Group items tagged

just saw a presentation on this - anybody wants to digg deeper into it?

looks as this could be useful also for us? any thoughts on this?

Looking for some Mars images? You don't have to steal from www.google.com/mars... Take them directly from the provider :-)

wow!

big big booster coming ... !

even bigger booster also coming: China Aims To Build World's Largest Rocket "Back in March, China revealed it is studying the feasibility of designing the most powerful carrier rocket in history for making a manned moon landing and exploring deep space, according to Liang Xiaohong, vice head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. The rocket is envisaged to have a payload of 130 tonnes, five times larger than that of China's current largest rocket. This rocket, if built, will eclipse the 53 tonne capacity of the planned Falcon 9 Heavy from SpaceX. It will even surpass the largest rocket ever built, the 119-tonne Saturn V."

still only "is studying the feasibility of designing a powerful carrier rocket" - we could easily do the same at no cost almost ... but still ... they might be serious ...

The scientific rationale behind it is that at km-depth there could be a) water resources (which could support a biosphere) and b) understand the formation of Mars. I would argue that an efficient drilling (robot) is also valuable for possible developing underground habitation (caves) at some point. This paper mentions two drilling concepts, but we could come up with many more (bio-inspired) probably. Daniel already came up with a nice one.. microwave drilling Also, the NASA InSight probe to Mars in 2016 is using a DLR-designed 'Mole' drill that is designed to reach a depth of... 5 meters

In this case I was thinking more about a smaller and controlled digging effort.. not ablating a football field sized hole

Nice one! plenty of examples in nature for this

Regarding our discussion on resource self-sufficiency of a Mars colony. Would it ever be possible (from a resource perspective that is..) A NASA report on availability of resources. A self-sufficiency trade study described in Boston (1996) identifies the mission duration at which the development of local life support resources becomes advantageous. Within 30 days, without recycling, or with the equivalent leakage, it becomes advantageous to derive oxygen from local resources. The time constants for water and food are about 6 months and 3 years, respectively.

I guess it depends on the number of astronauts that have to be supporte ... 3 years for food looks like a lot

Physicsworld releases their top 10 breakthroughs of the year 2014, ESA's Rosetta mission tops the list with the achievement of landing on a comet.

Our friends from NASA have come out with a plan to the human exploration of Venus in the time that everyone is speaking about Mars.

Love the concept acronym, which pretty much says it all... Not sure which astronaut would fancy floating around in an atmosphere where clouds are made of sulphuric acid. Besides I don't see the point of a manned mission if one can't reach the surface.. tele-operation would be easy and so much cheaper.

Typically, we send rovers to our planetary neighbors one at a time -- but what if we sent a small team of smaller, less impressive robots instead? That's the idea NASA is exploring at Kennedy Space Center with Swarmies: a quartet of four autonomous robots designed to work together to complete a single mission.

A new method of separating nuclear isotopes that exploits the slight differences in their electronic energy levels has been developed by physicists in the US. The energy-efficient separator was used to create isotopically pure lithium-7, which is used in some nuclear reactors. Good news for any future nuclear powered space missions perhaps? It could potentially replace the current (and much less energy efficient) methods that were developed in the 1950's

Mining the moon - now we know that the Moon's poles hold millions of tonnes of water ice, firms in the US as well as the Indian and Chinese space agencies are planning to mine this resource and sell it to space missions as fuel.

A group from Carnegie Mellon wants to send a robot to the Moon to beam live pictures of the Moon to Oculus Rift headset users, reported technology reporter Jane Wakefield of the BBC. Andy the robot is intended to swing into action as a robot on a mission to transform education about space.

They are developing so-called "Avatar" technology which will allow people to control robots remotely, as in the movie "Avatar." With Avatar X, they hope to revolutionize space exploration, resource extraction, and other space-based activities. On the Avatar X website, it says, "AVATAR X aims to capitalize on the growing space-based economy by accelerating development of real-world Avatars that will enable humans to remotely build camps on the Moon, support long-term space missions and further explore space from afar."

NASA and the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have successfully demonstrated a new nuclear reactor power system that could enable long-duration crewed missions to the Moon, Mars and destinations beyond. Main page for kilopower project: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower

interesting idea to produce O2 differently on Mars

Also, let's see how MOXIE does onboard the Mars2020 rover! https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/instruments/moxie/for-scientists/

38 degree core body temp in microgravity stabilised after 2 months - due to reduced conv. heat transfer+evaporation https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15560-w

so that's hypopyrexia (augmented concentrations of interleukin-1 receptor antagonist) AND hypothermia (convection/evaportation)? what puzzles me is that temperatures take so long to return to baseline after astronauts return to earth.

Thoughts? :)