Mars And Why?

[Bungielad]

The mission to Mars seems to me a little bit of a waste of time and resources and im hoping someone may enlighten me.

I understand the whole exploring thing and the issue of 'if you can , then why not ! But I cant see a point beyond those two factors.

It is believed that Mars lost its atmosphere due to solar winds blowing it into non existence and the core of Mars stopped churning due to rotation which would stop any kind of magnetic field to protect it from solar winds. Now... if we go to Mars and set up colonies that do eventually, after years and years of making a new atmosphere for Mars using gases to make an atmosphere, how is it going to last?

There is no magnetic field to stop the new atmosphere from being stripped from solar wind, which to me sounds like a whole waste of resources for which we could be putting to find a way of travel to find 'digs' for which are not going to be swallowed up by the sun.

Just my opinion

Bungielad.

[JB80]

So lets say we kick start the magnetic field one way or another, that would surely be a solution.

There's no point in spending time, money, and resources building up an atmosphere on Mars if it's just going to blow away. Even to this day, solar wind is still blowing away what little atmosphere the Red Planet has left.

Mars is geologically dead. The core solidified a long time ago. Without a dynamo in the core, Mars has no magnetic field.

There are various ways to fix the magnetic field problem, and maybe we should do that before taking any other steps in the terraforming process (though the atmospheric loss is slow, so postponing the magnetic field a few centuries past terraforming does hardly any harm at all). The first, and easiest way would be to place a network of artificial satellites in orbit around Mars to generate and create an artificial magnetic field. That would, however, require the function of the satellites and should mostly be considered a preliminary solution.

From this page http://spacecolonization.wikia.com/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars

Not the most in depth of pieces but there are ideas on how this can be achieved and no doubt if budgets were increased to the levels needed more ideas would be developed in time and may even become feasible.

As they say you will probably have a few centuries to work on the idea.

[Tinker1947]

I am willing to donate a PP9 Duracell battery and a coil of insulated wire to help kick start the magnetic field.........

[Oli]

I've posted this in another topic but I do like this guys reasoning (link below) As for actually settling on Mars, I presume it would be easier to create cities with a large dome around it instead of creating a new atmosphere. I can only imagine what kind of energy you would need to restart a planets core.

http://www.futuretimeline.net/videos/37.htm#.Vpea4BWLTIV

[robertinventor]

Just to say I totally agree, that the idea of "colonizing Mars" is a non starter. It's not remotely hospitable. And it is not terraformable in less than many thousand years with present day technology. And not at all clear it is at all.

It's not really the magnetic field that's the issue, that's one of the least of the issues right now. Long term if you had an Earth atmosphere on Mars then it would erode over millions of years due to lack of a magnetic field. It would also lose all the carbon into limestone on similar timescale due to lack of continental drift to return it to the atmosphere, and then would be a dead planet, with not even the amount of CO2 it has now.

But there are many more problems than that, far more immediate.

If we moved Earth out to Mars orbit, it would get half the amount of radiation it does now and would go into a snowball / slushball phase, as Earth often has in the distant past.

Even with a much warmer atmosphere of CO2 only, Earth density, it still wouldn't get warm enough for trees to grow on Mars even in the tropics.

To get Earth temperatures on Mars you'd need to add powerful greenhouse gases, or else large mirrors. The plans in academic papers about terraforming Mars involve either mirrors comparable in area to the cross section of Mars to double the amount of sunlight - that means, 144 million square kilometers of thin film mirrors - or else - greenhouse gases.

The greenhouse gases method is thought to be easier. But this involves 100,000 megawatts of power (200 powerstations each of 500 megawatts built on Mars) and mining 11 cubic kilometers of fluorite ore every century to make the greenhouse gases.

But then you have the problem that there may not be enough CO2 there for an atmosphere anyway. We only know of enough to double the pressure to 2% of Earth's atmosphere. The 1% point it is at now is a point of stability and to get a runaway greenhouse there we need to get up to 10% and it's not known if there is enough CO2 there for that. If there is only enough for 2%, that's a point of instability and you'd need to keep pumping in greenhouse gases to keep it at that level or it would revert to 1%.

Then - if there was enough for 100% of Earth's atmosphere - why has it never gone into that runaway greenhouse effect in the past, at times when much of the Martian icecaps melted? 

But now -suppose there is enough - well - that still doesn't make it warm enough for trees. You need to keep pumping in greenhouse gases even into a 100% CO2 atmosphere to keep it warm enough at the Mars distance.

Then as well as that - that's not a breathable atmosphere. Even with an oxygen breather - that's not enough, you also need to supply a buffer gas such as nitrogen. Because CO2 is poisonous to humans above concentrations of 1%.

So having released all that CO2, you now have to extract at least 99% of the carbon as organics. So that's a lot of photosythesis. Chris McKay estimates 100,000 years of photosynthesis at Mars levels of sunlight h- which even that is a huge speed up over the time it took on Earth.

Now you have your planet with a pure oxygen atmosphere and several meters of organics extracted from the atmosphere covering the planet. Now you have to add a buffer gas, because a pure oxygen atmosphere is a fire risk. It is breathable but only if the oxygen is rather low pressure. Better to have lots of nitrogen and not much oxygen. But where do you get the nitrogen from? Maybe extract from nitrates on Mars?

Now you have to do step up production of greenhouse gases, or construct your massive mirrors, because you've lost all the CO2 from the atmosphere. And probably not much water vapour on such a cold planet as Mars. 

All in all it's a project that would take thousands of years, spending billions of dollars a year, and there is much that could go wrong. And the end result could never be as habitable as Earth is or will be no matter how devastated it gets.

It just doesn't make any sense to use Mars as a colony world or backup. 

But the worst thing about sending humans to Mars is that it would go right against all the efforts we are making to protect Mars from Earth life. It's now thought to be habitable for some extremophiles, habitable enough anyway that all the higher latitudes and also the warm seasonal flows in the equatorial regions are marked as special regions that should only be approached with very sterile spacecraft and rovers. Humans could never be sterilized sufficiently to visit those regions.

But worse than that. A human mission to Mars could easily end up with a crash, hard landing. And if the hard landing is due, say, to a misfiring for the insertion burn, you could end up with a crashed spacecraft on one of those special regions. And if not, the crash debris anyway would soon begin to spread over Mars in the dust storms - things like long lived spores, protected from UV radiation by the iron oxides in the dust. 

It really doesn't make a lot of sense to send humans to the Mars surface right now.

It does make sense to send humans to Mars orbit. But that also should be done with great care. I think a ballistic transfer, to a high altitude orbit then gently go down to lower orbits with ion thrusters to avoid the issue of a misfired insertion burn ending up with a crash on Mars.

That could be a very exciting mission for humans. Orbiting Mars much as they orbit Earth in the ISS. From orbit Mars looks quite homely and Earth like so I think it would be psychologically helpful also. But you can explore it in shirt sleeves, and control avatars on the surface in real time. That I think is what human missions to Mars should be focused on. First go to the Moon because Mars is a huge challenge, when for decades we've been visiting the ISS with ability to get back to Earth within a few days. When we can send a mission to the Moon and leave it there for two years, without any resupply from Earth, then we are ready to go to Mars. Either that or if we can develop very fast transportation to Mars.

Then we could explore Mars from orbit by telepresence. Safe for the humans and safe for Mars and any Martian organisms.

But this whole idea of setting up a colony on Mars - when has anyone ever set up a colony in a place where it is impossible to breath the air? Even on Earth we could set up colonies on the sea bed, and the difficulty of breathing there is enough of an inhibitor that we haven't really taken that very far. Even though the air is available easily from the surface. 

I think it will be a while before we set up colonies off Earth. But Antarctica type bases - that we might do. Expensive places to live, but worth it for the science return. 

Or - depends how easy it is for humans to survive interplanetary. Might be that we stay with the Moon for humans and robots, and Mars has to be for robots, semi-autonomous, controlled from Earth, for the near future. Will just have to see how it transpires. I don't think you can map out the entire future here, but do it one step at a time and see where it goes.

A couple of answers I did on quora about this:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-full-plan-of-Elon-Musk-to-terraform-Mars-from-the-fusion-of-the-poles-to-the-magnetic-field-in-creation/answer/Robert-Walker-5

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-common-scientific-opinion-about-Elon-Musks-plan-to-nuke-Mars-poles-to-accelerate-the-creation-of-an-atmosphere

And this is my article about exploring Mars from orbit with the likes of Occulus rift and Virtuix Omni telepresence.

http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor/to_explore_mars_with_likes_of_occulus_rift_virtuix_omni_from_mars_capture_orbit_phobos_or_deimos-155974

As you can tell I'm keen on space and astronomy. But I think we need to be realistic and that science fiction and movies, though they can be inspiring, are not templates for future space exploration, as they use alot of poetic license in the interests of a good story, as well as also being products of the author's imagination and as we know, predictions even 20 years in advance are often way out. Some science fiction has been prescient, but many things are not.

[robertinventor]

Sorry typos, I meant that we can get back from the ISS in a few hours. We could get back from the Moon in a couple of days. And could resupply the Moon at any time, not have to wait two years for the opportunity if spares, replacements etc are needed. That's enough of a jump I think and the Moon is an interesting place, lots to find out there. When Amundsen reached the South Pole that was not the end of all interest in Antarctica, was just the start. So the idea that "We have done it before" for the Moon is absurd, it's plenty enough of a challenge for us right now. Things like surviving the lunar night, and surviving there for months or years on end with almost no resupply from Earth - then the next step might be Mars orbit after that. I'd be astonished if we are ready to go to Mars orbit as soon as the 2030s (pleasantly surprised I must say).