Should NASA go to Mars or back to the Moon?

@OmSigDAVID,

That too sounds like my fathers instructions about catching a wren,

"Kid, you merely sneak up on the wren and sprinkle salt on his tail"

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

I am following the dehydrated water idea and I think you should preent that as a paper,(There is a symposium next April 1)

I think the Discovery Institute is working on it. They're planning to start a court battle to force the idea into science class as a form of Academic Freedom (to present opposing views to "wet water").

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

(You can only recycle water so many times, because the treatment train would run out of water from distillation).

Have you factored in water produced by human metabolism?

Uh, Ros, I think you've already been beaten out on this dehydrated water business. Or maybe not. I ordered some decades ago when I was still backpacking. What a rip off. The package was empty.

You two are sure early birds, by the way. Hope you get the worms.

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@roger,

definately includes all systemic water.

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@roger,

roger wrote:

Uh, Ros, I think you've already been beaten out on this dehydrated water business.

It was pretty lame to start with, but I had to find something to prod the thread with. Smile

A real troll would jump on and say, "anyone who thinks we should go to the moon first is an idiot". But I don't have the beard for that.

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@OmSigDAVID,

What would steering comets to Mars accomplish?

Maybe you should patent a frozen comet tail catcher.

How much water in a coment's tail? How would you thaw the water, and what would you put it in?

That should keep you busy for awhile David.

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@Sglass,

Well normally I do not give great weight to the history channel but for what it is worth they had an expert on that claim that from 10 to 30 percent of all water now on earth came from comets hitting the earth.

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@rosborne979,

Exactly the point in Buzz Aldrin's plan (link on page 8 of your thread here).

Quote:

astronaut Buzz Aldrin has a problem with NASA’s current manned space plan: Namely, the five-year gap between the shuttle’s scheduled retirement next year and the debut of the Ares I rocket and the Orion spacecraft, which will take us no further than the moon"a place we’ve already been.

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@farmerman,

What ya do is, fly out to Saturn, find some of the bigger snowballs in the rings, slap some mass accelerators on 'em, using solar panels to power them, and then crash-land 'em on the Martian equator. Hey Presto ! ! ! Greenhouse gases and water in no time flat . . . and low cost, too--if yer willin' to wait about a decade.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

What ya do is, fly out to Saturn, find some of the bigger snowballs in the rings, slap some mass accelerators on 'em, using solar panels to power them, and then crash-land 'em on the Martian equator. Hey Presto ! ! ! Greenhouse gases and water in no time flat . . . and low cost, too--if yer willin' to wait about a decade.

You are exactly correct, though there are closer ice clumps in the asteroid belt.

Cycloptichorn

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@Sglass,

The relative gravity of Mars is 38% of one G (the force of "gravity" on our planet at sea level). My plan to use snowballs from Saturn would have the one drawback that you'd need to keep cartin' the **** in. It's not the gravity well which is responsible for the thin atmosphere on Mars, it's the lack of a magnetic field. The solar wind is a serious bitch if you don't have some really mega-sun block . . .

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

It's not the gravity well which is responsible for the thin atmosphere on Mars, it's the lack of a magnetic field.

I'm not buying that. What force would a magnetic field exert onto an atmosphere that isn't magnetic?

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@Thomas,

The magnetic field protects the atmosphere from cosmic radiation, especially stellar wind, which we refer to as the solar wind.

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And you ain't got to buy nothin' . . . you can believe or disbelieve it for free . . . it ain't no skin off my ass . . .

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@Setanta,

... and what would cosmic radiation do to an atmosphere? Heat it up so it evaporates? I still don't see where you get a force that would move the atmoshere into outer space.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

And you ain't got to buy nothin' . . . you can believe or disbelieve it for free . . . it ain't no skin off my ass . . .

Well, as long as it's not a matter of indifference to you ... that would have hurt my feelings.

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@Thomas,

Skip feelings, stick to topic: whoever goes to Mars must do so relatively soon, Phobos, one of that planet's 2 moons, is planning to come crashing down from its low, unstable orbit:

http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~idh/apod/image/0804/phobos2_hirise.jpg

Well, no panic necessary - 100 million years to go - but I hope we will see the manned mission to Mars within the lifetimes of everyone here.

1 Reply

@High Seas,

High Seas wrote:

Skip feelings, stick to topic: whoever goes to Mars must do so relatively soon, Phobos, one of that planet's 2 moons, is planning to come crashing down from its low, unstable orbit:

Well, no panic necessary - 100 million years to go - but I hope we will see the manned mission to Mars within the lifetimes of everyone here.

That's a space station waiting to happen, that is.

Cycloptichorn

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@Thomas,

Well this is how it works if memory serve me correctly a magnetic field stop a large part of the solar wind IE charge particles from hitting the planet upper atmosphere and breaking up gas molecules.

Broken gas molecules have less mass so for a given temperature they move faster and a higher percent of them had the speed to escape the planet gravity field and therefore leak away far faster then with a magnetic field.

Somewhere I had the equations that deal with this in my notes books from my physics class of 40 years ago.

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@Thomas,

I found the equations it took some time as I do not have the old notebooks index as well as I should but this was long before computers allow fast indexing.

The main law is call Maxwell's speed distribution law and it give the good old bell curve and is fairly long for me to post it here. You can google it however at whim.

The short version give the RMS value of gas speed and is as follow Vrms=(3RT/M)^1/2 and as you can see when you increase the temperate or more important when you decrease the mass of the gas you increase the speed of the gas overall and a higher percent of the total gas will be going fast enough to leak out to space.

So once more solar wind break gas molecules up and therefore allow a far greater leaking of gas into space then if the solar wind was block from hitting the upper air.

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Should NASA go to Mars or back to the Moon?

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