Everything about Mars except colonisation and where there specific threads already co

[selvaarchi]

Jan 2016 - (ExoMars) Europe Trace Gas Orbiter and Sciaparelli Technology Demonstrator Lander (fully funded and on track)ExoMars Jan 2016)


Mar 2016 - NASA InSight Lander (Fully funded and on track)


2018 - (ExoMars) European Rover and Russian Lander (Instrumentation still being decided)


2021 - NASA icebreaker rover (followup of Pheoenix and Insight) 2021 (conceptual but likely, not formally proposed)


2020 - China Rover (not likely to be approved in time for launch)


? India Orbiter and/or Lander (rumor)


2022? NASA communication relay (in consideration but might be bumped because of the Europa mission)

You left out the missing from UAE in 2021. Must say it is a orbiter and not a lander/rover. Below is a 6 min. video on their proposed mission.

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2015/05/...-mars-mission/

Although the UAE Space Agency is only 10 months, it has certainly reached parity with other agencies in terms of pursuing ambitious missions and producing slick promotional videos for said projects. The proof, as always, is not on YouTube but in the cold reaches of outer space near Mars, where many a spacecraft have failed before.

The video says they’re going to build the spacecraft themselves instead of buying technology abroad, but then it mentions unidentified partners. It’s not clear what that means.

[NEOWatcher]

You left out the missing from UAE in 2021.

Nope. Actually, I mistakenly put in the communication relay. Like you pointed out, it's not a lander.
My post immediately before yours should have made that clear.

Besides, most of my post is based on the article that didn't mention it. I did say that I'm not a fan of getting information from blogs.

[selvaarchi]

Planning for a vacation. How about going to some place exotic. It is new destination and they just published some posters advertising the beauty of the place. Some highlights are a trip to the tallest peak to enjoy the scenery, a trip to the canyons or even just enjoying the sunset with a loved one. Interested, please contact the travel agent Elon Musk for more details.

http://www.chinatopix.com/articles/5...rs-to-mars.htm

[swampyankee]

We've been studying Mars' surface and atmosphere. What about its sub-surface, with core drills, and its interior, with seismographs? We may need a human presence there to manage those, but I think we'd learn more about putative Martian water from a few good, long core samples than dozens of surface rovers.

[selvaarchi]

We've been studying Mars' surface and atmosphere. What about its sub-surface, with core drills, and its interior, with seismographs? We may need a human presence there to manage those, but I think we'd learn more about putative Martian water from a few good, long core samples than dozens of surface rovers.

ESA is starting the ball rolling on that. Read all about it here True it only goes a few feet into the ground but it is a start.

[NEOWatcher]

True it only goes a few feet into the ground but it is a start.

From what I can see, it's 2 meters. Even though it can be called "a few feet", that still a significant depth for such a small rover. Compare that to the deepest core that man was able to get on the moon (3 meters), it's significant.

[publiusr]

Here is a nice article which shows an image of what the human Phobos/Mars mission will probably look like
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2755/1

Bare-bones and do-able

[selvaarchi]

Yet another company has come up with plans to send humans to Mars in the late 2020s. I wish them luck.

http://phys.org/news/2015-05-aims-hu...lony-mars.html

MarsPolar, a newly started international venture is setting its sights on the Red Planet. The project consisting of specialists from Russia, United Arab Emirates, Poland, U.S. and Ukraine has come up with a bold idea to establish a human settlement on Mars' polar region, the part of the planet with abundant quantities of water ice. The targeted area could be very interesting in terms of alien life hunting as the MarsPolar team puts it: "life begins where the water exists." The plan is to create the colony around 2029. "We want to send to Mars a crew of 4-6 astronauts, every 2 years," Roman Juranek, the project's Director of Communications for Poland, told astrowatch.net.

Juranek and his colleagues would like to see SpaceX's Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket to launch the mission and also the company's Red Dragon spacecraft to deliver cargo and crews to Mars.

[NEOWatcher]

More specialists getting together with plans for dreams and no money.

It would be hard for the newly created project to avoid comparisons to Dutch company Mars One also planning to colonize the Red Planet with a fleet of space pioneers. But Juranek emphasizes that MarsPolar is different and it would not compete with the famed one-way mission designed by Bas Lansdorp. The new venture differs in terms of preparations for the mission and also the costs would be much lower.

And just how do they think it's cheaper?

They might be able to organize enough for their rover, but it doesn't sound like they have any commitments of funding or even vendors.

[selvaarchi]

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ( MRO) has spotted deposits of glass within impact craters on Mars and it's possible that this glass, formed in the searing heat of a violent impacts, could contain signs of long-ago life on Mars, NASA said in a statement on Monday.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20..._134308612.htm

"This significant new detection of impact glass illustrates how we can continue to learn from the ongoing observations by this long-lived mission," said Richard Zurek, MRO project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Research has shown past life preserved in impact glass on Earth. Scientists have found organic molecules and plant matter can be trapped in glass formed millions of years ago.

If the same is true on Mars, it could mean treasure troves that have stayed locked away since the days when Mars hosted some form of life. If there were ever microbes thriving on the alien world, they may still be buried in some of this impact glass.

[banquo's_bumble_puppy]

Article with picture of the rover.

ETA: Nevermind. Selvaarchi's article has one.

I hope the solar panels are higher off the ground than they look. Is that a sub-scale model?

[NEOWatcher]

I hope the solar panels are higher off the ground than they look.

Why?

Would a different angle help?

It looks more feasible than the other prototype they unveiled at the same time.

[selvaarchi]

Yet another study to send man to Mars. This time by a trio of experts from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)/California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

http://www.leonarddavid.com/humans-t...tegy-promoted/

They propose a long-term, stepwise series of missions to Mars that would begin with a crew landing on Mars’s moon Phobos in 2033, and followed by a short-stay mission in 2039 and a year-long landing in 2043.

In addition, the study is augmented by an informative editorial, “We Can Send Humans to Mars Safely and Affordably,” authored by New Space editor-in-chief, G. Scott Hubbard of Stanford University.

“With all of these previous technical and fiscal issues addressed, we can again believe that the dream of sending people to Mars is alive,” Hubbard writes. “The next step is to build a broad consensus around the goal and strategy for a long term, humans to Mars program.”

[NEOWatcher]

Yet another study to send man to Mars. This time by a trio of experts from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)/California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

That plan was in the article posted by Publiusr (#37).

[selvaarchi]

That plan was in the article posted by Publiusr (#37).

Yes the article they refer to is the same as well as the first photo giving the various parts of the Phobos base. The next two photos are new.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[selvaarchi]

Very well written article taking to pieces the arguments to send US astronauts to Mars by the early 3030s. His main argument being to do this we will be cutting corners and increasing the risks of failure. If that happens then Mars exploration will be set back for a long time.

http://spacenews.com/op-ed-humans-to...heaper-sequel/

In the 1990s, NASA’s Faster, Better, Cheaper (FBC) mantra almost drove the U.S. robotic Mars exploration program into oblivion. And the recent drumbeat from “boots on Mars” advocates appears to have human spaceflight headed toward the same end circa 2033, if not sooner.

It seems optimizing the aerospace trade space between schedule, quality and cost always requires a dynamic equilibrium among these attributes, typically with razor-thin stability margins. Performing this unnatural balancing act over protracted time intervals, human nature gives rise to a culture in which deviance becomes normalized to the point that “dodging bullets” and Russian roulette become routine practice. Sooner or later, this unwitting pattern of risk acceptance results in disaster. Following loss of the robotic explorers Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander within about 10 weeks of each other in 1999, it became lore among aerospace workers that expecting to maximize more than two attributes in the FBC trade space is unrealistic, even delusional.

A similar lesson has been learned time and again in U.S. human spaceflight. During a schedule-driven Apollo program virtually free from cost constraints, the watchword was “waste anything but time.”

[selvaarchi]

Another supporter of Elon Musk to get us next to Mars. The person is Stephen Petranek - The award-winning science writer, whose TED talk on the end of the world has been seen by 1.5million people, believes that humans will not just visit, but actually live, on another planet within the next generation.

His date is 2027, 2 years later then Musk's date of 2025. Not much details other then his faith in Elon Musk ability to do it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/scie...ed-Planet.html

Compared with Pluto, Mars is practically short-haul, just 250 million miles away, and could sustain the human race if an asteroid hit our planet, or a nuclear war wiped out most of Earth.

If it sounds like science fiction, consider this: the technology for such a venture has been in place for almost 50 years already. Or so says Petranek, whose new TED book, How We’ll Live on Mars, sets out a vision for the future of mankind, no less.

“In the year 2027, two sleek spacecraft dubbed Raptor 1 and Raptor 2 [will] finally make it to Mars, slipping into orbit after a gruelling 243-day voyage,” his book predicts. On arrival, the space pioneers on board will deploy a base camp habitat and inflate “buildings” in the form of domed, pressurised tents in which they can grow food. And so will begin the next stage in the progress of the species homo sapien.

[selvaarchi]

Q&A with Chris McKay, Senior Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center.

Two things stand out to me. 1st is you need to drill. and that to go as deep as possible. And the 2nd is to do a sample return even if we bring back the dirt. Read the full article to find out why he advocates them.

http://spacenews.com/qa-with-chris-m...search-center/

Christopher McKay, one of NASA’s most recognizable names in the field of astrobiology, argues that Mars probes to date have, quite literally, barely scratched the surface. The answers, he suggests, lie much deeper than the nuclear-powered Mars Curiosity rover has drilled to date.

Part of the problem, according to McKay, is that geologists are setting the Mars exploration agenda and that astrobiology is not a top priority. Having spent 30 years searching for signs of what he calls a second genesis — life originating from processes separate from what is known to have occurred on Earth — he now senses that the answer won’t come in his lifetime.

[selvaarchi]

Two reports in this weeks "The Space Review" on the US Manned mission for Mars. One looking at it optimistically and saying that NASA's plan agree with National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Committee on Human Spaceflight report and the other saying NASA has not done enough work on the effects of living in sub G environments.

To me NASA does not have much choices, but has to work within the financial constrains and other restrictions placed on it. At least it is making progress in some areas, slow be some standards but it is progress. Sub G experience is a problem but you can hope all that work being gone on zero G will mitigate that drawback. There is also the possibility that before NASA actually goes to Mars there might be experience of extended stays on the moon that her partners and China could share with her and that will be incooperated.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2804/1

So is NASA’s Journey to Mars a rebuke of the NRC report and its more specific architectures? Not so, agency officials say. “I think it’s wrong to say that we disagree with the report,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, during a presentation July 30 at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council at JPL. “There are many areas where we’re in 100-percent agreement with the report.”

Those areas of agreement, he said, including an endorsement of Mars as the long-term goal, as well as the use of modularity and sustainability in human exploration plans to avoid “dead ends” on the way to Mars. “All those concepts that are called out in the NRC report we agree with and we’re actually implementing in maybe a slightly different way specifically put into the report,” he said. “But the basis and the fundamental agreement is still there between us and the NRC.”

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2802/1

As bizarre as it seems in retrospect, NASA officials have managed to ignore one of the biggest challenges in human space exploration in decades. In 1975, as part of the required work for a post-graduate course in bioengineering, I did a literature survey on human adaptation to artificial gravity and to rotating environments. Most of the work had been done in Russia. In 1976 and 1977, my research paper was expanded to discuss the effects of rotation on people living in O’Neill space colonies. Gerard K. O'Neill and I wrote and published a paper on that work in 1977.

A few years ago, I was somewhat eager to look into what progress had been made on “artificial gravity” in the intervening 38 years. The results astounded and appalled me. Little progress had been made and some of the research facilities had been shut down. Very little meaningful additional work had been done on the use of artificial gravity or the effects of rotating environments!

[NEOWatcher]

Two reports in this weeks "The Space Review" on the US Manned mission for Mars. One looking at it optimistically and saying that NASA's plan agree with National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Committee on Human Spaceflight report...

Not much in that story except details of how they are quibbling. I would be more interested in the points they agree on and which ones they don't.

There is also the possibility that before NASA actually goes to Mars there might be experience of extended stays on the moon that her partners and China could share with her and that will be incooperated.

While research on moon's gravity will be beneficial, it's not what the article is talking about. The article is talking about artificial gravity.

[swampyankee]

Geology¹ is important. This is why I think that the next Mars missions should include seismographic stations. Core drills would be nice, too. They'd help the hunt for water.




_____________________

1: Don't be foolishly pedantic. I know the etymology of "geology."

[selvaarchi]

While research on moon's gravity will be beneficial, it's not what the article is talking about. The article is talking about artificial gravity.

True but that was at a time when that was the only way to experience sub G. With people on the moon we do not have to create it to experience sub G.

[NEOWatcher]

True but that was at a time when that was the only way to experience sub G.

It was not the only way. Whether it be more moon landings (Constellation) or spin habitats, they were available. Just not followed through.

With people on the moon we do not have to create it to experience sub G.

My point was that artificial gravity is different than low G. While the moon can show us many low G effects on the body and we need to test if it's just an extrapolation of something between 0G and 1G, nobody has tested low or 1G spin gravity on humans. The added coriolis effects and differing Gs of a smaller habitat need to be studied.

The article talked about the journey, not the destination.

[selvaarchi]

My point was that artificial gravity is different than low G. While the moon can show us many low G effects on the body and we need to test if it's just an extrapolation of something between 0G and 1G, nobody has tested low or 1G spin gravity on humans. The added coriolis effects and differing Gs of a smaller habitat need to be studied.

The article talked about the journey, not the destination.

Where money is a problem, do we look at building an artificial environment or use what we have. In 10 odd years we will be able to study the affect of moon gravity on astronauts for no additional cost. In 20 to 30 years we will be able study how Mars gravity acts on humans. In the mean time we should continue with the research on the effect of 0 gravity on humans for longer and longer periods.

[NEOWatcher]

Where money is a problem, do we look at building an artificial environment or use what we have..

So; are you agreeing that the article is talking about artificial gravity and not low gravity, and thus not applicable to low gravity research?

[selvaarchi]

So; are you agreeing that the article is talking about artificial gravity and not low gravity, and thus not applicable to low gravity research?

I agree that the emphasis was on artificial gravity but then that was their only choice. What I am trying to point out is we will have more options opening out to us, we should be taking advantage of it. At some point if the future we might invest in a dedicated variable artificial gravity environment but right now there is much more we can do with our limited resources.

Even with our experimentation with 0 G we have a lot more to learn. An example, is that hidden passengers on a manned mission--the bacteria in their gut--will also be affected.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-smi080515.php

Here's the summary of a new research report appearing in the August 2015 issue of The FASEB Journal: Prolonged spaceflight may give you a nasty case of diarrhea. Specifically, when mice were subjected to simulated spaceflight conditions, the balance of bacteria and the function of immune cells in the gut changed, leading to increased bowel inflammation.

"Our study provides useful insights on the cross-regulation of the mucosal immune system, epithelial barrier and commensal bacteria not only in humans in spaceflight or analog, but also in humans on earth that undergo various stresses," said Qing Ge, Ph.D., study author from the Department of Immunology at Peking University Health Science Center in Peking, Beijing.

[NEOWatcher]

I agree that the emphasis was on artificial gravity but then that was their only choice.

That was who's choice and why?

What I am trying to point out is we will have more options opening out to us, we should be taking advantage of it...

Although there are active programs for leading to those options, I don't see any that deal with long term habitation yet.

[selvaarchi]

That was who's choice and why?

The only way to test artificial gravity for habitation was in LEO so they had hobsons choice. Any thing else wold have been a very costly affair.

Although there are active programs for leading to those options, I don't see any that deal with long term habitation yet.

Just like it is only now that we are carrying out research on long term habitation in zero G we will start doing that when we have a base on the moon.

[selvaarchi]

Here is one woman who wants to get NASA astronauts to Mars in one piece!!!

http://www.popsci.com/geeking-out-da...ng-people-mars

Aerospace engineer Dava Newman has devoted her career to figuring out how we might live in space—suspending subjects from the rafters of her MIT lab to study reduced gravity and designing a flexible, self-mending space suit. As NASA’s new deputy director, she is now tasked with the planning and policy that will make greater human space exploration possible. That means leading the agency’s 18,000 employees and 40,000 contractors toward a successful crewed mission to Mars by the 2030s.

[selvaarchi]

Planetary Society is optimistic that we might have humans orbiting Mars by 2033. It is all in the report that came out of their workshop called "”Humans Orbiting Mars”.

http://www.planetary.org/press-room/...rs-report.html

“Amazing news: we could have humans orbiting Mars by 2033, and the astronauts are in school now.” said Bill Nye, CEO at The Planetary Society. “Mars is the next logical destination in the search for life. Such a discovery on that other world would change this one. Let’s go!” Nye added.

A focus of the workshop was a presentation of a proof-of-concept Mars exploration architecture developed by a study team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The study proposed a minimal architecture that would have astronauts orbit Mars and potentially visit the Martian moon Phobos in 2033, followed up by an ongoing series of Mars landings beginning in 2039. The JPL study was done as input to the overall NASA planning process and was presented for the first time at the Society’s Spring workshop.

“Breaking the first human mission to Mars into two pieces, the first of which would orbit Mars and then land on Phobos, allows the costs and risks associated with landing on Mars to be spread out over two separate missions” said Professor Scott Hubbard, workshop chair and Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University. “This stepwise approach, when combined with the overall debunking of past cost estimates, and assessing scientific and public interest represents a powerful combination of reasons to move forward confidently. Driving this program with clarity, stakeholder convergence, potential international collaboration and commercial opportunities provides a basis for leadership.”