Here's a link to the site..... http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html MARS PLZ!!! WE WANT MARS!!!!!! Any thoughts on this? are you guys as excited as I am over this??
When the co founder of PayPal can afford to have a company like Space X, I think NASA can think a little bit bigger, I'm not saying its going to happen next week, but it will.
Wow... they're not saying it explicitly, but it sounds to me like they're basically saying it's a mission to search for alien life on an asteroid.
I don't think the term LIFE is the most correct one. They will be looking for organic molecules, as life, even in the form of bacteriae takes a lot of time to evolve. Fuck the asteroids!!! I want a manned mission to Mars!!!
People must have said that same thing about the moon back in the day. Yeah, it might be a big rock, but there's definitely something there. Conditions in Mars are very similar to the conditions of primitive earth. Maybe they can find out how exactly life started on earth, since there seem to be organic molecules in martian soil but they haven't evolved into anything life-like.
conditions on mars are nowhere near those of earth. Nights ~-100'C and days at maximum 20'C. If we'd have to colonize mars (or make it a pit stop for other discovery missions) we'd have to build some kind of capsules that let in sunlight but protected from the environment. Also, the sunlight wouldn't be all that big. Plus, mars is mostly land, no water. And it's smaller in size than earth.
Of course today conditions in mars are nothing like earth. It is more similar to primitive earth. Hundreds of millions of years ago, mars and the earth were very similar. I for one would like to know at which point the planets stopped being pretty much all the same, and started accumulating specifical chararteristics.
there's plentiful of water on mars. also the -100 +20°c is not that scary since mostly it's due to atmosphearlessness. also people on our planet manage to live in places that have -40/-50 for months. also mars is the only option. venus is irrimediably compromised and impossible to colonize or terraform, while it seems mars might get a chance.
Mars is a hard one, it has no internal dynamo to protect an atmosphere from solar winds. You'd need to cover mars in a shell to keep the atmosphere in. Terraforming it will be nearly impossible. Now carving out / utilizing underground caverns is another thing. The gravity is close, but perhaps not enough to keep the immune system and bone density where it needs to be...
I think we should be spending the money on researching rocket technology, robotics, and reducing the cost of getting into orbit. I don't care to see man on Mars. I think it is a massive waste of money and resources. It's like learning to run before you can walk.
This is absolutely correct. Without Van Allen belts being generated by a rotating, convective, molten and conductive core, any semblance of a meaningful atmosphere will be steadily stripped away by solar wind. Unfortunately it's not simply a case of pumping out a bit of CO2 to start up a greenhouse effect.
actually there's project concerning that, to create a artificial magnetic field... that would be so difficult as providing an atmosphear