Remember that Mars rover they built last year?

Godron

Godron

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Well it's about to land, at 05:31 UTC on Monday (that's 01:31 in America).

This is the Curiosity rover, aka Mars Science Laboratory. It's about the size of a small car; it absolutely dwarfs anything that's been sent to Mars before. The engineering inside is fantastically complex, and it's utterly loaded with scientific equipment, far more than any previous rover. It has ****ing seventeen cameras. Opportunity, by comparison, has a pathetic four. Solar panels were deemed an inadequate power supply for this beast, so it was fitted with a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, powering it with heat energy from the decay of plutonium-238.

Then there's the decent. I could explain, but you'd be better off just watching this:



In all honesty, the scientific measurements this thing takes and the implications thereof barely interest me. It's just the sheer scale and audacity of the mission that gives me such a raging boner.


Oh and look here if you want to follow the landing (or spectacular crash) live.
 
They should send like 50,000 tons of algea to make oxygen on that red death rock.
 
I predict that they fail. What are the odds? I like those odds. Catastrophic failure.

Go Nasa!
DEATHMASTER said:
They should send like 50,000 tons of algea to make oxygen on that red death rock.
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Mars has a shitty magnetosphere. It'll all just get blown away.
 
In all reality why study to see if it had life. Our planet is falling apart at the seams we should simply colonize it. We can search other planets and or moons and search for life there instead. Why waste dozens if not hundreds of years finding life when we have so much of it here waiting to be spread out like a seed in the wind.
 
I'm sorry, but sending an even bigger rover to Mars to do some more scientific experiments/measurements, doesn't impress me in the slightest. What would impress me is if they sent a ton of autonomous robots to Mars to start building a base there.
For example the initiative to send robots to mine asteroids is much more impressive than this.

I really hope private aerospace companies have better luck, because NASA has proven itself to be a ****ing snail.
 
Warped Dan said:
In all reality why study to see if it had life. Our planet is falling apart at the seams we should simply colonize it. We can search other planets and or moons and search for life there instead. Why waste dozens if not hundreds of years finding life when we have so much of it here waiting to be spread out like a seed in the wind.
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We don't deserve another planet - we couldn't even take care of this one.

Remus said:
I really hope private aerospace companies have better luck, because NASA has proven itself to be a ****ing snail.
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I doubt it's Nasa's fault. Their annual budget is only something like $18 billion dollars. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but I think we spend more than NASA's annual budget every three days that we occupy the Middle East. We've spent over 3 trillion dollars on war, and next to nothing for research. Go America.
 
I think I will do exactly that.

Yorick for President 2012.
 
Arnie should get back into politics and go for President... then he could get our asses to Mars!
 
bobtheskull said:
Arnie should get back into politics and go for President... then he could get our asses to Mars!
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He can't become President, because in order to be eligible you have to be American-born. Which is unfortunate, because I think he'd stand a real chance and be a great candidate. I'd certainly vote for him.

Obviously it's all up to me.
 
Warped Dan said:
In all reality why study to see if it had life. Our planet is falling apart at the seams we should simply colonize it. We can search other planets and or moons and search for life there instead. Why waste dozens if not hundreds of years finding life when we have so much of it here waiting to be spread out like a seed in the wind.
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Mars can't be made permanently (or semi-permanently) liveable in the long run. Its gravity isn't strong enough to hold on to O2, it just floats off into space eventually. All colonies would have to be enclosed to hold on to the air.
 
Yorick said:
He can't become President, because in order to be eligible you have to be American-born. Which is unfortunate, because I think he'd stand a real chance and be a great candidate. I'd certainly vote for him.

Obviously it's all up to me.
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Yeah... I know... but, Demolition Man...

Anyways, yeah... Yorick for President!
 
Yorick said:
We don't deserve another planet - we couldn't even take care of this one.
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But this one comes pre-decimated, so we're not losing anything.

ríomhaire said:
Mars can't be made permanently (or semi-permanently) liveable in the long run. Its gravity isn't strong enough to hold on to O2, it just floats off into space eventually. All colonies would have to be enclosed to hold on to the air.
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It's simple, we simply make it stronger. Simple!
 
ríomhaire said:
Mars can't be made permanently (or semi-permanently) liveable in the long run. Its gravity isn't strong enough to hold on to O2, it just floats off into space eventually. All colonies would have to be enclosed to hold on to the air.
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It can with Future Technology(TM)! Like releasing oxygen from the rocks on a large scale to keep up with losses or whatever.

The Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy also had several ways where they thickened the atmosphere, like periodically areobraking harnessed comets to add water vapour. CO2 and H2O can obvs be converted to O2 as needed in The Future!


Ed: I read your comment as having to enclose colonies due to total air pressure differential, which theoretically could be a minimal problem with a bit of terraforming, partial pressure of O2 is ofc a bigger issue and you're more likely to need enclosures to deal with that.
 
Remus said:
I'm sorry, but sending an even bigger rover to Mars to do some more scientific experiments/measurements, doesn't impress me in the slightest. What would impress me is if they sent a ton of autonomous robots to Mars to start building a base there.
For example the initiative to send robots to mine asteroids is much more impressive than this.

I really hope private aerospace companies have better luck, because NASA has proven itself to be a ****ing snail.
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You seriously underestimate the difficulty of such a task. We don't have any technology even approaching that capability working on Earth yet, let alone reliable enough to be sent to the red planet. There's already enough relatively unproven technology aboard Curiosity to have Nasa's engineers shitting bricks. Apart from which, Nasa has little need for a ton of base-building robots on Mars (let alone the funding for it). Their primary aim right now is information gathering, in preparation for more complex missions (sending humans to Mars has been on the agenda for a long time now). Rovers may be a bit "been there done that", but they're still by far the most cost-efficient means of collecting data about Mars.
Planetary Resources Inc. (who I assume you were referring to) do indeed have a very ambitious goal, but it's a long-term one, just like Nasa's goal of a manned mission to Mars. Their current short-term goal is to launch space telescopes into Earth orbit, followed by robotic probes to selected asteroids, which they'll use, you guessed it, to gather information in preparation for more complex missions.

Yorick said:
We don't deserve another planet - we couldn't even take care of this one.
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I'm tempted to agree. Don't have kids unless you can support them, don't get a dog unless you can look after it, don't colonise a planet unless you can take care of the one you've got. We'd be like the Earth empire in Colony Wars, expanding faster and faster across our own solar system and then others, funnelling resources back to its dead rock of a homeworld, long since incapable of sustaining life on its own.
Having said that, Mars may be a wilderness but it's not exactly a beautiful one. It's not like we could make it any more desolate by mining the shit out of it.
 
Eejit said:
It can with Future Technology(TM)! Like releasing oxygen from the rocks on a large scale to keep up with losses or whatever.
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Seems like a waste of matter. Any O2 released to the open air would be doomed to float off into space eventually. Why not just put all that effort into improving the planet we have?
 
ríomhaire said:
Mars can't be made permanently (or semi-permanently) liveable in the long run. Its gravity isn't strong enough to hold on to O2, it just floats off into space eventually. All colonies would have to be enclosed to hold on to the air.
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What? No... the oxygen problem has nothing to do with gravity. As I said, it's due to the lack of a strong magnetosphere... which is due to it being completely or mostly geologically dead. The solar wind particles are what blow all the oxygen away from the planet. More gravity wouldn't help. It's the magnetosphere that helps.
 
Raziaar said:
What? No... the oxygen problem has nothing to do with gravity. As I said, it's due to the lack of a strong magnetosphere... which is due to it being completely or mostly geologically dead. The solar wind particles are what blow all the oxygen away from the planet. More gravity wouldn't help. It's the magnetosphere that helps.
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Taken from Wikipedia:
"A common erroneous belief is that the primary non-thermal escape mechanism is atmospheric stripping by a solar wind in the absence of a magnetosphere. [...] While Venus and Mars have no magnetosphere to protect the atmosphere from solar winds, photoionizing radiation (sunlight) and the interaction of the solar wind with the atmosphere of the planets causes ionization of the uppermost part of the atmosphere. [...] This interaction typically prevents solar wind stripping from being the dominant loss process of the atmosphere."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
 
ríomhaire said:
Taken from Wikipedia:
"A common erroneous belief is that the primary non-thermal escape mechanism is atmospheric stripping by a solar wind in the absence of a magnetosphere. [...] While Venus and Mars have no magnetosphere to protect the atmosphere from solar winds, photoionizing radiation (sunlight) and the interaction of the solar wind with the atmosphere of the planets causes ionization of the uppermost part of the atmosphere. [...] This interaction typically prevents solar wind stripping from being the dominant loss process of the atmosphere."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
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**** youuuuu man! I learned that from TV!

What was that shit about gravity?
 
Raziaar said:
**** youuuuu man! I learned that from TV!

What was that shit about gravity?
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Basically there's a thing called escape velocity which is the minimum velocity needed to escape a gravitational field. It's the speed at which the kinetic energy of the object becomes greater than the gravitational potential energy between you and the planet. The heavier something is (more strictly, the more massive the object) the higher its escape velocity is. Higher escape velocity means its harder for it to break out into space.

So if your gas is going to escape the planet it needs to have a higher velocity than the escape velocity. Each gas molecule/atom is going to be moving at different speeds, but you can work out the distribution (what percentage of the molecules is going at a particular speed) if you know the pressure, volume, number of molecules, mass and temperature of the gas (we can approximate all of that). The distribution of velocities for a gas looks like this. Higher velocities as you go to the right and the higher the point on the graph the more molecules that are travelling at that velocity. If the escape velocity of our gas is say at the 2 mark in this picture then any molecules with a velocity above 2 have a chance of leaking away. This will cause all the gas to slowly leak away (the Sun will keep the temperature of the gas up so it will keep leaking away over time rather than just taking all the heat away and then the process stopping).

The higher the temperature the faster the average speed of the gas and the higher the mass of the molecule the slower the average speed of the molecule is.

Now, as the molecules get heavier they
A) Have a higher escape velocity
B) Move at a slower speed than the lighter ones
These two effects added together mean that as a molecule gets heavier it becomes much much less likely to escape into space but lighter molecules escape easily. Have you ever wondered why there is almost no Helium or molecular Hydrogen in the Earth's atmosphere even though they are by far the most abundant elements in the universe? They just boil right out of the atmosphere. Their escape velocity is too low. It's the same with Mars and oxygen. The lightest (common) gas it can hold on to is CO2 so more than 90% of its atmosphere is CO2. The lightest common gas Earth can hold on to is Nitrogen so it's almost 80% of its atmosphere.
 
I wonder how long it would take for a given amount of oxygen to escape. I mean if the output is greater than the escape rate, perhaps it would still be worth a shot. I'm sure there's a great number of other variables that I'm not considering. Terraforming is a bitch.
 
They actually did it. I can hardly believe it actually worked. Good job NASA.
 
I was hoping for green girls in tight bikinis....
 
ríomhaire said:
Seems like a waste of matter. Any O2 released to the open air would be doomed to float off into space eventually. Why not just put all that effort into improving the planet we have?
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Well that's a whole other question, and it doesn't always have to be an either/or if we have a surplus of capability at some point.

Just saying that it could be possible to sustain an atmosphere by continually replacing the gas lost.
 
Watched this on the NASA channel, was pretty exciting.

Can't wait to see what videos and pictures it sends back.
 
It was an incredible feat for jet propulsion, but other than that I can't see anything substantial coming from this. Besides we can't really prove anything until we get hold of rock samples ourselves to analyse, there is only so much Curiosity can do.
 
Eejit said:
Well that's a whole other question, and it doesn't always have to be an either/or if we have a surplus of capability at some point.
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Absolutely. The "either/or" question seems like such a silly cop-out - whenever I see it, I tend to dismiss it pretty quickly.

Anyway, this whole landing event was pretty incredible. Much of what the team learns with Curiosity will increasingly arm them to prepare for future manned missions to Mars. So it's all very exciting!
 
Heard the news a while ago, after watching that video I'm amazed they pulled it all off. That landing looks incredibly complex!
 
Arnie was born in Austria, Obama was born in Kenya and lived in Indonesia. Surely Arnie can fancy his chances!! Ha

Sent from my BlackBerry using Tapatalk
 
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