base with easy launch facilities isn't just a jumping off point for other exploration, but a place with the easiest access to raw materials found in other places in the solar system. And the moon appears to have some useful water, as do many asteroids. And the moon has a lot of aluminum.

While trying to make a breathable atmosphere for Mars is still SF, it doesn't require much and we wouldn't need pressure suits on the surface. Again good luck even trying to get close to that on Moon/Ceres.

Mars pressure is less the tenth of the minimum pressure required for human blood to not boil - so you definitely need a pressure suit. Average Martian air pressure is about the same is 100,000 ft altitude on earth. At 100,000 feet, military pilots wear space suits and have almost no atmospheric cosmic ray protection. But at least they have the magnetosphere.


Ultimately, anyone living on Mars or the Moon is going to be living indoors. That's a necessity of the lack of cosmic ray protection in either place - plastic domes simply aren't going to cut it. And while going outside might seem more attractive on Mars, it will be an EVA that is just as serious and possibly a lot more dangerous on Mars because of factors like sandstorms, higher gravity and shifting sands. All of that makes it harder to build surface installations and maintain solar collection. The decreased effectiveness of a mass driver means a Martian colony would have to spend part of its resources on propellent to launch any sort of trade goods or mining effort outside of Mars.

So the hundreds or thousands of years required to terraform would be lived largely indoors, and that's assuming it is possible to generate an atmosphere that doesn't just boil off into space since the gravity is only .37 of Earth's. It is a real question whether even the thickest atmosphere would remain for any useful length of time.

In contrast, places with low gravity and easier access to solar energy are great places to hollow out. Excavations of city size caverns in the moon's more homogeneous soil would be possible and stable. Hollow asteroids could be built with carousels or spun themselves if sufficiently fused enough.


That's why I don't get it. The Martian atmosphere is all hazard and no reward, major projects on Mars are going to be much more difficult and the atmosphere that is there makes ferrying materials to and from the gravity well much more costly. That doesn't seem worth it to be able to look out of a several feet of glass at the Martian surfaces when you could build an indoor paradise other places. And the moon already has accessible lava tubes that could be quickly occupied. One found so far is 50km long and 100m wide.

This is what the view "out the window" of a Lunar lava tube colonist would look like:

This is the scale of what could be done over time:

Or maybe this:

 

[Onyx]

Enceladus or Europa the most likely, imo.

The radiation belt that Europa is in is 1,000,000 times that of the dangerous portions of our Van Allen belts. Once you get far enough under the ice you'd be reasonably safe, but even operating robotic spacecraft around Europa is a problem.

 

[Vertigo]

The radiation belt that Europa is in is 1,000,000 times that of the dangerous portions of our Van Allen belts. Once you get far enough under the ice you'd be reasonably safe, but even operating robotic spacecraft around Europa is a problem.

I think you'll find that comment was with reference to finding life rather than human habitation.

 

[J Riff]

Oh gee, oh gosh, can we go?

 

[Serendipity]

Oh sky-diving pussy-cats.... this thread has given me a crazy, absolutely out of the box of impossibilities that aren't, idea about how to sort out the radiation problem on Mars. Must put it into a short story.

(I'm never going to forgive C.A.T. for this... he kind of in his bumbling way, pointed the way).

 

[BAYLOR]

To make Mars habitable again, someone has to come up with a sure fire way to heat up the core of Mars and somehow get volcanic activity going again. Because an active core means an active magnetic field which in turn mean there wil be no solar winds to strip away any atmosphere you might put around the planet. Next problem , you need to find a proper moon for Mars and one proportionate to the size of the planet ( those two dinky little so called moons have to go) Maybe one of the giant planets in the solar system could spare Mars one of their moons ? Of course this brings up the logistics how to drag a moon all the way to Mars and put it into proper balances orbit? Hm, Ill have give that last one some more thought. As to getting water onto the surface of Mars. Well, compared to the Herculean task of making the planet livable. The solution to this one is easy by comparison . Some person way more brilliant and more imaginative them me will need to find a way to divert ice comets at Mars so that they will crash on the surface and give Mars all the water it needs.

 

[Venusian Broon]

To make Mars habitable again, someone has to come up with a sure fire way to heat up the core of Mars and somehow get volcanic activity going again. Because an active core means an active magnetic field which in turn mean there wil be no solar winds to strip away any atmosphere you might put around the planet. Next problem , you need to find a proper moon for Mars and one proportionate to the size of the planet ( those two dinky little so called moons have to go) Maybe one of the giant planets in the solar system could spare Mars one of their moons ? Of course this brings up the logistics how to drag a moon all the way to Mars and put it into proper balances orbit? Hm, Ill have give that last one some more thought. As to getting water onto the surface of Mars. Well, compared to the Herculean task of making the planet livable. The solution to this one is easy by comparison . Some person way more brilliant and more imaginative them me will need to find a way to divert ice comets at Mars so that they will crash on the surface and give Mars all the water it needs.

1) I've just seen an article where someone is arguing that it would be easier to put a big magnetic 'generator' - think of it as a shield - on the Lagrange point between Mars and the Sun. This would intercept and shield the main problem - the solar wind. Honestly, this idea is still science fiction, as the generator would be likely be huge and require masses of energy, but probably, by many orders of magnitude more doable than fiddling about with the core of a planet.. (And I point out, we still don't really know how the Earth generates it's field, so there's that.)

2) Why do you need a proper moon? A while back it was thought that something like the moon, in the Earth-moon system, provided a degree of stability that stopped far too much variability, i.e. keeping the axis of rotation fairly 'tight'...however that study was done a long time ago with a pretty simple model, and other studies and research has shown that actually it doesn't require much for a planet to be 'bound' to a fairly restrictive range of variability. In the case of the solar system this means that the orbit of Jupiter is the biggest timepiece that regulates many things...

3) We are finding out that there is a lot more water on Mars that we used to think. We don't need to divert huge amounts of ice comets to the place. Just warming it up will do some amazing stuff. Still, this level of terraforming is in the realms of SF

 

[Onyx]

1) I've just seen an article where someone is arguing that it would be easier to put a big magnetic 'generator' - think of it as a shield - on the Lagrange point between Mars and the Sun. This would intercept and shield the main problem - the solar wind.

Is solar wind the main problem?

The greatest threat to astronauts en route to Mars is galactic cosmic rays--or "GCRs" for short.

NASA - Can People Go to Mars?

Why do you need a proper moon?

Not for anything I can think of.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Does anyone think the next generation of space vehicles will be large robust vehicles capable of lifting off from Earth or is it going to be lightweight utility craft that are assembled in space. Maybe the equivalent of tug boats.

The first time around it was just people thinking of how to get to the Moon, which didn't take all that long. There was no real follow up because there was no followup in the building of a space fleet to manage everything that comes after the landings were made. Everything was just left there on the surface after it was over, with no plans of having anything left behind to function as remote sensing stations. It was just a three day trip.

Would it be easier to maintain an orbiting space station as a shelter/work station or would a permanent installation on solid ground be more practical.

Seeing as how people think they can get to the Moon or even Mars in the next 10 years, when they manage to do it, after landing, what would they be using for shelter? From a practical point of view would a fleet of vehicles first have to go at the same time to carry everything needed. The starting vehicles would be small in size to get off Earth. Perhaps a bigger, simple cargo type ship without an atmosphere could be put together outside of Earth's gravity to carry equipment and supplies to the Moon. It would be easy to accelerate by having another vehicle pushing it. There could only be a few people involved to start with because of the lack of suitable shelter upon arrival.

Once on the Moon or Mars, would the best bet be to use existing vehicles as temporary shelter or does the shelter need such things as thick shielding which would be added after landing to minimize damage from a rough landing. The simple cargo carrier would be the equivalent of a semi trailer that is pulled by the tractor unit. Pushing seems like it would be easier. Adding the shielding after landing seems like it would also be easier to minimize the physical damage from the landing. Buildings with multiple air locks or dust rooms (mud rooms) would be needed to minimize the damage from the dust. This probably wouldn't be possible on the current vehicle designs due to size constrictions. I'm thinking this stuff would have to be cheap construction, I can't see anyone building an expensive space shuttle and then leaving it on the surface of the moon as a quick fix housing solution. But maybe they will.

Living underground has its advantages. Bigger shelter areas, isolated entry/exit rooms to keep the dust out. The shielding would be achieved by the depth underground the structure was placed. The problem with this scenario is the equipment needed to dig underground, and it would have to be going into solid rock. How hard would it be to get tunneling equipment to the Moon. Would that situation force the use of semi-permanent temporary surface shelters to start with because of the difficulty of transporting tunneling equipment that would be capable of creating instant shelters. Would smaller excavation units be used first by people living in surface shelters. Their motto could be we built this city out of rocks which kept rolling away.

 

[Onyx]

Does anyone think the next generation of space vehicles will be large robust vehicles capable of lifting off from Earth or is it going to be lightweight utility craft that are assembled in space.

I'd like to think that dedicated space vehicles are much more useful than atmospheric craft. And the most efficient current engine ideas for deep space don't produce the thrust necessary to leave the Earth.

Everything was just left there on the surface after it was over, with no plans of having anything left behind to function as remote sensing stations.

What would the sensing stations be looking for, and how sophisticated could they have been in 1972 AND fit in the landers? The moon has no weather or techtonics - we can see it really well from here.

Would it be easier to maintain an orbiting space station as a shelter/work station or would a permanent installation on solid ground be more practical.

The only orbit that is safe from radiation is near earth orbit. Anytime you are sitting on the surface of something your cosmic ray exposure is at least half because the ground is shielding you from below. A crater is better than that, then a chasm and finally a cave.

Once on the Moon or Mars, would the best bet be to use existing vehicles as temporary shelter or does the shelter need such things as thick shielding which would be added after landing to minimize damage from a rough landing.

I would imagine that if the trip to wherever is mass limited, the vehicles are likely to little more than origami. But if you did have the option of combining the base with a large vehicle with full shielding, that would allow mobility with the least risk. I think such vehicles would be short, wide and tall with self leveling chassis so they can go more places. Long, narrow vehicles are great for roads and wind resistance, neither being much of a factor on the moon or Mars.

Alternately, the base craft could fly where the gravity is low - especially if local frozen water or gas are available to use as propellant.

The shielding would be achieved by the depth underground the structure was placed. The problem with this scenario is the equipment needed to dig underground, and it would have to be going into solid rock.

As I mentioned earlier. the moon has relatively accessible lava tubes that could be used as shelter. An oversized "inner tube" would be required to make it air tight, and that would provide structure, radiation protection and possibly even parking and service area for rovers and shuttles.

But you don't need to tunnel. Mars and the moon have a lot of dust and sand, so inflatable or other semi-rigid structures could just be buried using the equivalent of a snowblower. Add CO2 or water vapor if you want the final product to be structural.

 

[Onyx]

Another possibility for building materials is moon dust or sand packed into molds and heated until the grains fuse, like metal injection molding is done. You'd bake the wall section in the equivalent of a huge solar oven. With a large mirror array and vacuum, heating the material would not be much of a problem; cooling might be, though.

 

[Vertigo]

Is solar wind the main problem?


NASA - Can People Go to Mars?


Not for anything I can think of.

That articles is only putting cosmic rays forward as a problem during the voyage between Earth and Mars and the relevant post was only concerned with radiation on Mars itself. Now I'm not denying that radiation protection will be necessary on the surface of Mars, of course it will and I've always considered it the greatest problem to any kind of habitation there. However regarding Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) NASA seem to be focused on the voyage rather Mars itself and there they have some intriguing ideas up their sleeves:
How to Protect Astronauts from Space Radiation on Mars