Evidence for underground water on Mars

[rogermunibond]

https://www.reuters.com/science/seismic-data-indicates-huge-underground-reservoir-liquid-water-mars-2024-08-12/

 

Would be amazing if this finding is confirmed, brings to mind the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy.  Terraforming Mars anyone?

[Parsad]

Problem is accessing that water.  Cheers!

[Luke]

Time to send some people there I guess and start drilling! 

[ValueArb]

 

We have the team.

 

Actually the high likelyhood of accessible water at nearly all landing locations is a big driver of current mission plans built on the Mars Direct model. You land somewhere you can drill for liquid water, use solar power to split it into oxygen/hydrogen and in combination with CO2 from atmosphere and Sabatier process you can make LOX and Methane fuel for the return trip. Making fuel there reduces the amount of mass you need to send to Mars by huge amounts, increasing the payloads you can land on Mars by at least 10x or more. Its how each Starship can be designed to land 100 tons on Mars, to support massive exploration teams of dozens or hundreds of astronauts with a dozen or more ships and over a thousands tons of supplies and equipment.

 

The problems are, how easy will it be to drill for water? How effective will solar panels work, will they get damaged or regularly covered with sand, etc. They will be on the surface at least a year, so if they lose power its lights out for living quarters as well as the fuel making process. NASA refuses to buy into a Mars Direct type project because they are so risk averse, but that means their planned missions would be far more expensive even while being ludicrously under-massed for a two year round trip so they are just trying to land a couple astronauts for a few weeks to plant a flag and spend the rest of the time in orbit waiting for the return window, not exploring or doing testing on the surface. But if NASA ever bought into Mars Direct, they could include a small nuclear reactor that provides redundant power over solar to address the greatest risks of the approach.

 

As long as you can keep the first astronauts alive on Mars with new cargo landings every 18 month synod, theoretically it doesn't matter how long fuel production takes. They can send better equipment every synod to solve specific problems along with more supplies. This is the opposite of the Apollo approach where a giant rocket sends a small team for a one shot landing and return, all within a short period of time. So its questionable whether Mars Direct type missions will get the green light, even if solely privately funded.

[Spekulatius]

Aren’t we replay limited by engine tech. As long as we have only chemical engines, the journey to Mars takes 7-8 month each way

 To really make Mars feasible. We need engines that are much faster than that like those plasma drives that need to be nuclear powered to get hr energy density needed.

This enabling technology does not exist. Until then, we probably should sent robots there.

[Parsad]

3 hours ago, ValueArb said:

 

We have the team.

 

Actually the high likelyhood of accessible water at nearly all landing locations is a big driver of current mission plans built on the Mars Direct model. You land somewhere you can drill for liquid water, use solar power to split it into oxygen/hydrogen and in combination with CO2 from atmosphere and Sabatier process you can make LOX and Methane fuel for the return trip. Making fuel there reduces the amount of mass you need to send to Mars by huge amounts, increasing the payloads you can land on Mars by at least 10x or more. Its how each Starship can be designed to land 100 tons on Mars, to support massive exploration teams of dozens or hundreds of astronauts with a dozen or more ships and over a thousands tons of supplies and equipment.

 

The problems are, how easy will it be to drill for water? How effective will solar panels work, will they get damaged or regularly covered with sand, etc. They will be on the surface at least a year, so if they lose power its lights out for living quarters as well as the fuel making process. NASA refuses to buy into a Mars Direct type project because they are so risk averse, but that means their planned missions would be far more expensive even while being ludicrously under-massed for a two year round trip so they are just trying to land a couple astronauts for a few weeks to plant a flag and spend the rest of the time in orbit waiting for the return window, not exploring or doing testing on the surface. But if NASA ever bought into Mars Direct, they could include a small nuclear reactor that provides redundant power over solar to address the greatest risks of the approach.

 

As long as you can keep the first astronauts alive on Mars with new cargo landings every 18 month synod, theoretically it doesn't matter how long fuel production takes. They can send better equipment every synod to solve specific problems along with more supplies. This is the opposite of the Apollo approach where a giant rocket sends a small team for a one shot landing and return, all within a short period of time. So its questionable whether Mars Direct type missions will get the green light, even if solely privately funded.

 

2 hours ago, Spekulatius said:

Aren’t we replay limited by engine tech. As long as we have only chemical engines, the journey to Mars takes 7-8 month each way

 To really make Mars feasible. We need engines that are much faster than that like those plasma drives that need to be nuclear powered to get hr energy density needed.

This enabling technology does not exist. Until then, we probably should sent robots there.

 

I think this is the ideal type of scenario for intelligent robots.  As long as they have enough battery charging capacity via solar, they should lead the charge.  No need to risk the lives of human beings.  Won't matter how long they are in space, in different gravity, need for food, water, etc. 

 

Cheers! 

[Spekulatius]

28 minutes ago, Parsad said:

 

 

I think this is the ideal type of scenario for intelligent robots.  As long as they have enough battery charging capacity via solar, they should lead the charge.  No need to risk the lives of human beings.  Won't matter how long they are in space, in different gravity, need for food, water, etc. 

 

Cheers! 

If they run out of battery, they simply shut down but potentially could be waked up again if they can recharge with solar cells. That won’t work with humans,

Robots need no life support system , living space, rest times. The Mars rover Curiosity has been operating on Mars since 2012 and is still going!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_(rover)

 

Now the current robots are basically just remote controlled vehicle which due to the 3- 22min light travel time between earth and MArs means a lot of lag and slow movement. The robots needed would need to be semi autonomous that can do the lower or mid level task on their own with only high lvevl decision making required from Earth Mission Control.

 

In any ways, it a tremendously more economic and safer way to explore Mars and that’s how I think it will be done. Until we get something like the Epstein drive, that is:

https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Epstein_Drive

[ValueArb]

14 hours ago, Spekulatius said:

Aren’t we replay limited by engine tech. As long as we have only chemical engines, the journey to Mars takes 7-8 month each way

 To really make Mars feasible. We need engines that are much faster than that like those plasma drives that need to be nuclear powered to get hr energy density needed.

This enabling technology does not exist. Until then, we probably should sent robots there.

 

Nuclear power is entirely unsuited for Mars. Chemical rockets like Starship can do it in under 6 months with crews. You'd still take the 7-8 month trip with the cargo ships since it maximizes efficiency and payload mass.

 

The problems with NTRs (nuclear thermal rockets) like NASA's NERVA from the 60s, is their higher performance is sapped by the extra mass they require in shielding, and lower thrust to weight engines requiring more engine mass. Also, to get the highest performance you need to use Hydrogen as your fuel, which is extremely difficult to store for long missions without losing a lot to leakage. Despite all those problems, its performance is likely still superior for long trips beyond Mars such as the asteroid belt/jupiter/etc.

 

But for Mars you can use aerobraking to save immense amounts of fuel, which also allows you to transit at higher speeds. Starship is designed to aerobrake into Mars landing, and aerobrake back to Earth landing. No nuclear rocket will ever be licensed to aerobrake in Earth's atmosphere due to risk of breakup spreading active radioactive elements across wide areas, and its likely the same prohibition will apply to Mars. Even if your NTR could be licensed to land directly on Mars it's design is likely to be entirely unsuitable for aerobraking since most designs have engines on long booms to keep them away from crew compartments. 

 

If Starship meets it's design criteria, its crew versions are likely to transit to Mars in as little as 4 months. The main reason is in-orbit refueling in low earth orbit, which NASA never considered since Von Braun was forced to drop his idea of earth orbit rendeszvouz to assemble the landing stack and put everything on a single rocket to make the Apollo schedule. NASA since then made it a mission mantra that a single rocket loaded with everything is lower risk (not what Von Braun intended) which naturally limits the performance and capacity of what you can send to Mars. 

[ValueArb]

12 hours ago, Parsad said:

 

 

I think this is the ideal type of scenario for intelligent robots.  As long as they have enough battery charging capacity via solar, they should lead the charge.  No need to risk the lives of human beings.  Won't matter how long they are in space, in different gravity, need for food, water, etc. 

 

Cheers! 

 

Robots are entirely unsuited for effective exploration, and will be for many decades to come.

 

We've gotten a great deal of data out of robotic probes on Mars, but its still very limited. Over the last 50 years all the robotic probes have explored less of Mars than Apollo Astronauts did in one week total of cumulative lunar rover time. Insight is nearly a billion dollar robot that spent over a year trying to dig a hole on Mars and failed. Everything the probes do has to be planned on earth and painfully executed one step at a time with instructions taking up to 30 minutes to be executed and another 30 minutes before we can start to get data on their success. So each rover moves one step at a time, very slowly, towards any destination.

 

More importantly, the robots can only do specifically what they were designed to do, whatever the results of their tests they don't have equipment that can be repurposed to run additional tests that weren't anticipated. So we spend billions and up to a decade building basically single purpose robots to do one type of test, wait years to launch and land them, and then finally get results to guide us on what next robot should do.

 

Starship is designed to land massive teams of scientists and engineers, dozens to hundreds, with thousands of tons of equipment and supplies. They'll have a full medical lab, a full machine shop, a full scientific lab. If they discover something unexpected they'll be able to run hundreds of new tests quickly to explore it. If they have to dig a hole, and their backhoe breaks down, they'll use shovels. If the drill fails, the machine shop will make something even more adapted to the task at hand.

 

Explorers died exploring the new world, the arctic, Antarctica, space. 90% of Magellans crew including himself died. Explorers will die on Mars, but for incredibly useful and valuable reasons, advancing the science of how Mars and Earth were formed, whether there is or was life on Mars, and whether life on Mars seeded life on Earth (the theory of Panspermia), whether Mars can be habitable for colonists, whether it has resources that would support habitation or whether it can be terraformed easily.  And the risks/danger won't stop thousands of qualified people from volunteering to go.

[rohitc99]

20 minutes ago, ValueArb said:

 

Robots are entirely unsuited for effective exploration, and will be for many decades to come.

 

We've gotten a great deal of data out of robotic probes on Mars, but its still very limited. Over the last 50 years all the robotic probes have explored less of Mars than Apollo Astronauts did in one week total of cumulative lunar rover time. Insight is nearly a billion dollar robot that spent over a year trying to dig a hole on Mars and failed. Everything the probes do has to be planned on earth and painfully executed one step at a time with instructions taking up to 30 minutes to be executed and another 30 minutes before we can start to get data on their success. So each rover moves one step at a time, very slowly, towards any destination.

 

More importantly, the robots can only do specifically what they were designed to do, whatever the results of their tests they don't have equipment that can be repurposed to run additional tests that weren't anticipated. So we spend billions and up to a decade building basically single purpose robots to do one type of test, wait years to launch and land them, and then finally get results to guide us on what next robot should do.

 

Starship is designed to land massive teams of scientists and engineers, dozens to hundreds, with thousands of tons of equipment and supplies. They'll have a full medical lab, a full machine shop, a full scientific lab. If they discover something unexpected they'll be able to run hundreds of new tests quickly to explore it. If they have to dig a hole, and their backhoe breaks down, they'll use shovels. If the drill fails, the machine shop will make something even more adapted to the task at hand.

 

Explorers died exploring the new world, the arctic, Antarctica, space. 90% of Magellans crew including himself died. Explorers will die on Mars, but for incredibly useful and valuable reasons, advancing the science of how Mars and Earth were formed, whether there is or was life on Mars, and whether life on Mars seeded life on Earth (the theory of Panspermia), whether Mars can be habitable for colonists, whether it has resources that would support habitation or whether it can be terraformed easily.  And the risks/danger won't stop thousands of qualified people from volunteering to go.

The state of art on robots is changing fast too. With all the AI advancements, in the next 10 years we could have general purpose robots ..or atleast robots which are tuned and can do a lot which humans can. even if it is more expensive per robot, the regulatory risk and other safeguards that have to be put in place for humans can be reduced

[Parsad]

3 hours ago, ValueArb said:

 

Robots are entirely unsuited for effective exploration, and will be for many decades to come.

 

We've gotten a great deal of data out of robotic probes on Mars, but its still very limited. Over the last 50 years all the robotic probes have explored less of Mars than Apollo Astronauts did in one week total of cumulative lunar rover time. Insight is nearly a billion dollar robot that spent over a year trying to dig a hole on Mars and failed. Everything the probes do has to be planned on earth and painfully executed one step at a time with instructions taking up to 30 minutes to be executed and another 30 minutes before we can start to get data on their success. So each rover moves one step at a time, very slowly, towards any destination.

 

More importantly, the robots can only do specifically what they were designed to do, whatever the results of their tests they don't have equipment that can be repurposed to run additional tests that weren't anticipated. So we spend billions and up to a decade building basically single purpose robots to do one type of test, wait years to launch and land them, and then finally get results to guide us on what next robot should do.

 

Starship is designed to land massive teams of scientists and engineers, dozens to hundreds, with thousands of tons of equipment and supplies. They'll have a full medical lab, a full machine shop, a full scientific lab. If they discover something unexpected they'll be able to run hundreds of new tests quickly to explore it. If they have to dig a hole, and their backhoe breaks down, they'll use shovels. If the drill fails, the machine shop will make something even more adapted to the task at hand.

 

Explorers died exploring the new world, the arctic, Antarctica, space. 90% of Magellans crew including himself died. Explorers will die on Mars, but for incredibly useful and valuable reasons, advancing the science of how Mars and Earth were formed, whether there is or was life on Mars, and whether life on Mars seeded life on Earth (the theory of Panspermia), whether Mars can be habitable for colonists, whether it has resources that would support habitation or whether it can be terraformed easily.  And the risks/danger won't stop thousands of qualified people from volunteering to go.

 

Explorers died because they didn't have the technology to explore without risking human life.  That isn't the case anymore.

 

I'm also not talking about rovers...I'm talking about humanoid robots that can do tasks similar to human beings.  We aren't as far off as you may think.

 

Cheers!

[ValueArb]

3 hours ago, rohitc99 said:

The state of art on robots is changing fast too. With all the AI advancements, in the next 10 years we could have general purpose robots ..or atleast robots which are tuned and can do a lot which humans can. even if it is more expensive per robot, the regulatory risk and other safeguards that have to be put in place for humans can be reduced

 

There is zero regulatory risk in using humans. SpaceX could send volunteers to Mars tomorrow (or next Martian launch window) if Starship demonstrated that its re-entry shielding and in orbit refueling system works. 
 

NASA is the only one handcuffed by its own safety regulations, which border on the absurd. For example, requiring seven successful flights before certifying a private launch system for NASA astronauts, but only a single flight of the SLS before risking human lives on it. 
 

NASA specifically handcuffs itself for human mars expeditions by requiring them to be entirely self contained, ie travel with enough fuel for return trips instead of relying on making it at the destination. This reduces potential payload mass by roughly 90%, increasing risks of death on Mars due to less redundant equipment and supplies. 

[ValueArb]

13 minutes ago, Parsad said:

 

Explorers died because they didn't have the technology to explore without risking human life.  That isn't the case anymore.

 

we don’t have the technology to travel to Mars with risk of death, and won’t for hundreds of years. That’s a silly reason to not allow volunteers to explore Mars now.

 

 

13 minutes ago, Parsad said:

I'm also not talking about rovers...I'm talking about humanoid robots that can do tasks similar to human beings.  We aren't as far off as you may think.

 

Cheers!

 

Humanoid robots are farther away than you think, especially when a leading proponents demonstrations have included m a man in a robot suit.

 

A humanoid robotic can’t just master a few dozen or few hundred tasks, human mental flexibility approaches infinity. A robot can not weight substantially more on a trip where  mass is at a premium. And still has to have batteries that last long times between charges, don't decline in charge capacity over long trips, and it also has to be able to repair itself. 
 

the first time a robot runs low on power too far from its charger, or its charging connector gets damaged, it’s stuck forever. A human with a broken leg can at least drag himself to the medical facility.

And then there is the current state of AI, which is merely pattern matching. We train AI systems by showing them data and telling them which is “good” and which is “bad” until they can identify “goid” decisions on their own. This doesn’t train them for the ability to handle unexpected situations, or make any general purpose decisions. Only specific decisions across data they’ve been trained on. So they will still need to be operated from earlh, with a round trip communication time of up to an hour, and slowly, carefully to ensure they aren’t stranded or damaged beyond repair. 

 

We don’t need further breakthroughs for humans to perform well on mars. We know exactly how much food is needed to power them through a long trip, and when they get hungry they eat, when supplies get low they can reduce consumption to stretch them out. They’ll have their own medical facilities and doctors to address accidents and illness and keep them working. When they notice an unusual outcropping they can walk directly to it and examine it in detail without a single command from earth. 
 

The day these magic humanoid robots actually work, with sufficient battery and self repair capabilities, without doubling or tripling mass requirements, and at a reasonable cost, I’m sure they will supplement human crew members under their direct supervision. But there is no reason to wait decades for humanoid bots when we can go to Mars this decade with a fully capable human crew.

[Parsad]

37 minutes ago, ValueArb said:

 

we don’t have the technology to travel to Mars with risk of death, and won’t for hundreds of years. That’s a silly reason to not allow volunteers to explore Mars now.

 

 

 

Humanoid robots are farther away than you think, especially when a leading proponents demonstrations have included m a man in a robot suit.

 

A humanoid robotic can’t just master a few dozen or few hundred tasks, human mental flexibility approaches infinity. A robot can not weight substantially more on a trip where  mass is at a premium. And still has to have batteries that last long times between charges, don't decline in charge capacity over long trips, and it also has to be able to repair itself. 
 

the first time a robot runs low on power too far from its charger, or its charging connector gets damaged, it’s stuck forever. A human with a broken leg can at least drag himself to the medical facility.

And then there is the current state of AI, which is merely pattern matching. We train AI systems by showing them data and telling them which is “good” and which is “bad” until they can identify “goid” decisions on their own. This doesn’t train them for the ability to handle unexpected situations, or make any general purpose decisions. Only specific decisions across data they’ve been trained on. So they will still need to be operated from earlh, with a round trip communication time of up to an hour, and slowly, carefully to ensure they aren’t stranded or damaged beyond repair. 

 

We don’t need further breakthroughs for humans to perform well on mars. We know exactly how much food is needed to power them through a long trip, and when they get hungry they eat, when supplies get low they can reduce consumption to stretch them out. They’ll have their own medical facilities and doctors to address accidents and illness and keep them working. When they notice an unusual outcropping they can walk directly to it and examine it in detail without a single command from earth. 
 

The day these magic humanoid robots actually work, with sufficient battery and self repair capabilities, without doubling or tripling mass requirements, and at a reasonable cost, I’m sure they will supplement human crew members under their direct supervision. But there is no reason to wait decades for humanoid bots when we can go to Mars this decade with a fully capable human crew.

 

I think you need to go and read up a bit more on where robot technology is today, and where it is headed in the next 20-30 years.  A robot exploration of Mars isn't a hundred years away, but probably will occur in the next decade or two.  Cheers!

[ValueArb]

2 hours ago, Parsad said:

 

I think you need to go and read up a bit more on where robot technology is today, and where it is headed in the next 20-30 years.  A robot exploration of Mars isn't a hundred years away, but probably will occur in the next decade or two.  Cheers!

It’s all self promotion so far. Two decades? Maybe but there will already by explorers waiting for them. If Starship meets its design goals, humans will be walking on Mars in under a decade.

[Morgan]

I'm super excited for water on Mars!

 

Hopefully SpaceX will achieve its Mars goals and gets crews there and start exploring and building!