For Aron Sora: Mars Experiments

Aron Sora said: I also have the most insane idea for an experiment at the Mars Desert Research Center. I want to make solar panels (or atleast one cell), from scratch, in a simulated enviroment. I also want to do an experiment where I compare the efficiency of EVAs with and without UVAs. What do you think?

I'm afraid I need more information before I can give you an answer. When someone wants to do an experiment, it's important to understand what he wants to accomplish or what he's trying to prove.

In order to answer your questions, I need to understand what exactly you mean by them. For the first, do you mean making a solar cell using strictly Mars materials in a simulated space colony environment?

On the surface, it seems simple enough, but I can see some things to watch out for. First, there's an important level of uncertainty when it comes to the materials available on Mars. We've done a large number of analyses, both via rover and remotely, but there are limitations to that. No one has ever brought back actual samples from Mars as they have from the Moon so a certain percentage of our estimations of soil components and compositions is educated guesswork. Therefore, providing "Mars-like" soil samples would be, well, speculative. Even if the Martian soil was largely composed of silicates, obtaining high quality silica from that would take as much as energy as a solar cell could generate over several years on Mars.

But say we knew for sure or decided all we really needed was silicon and we were confident it could be obtained without using so much energy that it would be a waste of time (there are new methods for obtaining high quality silicon that might improve that), you're still talking about specialize equipment, a great deal of it, to gather materials, refine it, make it into a usable form and build the solar cells (and I suspect silicon is not the only key ingredient). In order for this to be a viable plan for on Mars, you have to do all this work either using equipment already planned to be used or specially built for the purpose. That's a multi-year endeavor, even to used it on the ground.

I think the idea has merit. I'm not sure, until we get more efficient and/or a better handle on Martial materials, that it's a viable short term experiment unless we have appropriate equipment already in hand.

As for the other question, I'm not sure what a UVA is. I reached acronym saturation some years back and I'm not familiar with that one. If you mean vehicles, one can experiment with it, but I could also just wander through the Apollo Lunar Surface Journals and find ample evidence of the value of surface vehicles, even when they spew dust and need to be repaired with document covers.

EVAs, of course, depend on having a representative suit available and experiments with those suits are severely hampered on the Earth's surface because of the huge difference in gravitational force. Which makes the wealth of data available from the Apollo missions all the more valuable. Having said that, I think experiments are in work now to evaluate different suit concepts and different roving concepts. I like the one they have now that keeps the suit on the outside of a pressurized vehicle that they can don from inside the vehicle. This severely limits the dust that comes inside, a real issue for the Moon and probably Mars as well.

If you didn't mean vehicles and did mean something else, let me know and I'll see what I think.

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Hiatus Interruptus - For Jeff King: Where Will We Go?

Jeff King asked: If we ever travel to a planet, i mean actually going there ourselves in a spacecraft. What one do you think it would be, and when?

Well, do you count the moon? 'Cause, in my opinion, that's the way to go.

Why, you might ask. Because the moon is close at hand, an excellent place to test out all the things we're going to need when we move to other planets. Any other planet is months (if not years) to get to, a complicated trip where, if anything goes wrong, there are limited options to correct the rescue them. If the US doesn't make it there in the next ten years or so, other countries are also considering it and they will go there first.

However, if the moon doesn't count, it will be Mars. Why?

First, although Venus is technically closer, it is very inhospitable. Hot - I mean DAMN hot, toxic atmosphere, high pressure (like deep underwater type pressure). Right now, we just don't have equipment that can protect people from this kind of harsh environment. Protecting people from vacuum and temperature extremes found in "deep space" is child's play next to protecting people from temperatures that will melt lead (literally) or exposure to sulfur dioxide.

The gas giants are very very far away with no place to land. Some of the moons to the gas giant have possibilities as places to explore. But, as for planets, Mars will be first.

When? Not sure. It depends on when we come up with the right plan and then DO it. Not soon enough.

Now returning me to my regularly scheduled hiatus.

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Trivia Break: Asking You a Question

Alright, I should write a blog, but my sister's in town and I'm falling behind. Expect blog posts to be spotty.

Instead of a trivia bit, I'll ask a trivia question. Tomorrow, I'll tell you the answer.

What were the six wives of Henry VIII of England?

And why do his marriages play into the settlement of North America?

Have fun.

(Actually, this might be a lot more fun than the way I did previous trivia breaks)

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For the Mother: Tell Me About Mars Exploration

The Mother gave me a great question since I was out of them: What is the current status of the manned mission to Mars? Loved the "Mars Rising" series. How much of that was true?

This is a great question, most of which I can't answer, because the answer to the first part is "speculation status" and the answer to the second one is "I have no idea because I've never seen it." I really should watch a little television once in a while, but I really don't. But fear not, I think you'll like my whole answer anyway.

To elaborate on the first answer, let me explain. Constellation (our exploration program) is designing hardware to launch (Ares I rocket) a craft (Orion spacecraft) capable of going to and from the ISS and orbiting the moon in support of lunar expeditions and outposts (like excursions only longer on the order of months). I believe there are groups actively starting to wrestle with the challenges associated with building the lander (Altair) for the Moon. These are the criteria we are using for the design even though a manned mission to Mars is definitely an end-goal.

But, right now, there's a world of speculative prototyping and speculating on the right directions to take for both the lunar surface and, especially, Mars. Some of the prototypes exist and are quite cool, though perhaps not as cool as the many concepts being bounced around in simulations. Some of those are supercool. But Mars is at least twenty years away and what we actually find is most practical, what we actually build and fly so far away may resemble the concepts out today as much as street cars match automotive concept cars. A lot can happen between now and then, a lot of politics and money wrangling, a lot of lessons to learn on the moon, a lot of technology to perfect. The plan is to use the designs we're designing now as the starting point for Mars, but by then, there's no way to tell how much we'll be able to use moving forward. Everything you saw in the documentary might be true, but I'd bet a great deal of it will look different when we really get there.

So, why not design for Mars now?

I'm glad you asked. (You would have, you know it).

Well, first, we're not ready.

• Part of it is that we haven't sent people beyond low earth orbit in literally decades. We need to reteach ourselves learning from what was done before and taking advantage of some of the technological advances since then (like computers - Apollo 11's computer had a total of 80 Kb - not Gb, not Mb. I think my watch has more than that. I know my cellphone does.) Most of the people who were deeply involved in the Apollo Program are either retired or dead. We haven't been building those kinds of rockets, those kinds of spacecraft in decades.
• Part of it is that we don't know enough. Mars has had many missions to it, but we still don't know it as well as the moon but there's a lot we don't know about the planet and the trip there. Even more importantly, what we do know poses technological problems we don't necessarily have the knowhow to fix today.
  
• Additionally, there considerable challenges to address that we don't have with the moon. Like a lander than can deal with reentry. Like storms. Like a long long trip with no one able to come rescue you if something goes wrong. And things go wrong with Mars missions, quite frequently. Roughly two thirds of all planned Mars missions failed before completing their missions. Not because of a bogeyman, but because getting there is complex, is challenging, is tricky with minimal margin for error. And, if we fail, we only lose money, not people. We'd better know what we're doing before we send people are sent over. Just the radiation and meteoroids alone are issues.

That's why going to the Moon is so important. It's a dry run for most things we have to do for Mars, but within reach. The math to reach the moon is relatively benign and we don't have those tricky three month launch windows. There's no complicating atmosphere and no storms, BUT it has gravity and we haven't waltzed in spacesuits in gravity for years. It has a high radiation environment (relative to low earth orbit) and methods we develop there to protect the crew may help with Mars. We'll want to explore it with rovers and there's no reason to think we can't test out real designs in a real extraterrestrial environment to see how they work. Dust mitigation on the moon will be at least as challenging as it will be on Mars and we better get that handled because, if we come back with an enclosed environment as dusty as the Apollo missions came back, we'll have a whole lot of astronauts with red lung.

It gives us a relatively safe way to prove we have a viable program because, if things go wrong here, it might be days or weeks before we can get them, but it won't be months and years. Mars has a 780 day period between 2-3 month windows for optimized approach. We can launch one vehicle in that period, but, if something goes wrong after the window has gone by, anything we send after them has no possible way to catch up - heck they won't be going to the same place. The earth has changed positions and so has Mars. We may have no choice to abandon them, alive or dead. If they get lost on the way, if they get stranded on Mars, help can't reach them, even if we were able to launch immediately for months or years. Maybe ever. We need to be confident, really confident, they can make it before we send them.

Or, let's say, we send two during the window and we find out, say, when the first lands, that there's a catastrophic design flaw with the lander. We'll either have to waste the second mission's trip and send them back or we'll have to gamble that the second lander can survive. The moon can help increase our confidence in our hardware.

Personally, I like the design I've seen of the rover they're talking about. It's a pressurized rover with suits you climb into from the back but they're attached to the outside. This eliminates the need for an airlock, drastically reduce dust brought into the habitable environment and is way safer for the astronauts in my opinion. Here's hoping that our end result is as appealing as they current model (pictured above and below).

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