[AgentR11]

I think one of the main problems with this mission, is how to deal with the unexpected. Like a rock or something hitting the ship, or a unexpected malfunction. Remember they will be so far away from any assistance or rescue. Then their is the capabilities of the crew to deal with the conditions of space travel as well as the long time of being away from Earth as well as dealing with each other. A daunting challenge but doable given adequate planning. We even seem to have the preferred propulsion system being the ionized Solar Sails

Manned missions never use bleeding edge tech. Certification.

Not to say that cargo trains to Mars wouldn't be able to use low-G propulsions system to reduce cost; but the best way to reduce the risk of the transit flight from Earth to Mars for a crew, is to reduce its time of flight. You do that by launching at high-G, probably from orbit (LEO would be good, geosync would be an awesome trick), from a docked to vehicle, and having a high-G deceleration capture at Mars.

So go and stay would look like:
supply launches 1 to x. once every 6 months.. till mission end
two years before people leave, launch support and habitat system
after confirming landing & function of supply and support modules; launch transit vehicle to LEO
fuel it; test by boost to geosync,
launch human varmints to geosync, dock.
Test systems for flight
burn

all astronauts should start praying really really hard; because they are now exposed to lots of things that could kill them in the blink of an eye that no capabilities exists in the hands of man to protect them from.

orbital capture at mars
check to confirm astronauts have not been barbecued
test.
land.
work.
live.
die.
the end.

If one were to INSIST on return. Let me suggest that an orbital STATION at mars commanding a fleet of ground robotics does permit a certifiable return, and gets you most of the benefits of proximity without the risk of contamination of the Mars environment.

[onlooker]

Tanada, what makes you believe the engineers can duplicate the wonder and perfection of a self-replicating and sustainable habitat like earth with our simple machines?

I believe the term they use in the field is Terra forming. I would have to concur that to create a artificial habitat as prodigious, masterful and self-sustaining as Earth is daunting. Perhaps in a limited way so the Astronauts can at least have means to breathe, eat and sustain themselves for an indefinite period of time. Also, yes way stations or transit points should be established as something akin to beachheads so that we can in increments perhaps send more people on the trek farther and farther into the solar system. Worth doing certainly but only if we can really stabilize the situation here on Earth.

[Tanada]

Tanada, what makes you believe the engineers can duplicate the wonder and perfection of a self-replicating and sustainable habitat like earth with our simple machines?

I believe the term they use in the field is Terra forming. I would have to concur that to create a artificial habitat as prodigious, masterful and self-sustaining as Earth is daunting. Perhaps in a limited way so the Astronauts can at least have means to breathe, eat and sustain themselves for an indefinite period of time. Also, yes way stations or transit points should be established as something akin to beachheads so that we can in increments perhaps send more people on the trek farther and farther into the solar system. Worth doing certainly but only if we can really stabilize the situation here on Earth.

The first step is a closed system that is self sustaining. It takes a lot of steps to go from there to Terraforming, but if you manage that first step you will have developed a true understanding of the complexities and how to balance systems in an artificial environment. Until you can do that you are dependent on what nature provides and as one who believes climate disruption is a real possibility learning how to create self sustaining artificial environments could be the difference between life and death.

[onlooker]

Tanada would you agree that we are well on our way to developing such artificial environments? I would cite our expertise in greenhouse planting, our ability already to create synthetic foods, our knowledge of dealing with closed self-sustaining environments in the space station that has been orbiting. I would also think that as we speak scientists are studying these problems at places like NASA. Of course to master this for an indefinite period of time is the objective. For risking the death of the pioneer astronauts would be if nothing else be demoralizing.

[SeaGypsy]

Its not going to happen OL, it's pure speculation.

[AgentR11]

Tanada, what makes you believe the engineers can duplicate the wonder and perfection of a self-replicating and sustainable habitat like earth with our simple machines?

Not to mention how much less solar radiation per m2 there is. I'm not convinced its even possible to grow substantial, sustainable food calories on Mars. (remember the underlying formula turns solar radiation into glucose bound into starches) Best I can see would be some form of larger RTG or a bunch of smaller RTG running in parallel, to provide light and heat, to grow plants; but that hits a level of complexity and vulnerability that makes me want to just say, "no way dude, 1-click amazon all the way". eg... Continuous, low-G, supply deliveries, or just cache enough calories before landing your human that your marsonaught (lol) dies of old age or cancer/radiation sickness before he runs out of food. (go and stay). Water, and its recycling would be far more challenging than just shipping a bunch of sugar to mars.

Another, tad evil'ish solution, figure out which males will have that 50-60yr old no-warning cardiac event, and send them. Then they're lively and awesome and making history right up to the moment of "This is the Big One Elizabeth!", and then a rover/droid can box him up in a suitably patriotic case and allow the Mars environment to freeze him for posterity. I'd be fine with that personally...

Great... now I have an image of Sanford Senior rummaging around on Mars, a force to be reckoned with for sure!

[ennui2]

Once that is accomplished then the solar system is colonizable and best of all we could repair the damage we have done to the ecosystem of the Earth by using the developed strategies to lower our demands on the natural systems.

Well, gosh, if all you want to do is that, we've already got the technology.



We just won't use it.

[Tanada]

Once that is accomplished then the solar system is colonizable and best of all we could repair the damage we have done to the ecosystem of the Earth by using the developed strategies to lower our demands on the natural systems.

Well, gosh, if all you want to do is that, we've already got the technology.

We just won't use it.

Population is A problem, however it is far from the ONLY problem. Ignoring all the others while you scale that Mount Everest is IMO counter productive.

One of the biggest things that could be done to help would be to have waste result in a financial cost to the most wasteful. I am not talking about just conserving energy either here, just as one example some (not all) big poultry operations pour massive quantities of guano from their flocks on fields far faster than plants can consume it. This causes massive nitrate and phosphate pollution as the unbound material is washed away by rain and in dry periods breaks into fine dust and blows down wind. At the same time that is going on there are farmers all over the place buying phosphate and nitrate fertilizers created from rocks on the one hand and natural gas on the other hand. Clearly this system is broken.

The financial system for farmers was essentially recreated in the very early 1970's to farm "hedgerow to hedgerow' and to do so with the biggest machines available all in the name of efficiency. The problem is we created a system of dense, fossil fuel dependent monocrops. In 1915 there was not one farm in the USA that was a monocrop where the farm family buys all of their own consumption from the local grocery store. Today you are hard pressed to find a farm that is self sufficient unless you are talking about a few of the most traditional Amish/Mennonite style farms that still exist. The small farm I grew up on had an orchard and vineyard, a perennial crop section and an annual crop section garden, poultry and rabbits. We also raised livestock in partnership with my Uncle who had bought the original family farm with my Aunt from her Grandmother, my Great Grandmother. My cousins who still own that farm know in the back of their minds it has been in the family since the 1840's. They are the last 'professional' farmers in my family tree that I know of, and they have some rough times because the farm is much smaller than the mega farms in the prairie states. My cousin who still farms it is a very capable man who for a few years thanks to perfect weather managed to double crop wheat and soybeans, but farming is always a weather gamble. You can have years of abundance and years of losses and in the old days you had to be smart enough to set aside for a 'rainy day' because otherwise a bad season could bankrupt you.

This is wandering far afield of the topic so I will stop there.

[vox_mundi]

Que Also Sprach Zarathustra ...

From BBC News: There is a Huge 'Monolith' on Phobos, one of Mars's moons

"When people find out about that they are going to say, 'Who put that there? Who put that there?'"

These are the words of Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, in 2009. He was talking about a peculiar and solitary large rock, a monolith, that sits on the surface of the Martian moon Phobos.

Aldrin was right: many people are vexed by the Phobos monolith. It has inspired all manner of alien-based conspiracy theories and this fascinating discussion on Reddit. It even gave its name to an album released this year by Les Claypool and Sean Lennon Ono.

So what is it? ...

[Cid_Yama]

Does it look like a giant domino?

[peripato]

Amazing!

Only last night I was watching "Red Planet" starring Val Kilmer and Carrie Anne-Moss and now this thread turns up again.

[vox_mundi]

How the ExoMars spacecraft will make its way to the surface of Mars
- Video

[vox_mundi]

Schiaparelli Mars probe's parachute 'jettisoned too early'

Europe's Schiaparelli lander did not behave as expected as it headed down to the surface of Mars on Wednesday.

Telemetry data recovered from the probe during its descent indicates that its parachute was jettisoned too early. The rockets it was supposed to use to bring itself to a standstill just above the ground also appeared to fire for too short a time.

The European Space Agency (Esa) has not yet conceded that the lander crashed but the mood is not positive.

Data shows that everything was fine as the probe entered the atmosphere. Its heatshield appeared to do the job of slowing the craft, and the parachute opened as expected to further decelerate the robot.
But it is at the end of the parachute phase that the data indicates unusual behaviour.

"We cannot resolve yet under which, let's say, logic that the machine has decided to eject the parachute. But this is definitely far too early compared to our expectations," Andrea Accomazzo, the head of operations for Esa's planetary missions, told BBC News.

Not only is the chute jettisoned earlier than called for in the predicted timeline, but the retrorockets that were due to switch on immediately afterwards are seen to fire for just three or four seconds. They were expected to fire for a good 30 seconds.

In the downlinked telemetry, Schiaparelli then continues transmitting a radio signal for 19 seconds after the apparent thruster shutoff. The eventual loss of signal occurs 50 seconds before Schiaparelli was supposed to be on the surface.

Many scientists here at mission control have taken all this information to mean one thing - that the probe crashed at high speed. It is likely it went into freefall a kilometre or two above the surface.

[vox_mundi]

Did 40-year-old Viking experiment discover life on Mars?

... Publishing a paper about life on Mars was very different than publishing more typical studies (over the years, Levin's research has included low-calorie sweeteners, pharmaceutical drugs, safer pesticides, and wastewater treatment processes, among others). It took nearly 20 years for Levin and Straat to publish a peer-reviewed paper on their interpretation of the Viking LR results.

"Since I first concluded that the LR had detected life (in 1997), major juried journals had refused our publications," Levin told Phys.org. "I and my co-Experimenter, Dr. Patricia Ann Straat, then published mainly in the astrobiology section of the SPIE Proceedings, after presenting the papers at the annual SPIE conventions. Though these were invited papers, they were largely ignored by the bulk of astrobiologists in their publications." These papers are available at gillevin.com.

"At a meeting of the Canadian Space Agency, I met Dr. Sherry Cady, the editor of Astrobiology. She invited me to submit a paper for peer review. I did and it was promptly bounced, not even sent out for review because of its life claim.

"Pat and I decided we would produce a paper that would withstand the utmost scientific scrutiny. It took years of countless renditions and compliance with or explanation away of a myriad of reviewers' comments, but we persisted until we disposed of every adverse comment. Thus, we think this publication is quite significant in that it was scrubbed so thoroughly that the points remaining are firmly established.

"You may not agree with the conclusion, but you cannot disparage the steps leading there. You can say only that the steps are insufficient. But, to us, that seems a tenuous defense, since no one would refute these results had they been obtained on Earth."

Gilbert V. Levin and Patricia Ann Straat. "The Case for Extant Life on Mars and Its Possible Detection by the Viking Labeled Release Experiment." Astrobiology. October 2016, 16(10): 798-810. DOI: 10.1089/ast.2015.1464

[DesuMaiden]

Sending space probes to Mars is one thing, and that has been done, but sending a manned mission onto Mars is and will always be out of technological capability. Sorry to burst some people's bubbles, but the movie Martian (talking about a manned mission, or sending people to, to Mars) is a pipe-dream. Due to the limitations of technology, sending people to Mars is not only unfeasible and impossible today, but it will also be that case into the future. And believe it or not, there are actually limitations to technology and science. Contrary the popular belief of cornucopians and technophiles (which is the prevailing opinion of modern society), there are certain laws of nature that make certain aspirations completely unrealistic and unachievable. Free energy/zero-point energy, cold fusion reactors, and photovoltaic/wind turbine powered industrial civilization are just pipe-dreams for the disillusioned masses that think that technology can somehow save industrial civilization from collapsing.

As for what is actually required to send people onto Mars, you need an energy source with a far higher energy density and potential than fossil fuels being discoverd and harnassed, but that is very unlikely to happen. Besides, technophiles/cornucopians of the 1970s thought that by 2010, we would already be using free-energy/zero-point energy and sending people to Mars since they already allegedly sent people onto the Earth's Moon. That hasn't happened yet because it will never happen.

Maybe, I'm wrong. Maybe we might be able to send a person onto Mars. But let's see if that happens in another 50, 100, 500 or even 1000 years into the future, because if it doesn't happen by then, then it will probably never happen. In other words, I'm fairly certain no human will ever set foot on Mars.

[Cog]

If EM drive proves to be real, Mars is open to us with current technology.

[Tanada]

If EM drive proves to be real, Mars is open to us with current technology.

Even if EM drive is a bust both Ion drives and solar sails would also get us to Mars far quicker than the boost and coast method we use with unmanned equipment where time is not an issue.

[vtsnowedin]

Besides, technophiles/cornucopians of the 1970s thought that by 2010, we would already be using free-energy/zero-point energy and sending people to Mars since they already allegedly sent people onto the Earth's Moon. That hasn't happened yet because it will never happen.

.

Oh you are one of those!! Way to blow your own credibility.

[vtsnowedin]

The first step is a closed system that is self sustaining. It takes a lot of steps to go from there to Terraforming, but if you manage that first step you will have developed a true understanding of the complexities and how to balance systems in an artificial environment. Until you can do that you are dependent on what nature provides and as one who believes climate disruption is a real possibility learning how to create self sustaining artificial environments could be the difference between life and death.

We have yet to build a contained self sustaining environment here on earth with earth gravity, temperatures, pressures and solar radiation and an escape hatch handy by. We should build that first then send a robot staffed mission to Mars to build one there. Once it's up and running for several years we could risk sending humans to man it as their retirement village.