US To Return To Moon ... and Beyond

I would expect dust to fall abruptly in the absence of an atmosphere.

Not sure where to put this - but I thought it interesting.

Paul Davies is a world renowned scientist who lives in Oz - though past his best, the astro folk say.....

One way to Mars, please
As the United States sets its sights on a manned mission to Mars, Australian astrobiologist Professor Paul Davies says he has the perfect way to cut costs - do not bring the astronauts back.

US President George W Bush is expected to announce next week an initiative to send Americans back to the moon and ultimately to Mars.

While the news set some spirits soaring, others were immediately reaching for their calculators, warning that the mission would be not only dangerous but extremely expensive.

Professor Davies, an astrobiologist and professor of natural philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney, expects that earth's first Martian explorers may be similar to Australia's first colonists.

"I see no particular reason that the astronauts who go to Mars should come back again," Professor Davies said.

"I'm in favour of a one-way mission to Mars - it would dramatically cut the costs.

"You might think that's terrible - you're sending them to their deaths, but that's not what I had in mind.

"I have in mind resupplying them every two years as a sort of cycle of the Martian orbit.

"We could send on the food parcels from home and other things that are required to keep a tiny colony, maybe four or six people, going perhaps for many years."

Signs of life

NASA has an unmanned probe exploring the Martian landscape at the moment while British astronomers had less luck, still waiting for any word from their Beagle 2 probe, which was due to land on the red planet on Christmas Day.

Both probes were sent to Mars to look for among other things, any signs of life, a mission Professor Davies believes it more than worthwhile.

"If we found positive evidence of life on Mars, if we could be absolutely sure that there was life there, either in the past or still existing there now - then I think that would be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time," he said.

"Mars is about the only place in our cosmic backyard that maybe could harbour life and so there's the added incentive that it's not just a planet to explore but it's one that could hold the secret to life," he said.

Of course, close inspection of the planet has so far revealed no obvious signs of life.

If Martians did or still do exist, Professor Davies says they are most likely very basic life forms buried deep underground.

"The only hope for life still clinging on Mars is, in my opinion, deep beneath the surface," he said.

"It turns out that if you drill down under the ground right here, you can go down one, two, maybe three kilometres and it's teeming with life.

"There are microbes living inside the earth's crust in apparently solid rock under our feet - now the same may be true of Mars too.

"It may be that beneath the surface, a kilometre or two down, the internal heat of the planet has melted the permafrost to form liquid aquifers and that these could host organisms similar to those we find beneath the surface of the earth today.

"Now that would be tremendously exciting - these would be actual living Martians."

One of the people who is helping to try to find that Martian life is Abigail Allwood, a geologist who has her feet planted firmly on earth.

Rock formations

Ms Allwood is a PhD student who works with the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney.

She has been studying ancient rock formations in Australia's north-west in search of clues to finding the earliest forms of life here on earth and, ultimately, on Mars.

"It's thought by many scientists that if we're going to find life on Mars, it's not going to be a set of man-sized footprints or a dinosaur skeleton," Ms Allwood said.

"It's going to be something pretty simple and it's probably going to be very ancient and it might be pretty difficult to recognise.

"The best analogue we have on earth for such a thing so that we can practise and prepare for Mars are the rocks of the Pilbara in Western Australia.

"These are 3.5 billion-year-old rocks that contain what we think is evidence for life.

"The earliest life on earth is very primitive, it's very altered, it's very small."

These early signs of life, or biosignatures, are likely to be little more than chemical traces left in rocks by micro-organisms, making them so difficult to identify that some scientists dispute that they are evidence of life at all.

"Right now there is so much debate about whether the evidence in the Pilbara is really biological in origin and if we can't determine whether or not this was biological, how can we hope to go to Mars and investigate the evidence there?" Ms Allwood said.

Professor Davies and Ms Allwood are certain that if signs of life are discovered on Mars, then a manned mission will be essential if earthlings are to distinguish that life from their own.

"I, like many other people, hope that one day we'll be able to send people, geologists, to Mars," Ms Allwood said.

Ms Allwood says she would take the opportunity to join such a mission if she had the chance.

She may have to think twice if Professor Davies has his way and the first Mars explorers only get one-way tickets.

-- Adapted from a story by Andrew Geoghehan on ABC TV's The 7.30 Report program

double post

The video I saw wasn't from that site!

Sounds interesting Deb, but are the effects of continued exposure to low gravity well enough known to risk it?

I'd vote both "long overdue" and "a campaign stunt."

I find myself identifying the most with Frank's thoughts here so far, and frankly, (har) I don't care much about the motivation behind the plan to get someone to Mars, be it political, humanistic, economic or otherwise. The motivations behind the 1st man on the moon were political, but it got done. And hey it's about going into space. . .People living on the moon in the next fifteen years! Tell me that's not truly awesome. Going even deeper into space and colonizing planets will happen one step at a time, & this is a good one.


Yeah. Sure, it's expensive as hell and won't pay for itself in anything close to short-term, but as for "What do we get," well, international prestige, for one. It's hard to quantify but rather valuable. More pragmatically, & similar to what Frank said above, doing anything cutting edge tends to push science & engineering further. The money Apollo put into computer research, materials science, engineering & a host of other things got some nice results...much of which became public domain.

I'll admit that "Give us a whole lot of cash now & we promise mysterious good things will happen" is a tough sell, even though it's usually been true before with exploration. I don't see the question with big research as being about whether the money be better spent elsewhere, because humans very often don't spend on the "right" things. What guarantee do we have that, should we spend the money elsewhere, it won't be wasted there as well? I think the creativity & wonder we get from science & technology is something that can really be exploited, & I can't wait till we get someone on Mars.

And planetary habitats are fragile. We ought to have a spare.

Hmmm - dunno. However, I do imagine that, if people were NOT to return to earth, then the changes to stuff like bone density would be, in fact, appropriate to the lower gravity conditions - ie that less dense bones would be sufficient to cope with the conditions that created them.....possible that this is a reasonable thought?

I s'pose it's possible. What' the value of Martian gravity? Something like 1/3 of that on earth?

Vera interesting article, Dlowan.

One thing about this part, though...

Before, I read a little bit about an idea that since Mars has an atmosphere that's something like 95% carbon dioxide, it would be possible to send a few tons of liquid hydrogen to the surface of the planet, convert it to methane & use that as fuel for the return trip. It saves a heck of a lot of mass at least.

Also, I'd assume that a rocket with the wherewithal to make it to Mars would be more easily & cheaply launched from the Moon than from Earth. Of course, in order to do that you'd still have to get the fuel out of Earth's gravity well up to the moon in order to do the launch, but it's not like the chemical energy stored in fuel is a function of its weight (other than the more the heavier factor). Also, you could prolly leave fuel orbiting the Earth or Moon, making the return trip to Earth more streamlined.

Hmmmm - yes, I see...or not land the main craft, but leave it orbiting - but, I suppose this is a given...

Wilso - I asked Jeeves:

F = G m1m2 / R2

This says that a planet of mass m1
and radius R
will exert a force on an object (you) of mass m2
F = G m1m2 / R2

So we can relate the force on the surface of Mars to the force on the surface of the Earth.
It will change like:
mMars / R2Mars
Since Mars has a mass that is 0.11 times the mass of the Earth
and a radius that is 0.53 times the radius of the Earth
we expect the surface gravity to be
0.11/(0.53)2 = 0.4 times the Earth's

Who's 'Jeeves'?

Wilso:

Search engine.

http://www.ask.com/

Hmm. One way mission to Mars eh? I can think of a few deserving candidates.

Occom Bill wrote



We are not all making educated guesses. Some of us are describing a factual event. Others are making up fantasy stories for their own purposes.

If we all had to experience something personally before we believed it we would still be living in caves. But we have also learned not to fall into the trap of believing just anything. Hence the rigorous processes involved in discovering what we can regard as a truth in scientific methodology.

I believe the earth is spherical. That's not a matter of faith or personal belief, its a fact, a truth I am willing to accept as reality. I don't intend, nor should I be expected, to travel around the world to prove it to my own satisfaction.

At a more fundamental level, 1 + 1 = 2 in my book. If someone says they believe 1 + 1 = square root of pi, then I'm not going to respect that belief just because they sincerely believe it. I can either dismiss it as idiotic (and believed by idiots) or I can sit down with them and go through their belief and mine until I have demonstrated why they are wrong. But of course the type of person who might believe that 1 + 1 = root pi, is not going to be put off by a mathematical proof to the contrary. Hence the inclination most of the time to just allow these people to wallow in their own stupidity.

There is no equivalence between (sincerely held) beliefs. Like it or not, some are closer to the "truth" than others.

NASA is nothing more than a welfare program for engineers, and just so you understand my bias, I live in Space City. If the space program were suddenly shut down tomorrow, Houston would lose 100,000 high-paying jobs, for starters.

But after reading the Washington Post's behind-the-scenes-lookat the White House version of Red Planet Part II, I just can't stop the freaking laughter.



Kennedy, Schmennedy. What this really is, is an LBJ moment:



Do you feel unified yet?

The funniest part, though, is how Mission Control decided to go to both the moon and Mars:



So who helped the President make the call?

NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe?

His chief science advisor?

A team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory?

Surely the Bush White House relied on the most qualified, technically informed experts it could find to make such a momentous decision about the future of the U.S. space program...





I mean, it almost sounds like one of those old Katzenjammer Kids with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland -- you know, the one where the gang needs to raise some money to pay off Aunt Edna's mortgage, so they all get together and put on a show in the barn?

"Hey, I got a swell idea! Why don't we get the kids together and build a moon base!"

Sometime ago -- well, actually it was just a year, but it seems like a lot longer than that -- former Bush advisor John DiIulio got into some hot water for revealing to Esquire magazine that the White House did not possess, in any conventional definition of the term, a policy-making process:



"Mayberry Machiavellis Go to Mars."

I just think that maybe Bush ought to consider exploring the vast space between his ears first.

Thanks for those comments, Monger.

One way or another we will reach for the stars -- and humans will get out there.

There will never be a time where other things are not priorities -- but it will be done.

There will never be a time where the money could not be spent to deal with problems here on Earth -- but it will be done.

I doubt Dubya will be the one to move things along in that direction, though, no matter what he is saying at this moment.

Sure, Bush is electioneering and sure the money ain't there to make it happen. But, if by some miracle, they did commit to a moon base and manned Mars expeditions, at some point scientists would have to take over. They would be the ones to put coherence into the idea. I think we have to separate Bush from the actual nuts and bolts of the program to see if it can work. As to the pork barrel aspect of it: There is always going to be that element to government programs until I am elected dictator.

Get in line. I'm older -- and I'm first for the position.

Agreed.


Me too, but even if he does nothing to make it happen it's out there on the table now. The Dems have to take it into account.

This is your opinion. Don't confuse it with fact.

This is the last thing you said that made any sense at all. And; it can be applied either way.
obvious strawman
ridiculous strawman
I said absolutely nothing contrary to this assessment. Your argument on the other hand, fits my atheist/Christian example perfectly. Think about it.