Mars 2020 Missions

namloc1980

fryup wrote: »

they (NASA and ESA) should save up money & resources on a mission to the outer reaches of the universe, so as to find other earth like planets before this one goes ka-put

The distances in space are vast and our technology is primitive in terms of traveling anywhere outside our neighborhood. For example, New Horizons launched in 2006 and reached Pluto in 2015 but it'll take around 78,000 years to reach the distance of the nearest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri. Simply put, we won't be going anywhere outside our solar system.

fryup

namloc1980 wrote: »

Simply put, we won't be going anywhere outside our solar system.

unless we invent warp speed

Cookiemunster

fryup wrote: »

unless we invent warp speed

That's science fiction. According to the laws of physics faster than light travel is impossible.

JJayoo

fryup wrote: »

seriously though, what do that do they expect to find there this time? that will be any different from the previous rover expeditions??

seems to me like a complete waste of resources

You have to remember that the guys running these missions grew up watching star trek, they absolutely love space and the idea of space travel, this is their passion in life...so when they get an enormous budget they will spend it and they will constantly look for more and more funding. Progressing technology is not something that crosses their mind. Going into space searching for life and possibly bumping into some sexy green aliens is the goal.

Look at Musk and the enormous advances in technology his company has made in a short period in regards to their rockets. No advancement in technology will come from this mission.

I suppose My point is I would like it alot more if it was being funded by some billionaire instead of coming from the tax pool.

Still cool tho

josip

JJayoo wrote: »

You have to remember that the guys running these missions grew up watching star trek, they absolutely love space and the idea of space travel, this is their passion in life...so when they get an enormous budget they will spend it and they will constantly look for more and more funding. Progressing technology is not something that crosses their mind. Going into space searching for life and possibly bumping into some sexy green aliens is the goal.

Look at Musk and the enormous advances in technology his company has made in a short period in regards to their rockets. No advancement in technology will come from this mission.

I suppose My point is I would like it alot more if it was being funded by some billionaire instead of coming from the tax pool.

Still cool tho

I think the JPL people deliver good bang for buck.
The whole Orion thing is, as already mentioned by another poster, just pork barrelling to keep the likes of Boeing afloat.
Musk is not the solution to every problem either.

JJayoo

josip wrote: »

I think the JPL people deliver good bang for buck.
The whole Orion thing is, as already mentioned by another poster, just pork barrelling to keep the likes of Boeing afloat.
Musk is not the solution to every problem either.

But Musk is spending his own cash so let him fire ahead.

Let's say the mission failed and they crashed, all that money down the drain, what would happen? Start all over again and hope next time it works, and if it crashed that time? Is there an endless pot of cash?

namloc1980

JJayoo wrote: »

But Musk is spending his own cash so let him fire ahead.

Let's say the mission failed and they crashed, all that money down the drain, what would happen? Start all over again and hope next time it works, and if it crashed that time? Is there an endless pot of cash?

NASAs annual budget is around 3% of the US military budget or about 0.4% of the total US annual budget. And only a fraction of that budget is spent on solar system exploration - most of the budget is spent on earth science, aeronautics and human spaceflight.

They don't have an endless pot of cash, and constantly make choices to get the most out of the relatively modest budget.

namloc1980

JJayoo wrote: »

No advancement in technology will come from this mission.

Wrong. Just one of the experiments on board Perseverance called MOXIE - Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment - will demonstrate technology to turn the Carbon Dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into oxygen. Mars' atmosphere is 95% CO2.

This has multiple potential benefits for both future human Mars exploration and us on earth. Being able to extract oxygen from the Martian atmosphere would mean breathable oxygen for humans so they wouldn't have to bring it with them. Oxygen is also a rocket fuel so again future missions wouldn't have to bring the oxidiser for a return trip home, they could just pull it out of the atmosphere. Oh and add hydrogen to it and you got water!

This technology could also have significant benefits on earth. Imagine being able to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.

Cookiemunster

JJayoo wrote: »

But Musk is spending his own cash so let him fire ahead.

SpaceX has gotten billions of dollars from NASA for the ISS resupply missions. Without the $1.6bn contract they got in 2008 they would probably never have gotten where they are today.

They then got $2.6bn for the commercial crew project.

They also get hundreds of millions a time from the US military to launch satellites.

Make no mistake, SpaceX are spending a lot more than Musks own money and are heavily reliant on US Federal agency income.

fryup

fryup wrote: »

unless we invent warp speed

Cookiemunster wrote: »

That's science fiction. According to the laws of physics faster than light travel is impossible.

never say never,

television would have been deemed impossible 100 years back and now look

MeteoritesEire

I'm with you fryup, science fiction often drives forward science innovation

Perhaps Bob Lazar just talking about this supposed gravity drive he encountered at his alleged govt workplace in the Nevada desert might encourage more research in that area whether he is legit or not (a topic for a different thread I realise )

Anyway back on topic I'm looking forward to more science on Mars geology

namloc1980

fryup wrote: »

never say never,

television would have been deemed impossible 100 years back and now look

We're a long long way from inventing travel at, or close to, the speed of light.

The fastest human made object to date is the Parker Solar Probe which will reach a speed of 690,000 kilometres per hour as it orbits the sun. Pretty fast but it's just 0.064% of the speed of light. At that speed it would take around 7,000 years to reach the nearest star.

Even if we did invent light speed travel in the morning, the nearest star system to Earth is 4.3 light years away so it would take at least that length of time to get there and then another 4.3 years on top of that to get any news back as radio signals travel at the speed of light.

At the speed of light it would take 50,000 years to make a round trip to the centre of our own galaxy. It would take 5 million years to make a round trip to the nearest major galaxy to our own, the Andromeda galaxy.

In short, we need to explore and understand our own neighborhood first.

josip

fryup wrote: »

never say never,

television would have been deemed impossible 100 years back and now look

Not by the laws of physics it wouldn't.
Traveling at the speed of light on the other hand...

fryup

namloc1980 wrote: »

Even if we did invent light speed travel in the morning, the nearest star system to Earth is 4.3 light years away so it would take at least that length of time to get there and then another 4.3 years on top of that to get any news back as radio signals travel at the speed of light.

shush

namloc1980

fryup wrote: »

shush

No.

AMKC

I have faith in Humanity. I think we will eventually invent some way to travel the Galaxy and to other Galaxys too. Maybe it will be to fold space or maybe to make space fold around a ship in a sub space bubble like warp drive. Who knows. It will more than likely not be in our time. It might take 100 years or 500 hundred but I think humankind will do it and they will look back at us and how we though space travel would be as how we look back at Leonardo De Vinci and how he could conceive of flying machine like helicopters and of war machines like tanks but they would look like nothing that we actually have now

Capt'n Midnight

namloc1980 wrote: »

This technology could also have significant benefits on earth. Imagine being able to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.

That's what plants do here. And probably the cheapest way of getting rid of CO2 would be to dump some fertilizer in the ocean to case an algal bloom. Or expose bed rock in the desert.

On Mars it's a necessity. And you have to test on Mars in case you missed something during testing on Earth. Like the way that sharp moon dust composed of glasses or harder materials could affect seals or pistons or gears. Or it concentrates beryllium or whatnot.

namloc1980

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

That's what plants do here. And probably the cheapest way of getting rid of CO2 would be to dump some fertilizer in the ocean to case an algal bloom. Or expose bed rock in the desert.

On Mars it's a necessity. And you have to test on Mars in case you missed something during testing on Earth. Like the way that sharp moon dust composed of glasses or harder materials could affect seals or pistons or gears. Or it concentrates beryllium or whatnot.

I was responding to a poster who claimed there was no advancement in technology from this mission when there clearly is. Causing algal blooms probably isn't the best idea as out will create substantial problems in our oceans.

fryup

AMKC wrote: »

I have faith in Humanity. I think we will eventually invent some way to travel the Galaxy and to other Galaxys too.

how about tele-transportation ?? like on Star Trek

"beam me up Scotty"

Capt'n Midnight

namloc1980 wrote: »

NASAs annual budget is around 3% of the US military budget or about 0.4% of the total US annual budget. And only a fraction of that budget is spent on solar system exploration - most of the budget is spent on earth science, aeronautics and human spaceflight.

They don't have an endless pot of cash, and constantly make choices to get the most out of the relatively modest budget.

NASA won't be using the SLS to launch the Europa Clipper. Using a commercial launch system will save $1.5Bn That's what India's ISRO got in recent years.

India has now upped it to $2Bn so keep an eye on them.

AMKC

fryup wrote: »

how about tele-transportation ?? like on Star Trek

"beam me up Scotty"

That's probably 6 or 7 hundred years away but ye I think humankind will accomplish that too eventually.

jackboy

fryup wrote: »

how about tele-transportation ?? like on Star Trek

"beam me up Scotty"

Not great as that kills you. It’s a copy that appears in the destination. We are a lot of Mars missions away from something like that anyway.

Fritzbox

MayoForSam wrote: »

Excellent, the Mars landing curse must be lifted.

That only ever applied to Soviet and Russian probes.

irishgeo

Fritzbox wrote: »

That only ever applied to Soviet and Russian probes.

Didn't the uk lose one over a metric/imperial mixup.

namloc1980

Fritzbox wrote: »

That only ever applied to Soviet and Russian probes.

NASA lost both the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. They learned a lot from those preventable losses.

JJayoo

Cookiemunster wrote: »

SpaceX has gotten billions of dollars from NASA for the ISS resupply missions. Without the $1.6bn contract they got in 2008 they would probably never have gotten where they are today.

They then got $2.6bn for the commercial crew project.

They also get hundreds of millions a time from the US military to launch satellites.

Make no mistake, SpaceX are spending a lot more than Musks own money and are heavily reliant on US Federal agency income.

Bit of a difference between getting paid for doing a job and getting a chuck.of tax dollars

JJayoo

namloc1980 wrote: »

They don't have an endless pot of cash, and constantly make choices to get the most out of the relatively modest budget.

So if the lander had crashed and the mission was a complete failure they wouldn't try again? I mean if the modest budget was all used up, just forget about mars and move on?

JJayoo

namloc1980 wrote: »

This technology could also have significant benefits on earth. Imagine being able to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.

Ya it's called a tree

Fritzbox

irishgeo wrote: »

Didn't the uk lose one over a metric/imperial mixup.

I think that was an American probe, I believe there was also a probe or satellite lost when they misplaced a decimal point in the computer instructions.

NASA lost both the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. They learned a lot from those preventable losses.

Indeed. NASA learned a lot from their earlier failures in the 1950s and sixties and were able to build upon their experience. The Soviets - were not so quick to learn, perhaps.

slade_x

JJayoo wrote: »

Ya it's called a tree

Most of the oxygen in our atmosphere doesn't come from tree's though. 3 quarters of it is generated in the oceans by phytoplankton, algae and kelp so I guess were sorted for a CO2 scrubber here on Earth as we don't have a net increase in CO2 every year . Algae etc, isn't getting the job done and certainly neither are trees

As a trees entire mass comes from air, trees only absorb CO2 equal to their mass until they mature. They then no longer absorb any net CO2, and then slowly decay, releasing back this CO2 slowly. Trees that leaf in the summer also do not reduce a net CO2 as in winter they lose these leaves and return this CO2 back into the atmosphere.




https://www.thoughtco.com/how-much-oxygen-does-one-tree-produce-606785

.........
"A 100-foot tree, 18 inches diameter at its base, produces 6,000 pounds of oxygen."

"On average, one tree produces nearly 260 pounds of oxygen each year. Two mature trees can provide enough oxygen for a family of four." ....................................................

It's also important to remember that trees not only release oxygen but also consume carbon dioxide. However, trees perform photosynthesis during daylight hours. At night, they use oxygen and release carbon dioxide.

Interesting to note in terms of oxygen production:

The average 260 pounds per year in grams is 117,934 grams per year = 323g per day = 13.45g per hour


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment

MOXIE is a 1/200 scale test model of a design that may be used on Mars

To achieve this objective, the MOXIE instrument has a goal of producing 22 g of oxygen (O2) per hour with >99.6% purity for 50 sols (~1230 hours).

......NASA officials stated that if MOXIE worked efficiently, they could land a 100 times larger MOXIE-based instrument on Mars, along with a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Over the course of some years the generator would power the system, which would produce up to two kilograms of oxygen per hour,

At a 1/200 scale size run this experiment for a full year so @ 22g per hour = 528g per day = 192,720g per year

The total mass of the perseverance rover, (ignoring the fact that the MOXIE experiment is much smaller than this again ie. mass, volume and span), the rover is of significantly less mass than an average tree.

MOXIE @ 23.9 x23.9 x30.9 cm will fit under a Christmas tree as a nice small sized present