Where do you get the energy to heat the soil?
Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
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Re: Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
#12"If you think about a cubic foot of this dirt and you just heat it a little bit - a few hundred degrees - you'll actually get off about two pints of water - like two water bottles you'd take to the gym," Dr Leshin explained. This is huge for Mars exploration by humans. 1. We can send unmanned expeditions to stockpile large tanks of water. 2. This would allow us to literally 3D print structures on the surface and allo…
ALICE is Aluminum+Water Ice in case anybody is wondering. You basically make a slurry of very fine Aluminum powder and water, then freeze it. Very cool stuff.
Re: Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
#13Where do you get the energy to heat the soil?
Solar, or potentially nuclear.
Re: Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
#14Where do you get the energy to heat the soil?
[deleted]
Re: Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
#15"If you think about a cubic foot of this dirt and you just heat it a little bit - a few hundred degrees - you'll actually get off about two pints of water - like two water bottles you'd take to the gym," Dr Leshin explained. This is huge for Mars exploration by humans. 1. We can send unmanned expeditions to stockpile large tanks of water. 2. This would allow us to literally 3D print structures on the surface and allo…
Since people have been hopeful about finding water there for a while, are there any good estimates for how much exploration mission costs would be reduced by if water were found?
One of the central costs of a round trip to Mars is the fuel for the return flight. With enough water at Mars we can manufacture all the methane/oxygen rocket fuel we need on site.
The Mars Direct mission architecture and the NASA Johnson Space Center's Design Reference Mission derived from Mars Direct both assume we send hydrogen from Earth to manufacture rocket fuel for the return trip at Mars, combining it with atmospheric carbon dioxide into methane and oxygen, and saving 95% of the mass of the fuel versus bringing it all from Earth. They are estimated at $20-30 billion and $50 billion respectively (spread over ten to twenty years), compared with the earlier $450 billion price tag of the Space Exploration Initiative announced by President Bush 1, which was based on bringing all our fuel for the round trip with us from Earth. Not even having to send hydrogen from Earth would cut the cost further.
Methane/oxygen rockets have been rare outside of Russia, but Pratt & Whitney demonstrated a working model of a modded RL10 rocket engine running on methane/oxygen.
More to the point in the context of Mars missions, SpaceX is switching to methane/oxygen for their new Raptor engine.
Re: Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
#16Every time I read Curiosity stories, David Bowie starts playing in my head.
Hopefully the first man on mars will not be Major Tom
Re: Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since people have been hopeful about finding water there for a while, are there any good estimates for how much exploration mission costs would be reduced by if water were found?
One of the central costs of a round trip to Mars is the fuel for the return flight. With enough water at Mars we can manufacture all the methane/oxygen rocket fuel we need on site. The Mars Direct mission architecture and the NASA Johnson Space Center's Design Reference Mission derived from Mars Direct both assume we send hydrogen from Earth to manufacture rocket fuel for the return trip at Mars, combining it with at…
Are there benefits to methane/oxygen outside what you referenced?
Re: Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
#18For a comparison, typical values for water content on Earth are in the 15 to 50% range for the inhabited world.
This is kind of an awkward way to present this data. They are talking about water content (which is by weight) and then translating to volumes which is not straight-forward in all cases.
I don't know how revolutionary this is. A cubic foot of soil is, in my experience, quite a bit larger than most laymen think and heating something a "couple hundred degrees" on a world with no established infrastructure (e.g. - there are no large scale solar panels or nuclear reactors set up on Mars) seems like quite a problem.
Re: Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
#19"If you think about a cubic foot of this dirt and you just heat it a little bit - a few hundred degrees - you'll actually get off about two pints of water - like two water bottles you'd take to the gym," Dr Leshin explained. This is huge for Mars exploration by humans. 1. We can send unmanned expeditions to stockpile large tanks of water. 2. This would allow us to literally 3D print structures on the surface and allo…
Aluminium Nano-thermites like ALICE are certainly cool, and certainly scary. Could you make a explosive more powerful than small atomic bombs?
Re: Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples
#20"If you think about a cubic foot of this dirt and you just heat it a little bit - a few hundred degrees - you'll actually get off about two pints of water - like two water bottles you'd take to the gym," Dr Leshin explained. This is huge for Mars exploration by humans. 1. We can send unmanned expeditions to stockpile large tanks of water. 2. This would allow us to literally 3D print structures on the surface and allo…
They also suggest that one of the main components is perchlorate -- which, if turned into lithium perchlorate can be used for oxygen generation, and if turned into ammonium perchlorate can be used for solid rocket fuel.