InSight data suggests plentiful water lies beneath Mars' surface Data from the late Mars InSight lander continues to pay dividends, with the latest findings suggesting liquid water is abundant in the Martian mid-crust (about 7 to 12 mile depths). The discovery comes via a trio of scientists from the University of California San Diego and UC Berkeley, who said in a paper published yesterday …
Well Brandon, if Murmansk-based Russian Manga fans take 20 years of sweating muddy fluids to drill a satisfactory hole, and then just plain abandon it without even leaving a note, it's because they approach geotechnic relationships with a hard and cold mechanical perspective, where single-mindedness (or vodka) commonly trumps sensory guidance and feelings! As my green martian granny used to say, it's not the size of the Russian drill that matters grass-hopper, it's the motion of the burrowing tip, and the extension of the tubular body (she had studied abroad, in Italy, Earth ...).
Here on Mars then, my girlfriends and other experts much prefer a gentle and plant-inspired approach to such endeavors. And so, in order to release deeply held Martian waters with the greatest of satisfactions, we favor the self-growing soft robotic technique, known as FiloBot (from Italy), as detailed recently in Science Robotics (closed access), and a few years ago in Soft Robotics (open access). It torques, and grows, and bends to avoid obstacles in its deepest of progressions, and even comes in a convenient two-headed plantoid version for the highest of performances in water seeking explorations.
So, you see Brandon, drilling for deep water here on Mars doesn't have to be a soviet-style resource-intensive red-army gulag chore. With the right tools and techniques, it can actually be a very rewarding experience for all (and please, do leave a note before returning to Earth, this time, wink-wink!)!
I worked for a few years designing deep drilling robots... the problem (apart from the obvious issues of a few kilometers of drill pipe behaving like spaghetti!) is heat. As you go down, it gets warmer. On Earth, five or six kilometres gives temperatures of around 125-150C. Things stop behaving - particularly electronics, but also the mechanical parts. When your lubricant is boiling it doesn't tend to lubricate that well.
The Russians stopped because of the heat.
My wild guess is the temperature increases would be smaller on Mars: for starters, the average surface temperature is -60 °C (the peak midday temperature at the equator is only 20 °C) and the core looks to be about a quarter of the temperature of earth - and the crust twice as thick. That said, the boiling point of pure water on the surface of Mars is −4.96 °C...
But that's one of the things you've got to test. It's a very, very different environment to what we're used to, with very different behaviours.
"Drill a hole down a couple km (err... miles) send down a nuke, detonate. Rinse and repeat."
That was tried in the US (Colorado?) as a way to frack for gas. Good news, it worked, bad news was the gas become hopelessly contaminated and couldn't be used.
In my DVD collection I have one that covers all of the different things that were tried to use nuclear bombs for civil engineering projects and they all suffered from radioactive contamination. While it takes more time, a giant digger plugged into a small and portable nuclear power generation plant would be far better as the site would still be able to be visited by humans afterwards.
Geological time to dissipate a pre-existing atmosphere, agreed. But WRT "terraforming" Mars from a fresh start it only needs to blast stuff away at more than the replenishment rate.
Of course, if you are prepared to live underground the problem goes away.
FWIW I am well used to getting downvoted on this subject, there are some very sensitive and unrealistically optimistic souls out there! Bless ;)
This post has been deleted by its author
"Did anybody else hear this story and wonder where's the alien machine that pumps it back into the atmosphere and turns mars into a liveable planet? I forget which film used that as a denouement."
Total Recall starring Arnold. An adaptation of a Philip K Dick story.
My physics knee was twitching during that movie. All of the ice that was melted to create the atmo would have been needed to be kept under pressure all of the time so it wouldn't sublimate. The amount of power required to turn the ice into a gas would be unbelievable and it would have led to a massive explosion to do it fast enough to keep Arnold and his squeeze from suffocating to death. Yeah, sometimes I can't disengage my brain and just go with the flow. I still liked the movie, btw.
I may be way off on my physics here - please forgive if so... but my admittedly vague understanding is that at high altitude (on Earth) water is disassociated into free hydrogen and oxygen under the influence of (dunno? Space aliens, solar radiation, helpful mice?) and the average velocity of a hydrogen molecule up there is greater than escape velocity. Hence it leaves, leaving the oxygen behind.
Of course, I could be talking complete bollocks; I often am.
A scientific base or colony on Mars has a lot of water options besides "drilling ridiculously deep into the crust." Hydrogen-rich soils indicative of water show that permafrost is widespread and shallow. The north pole has plenty of water ice. Korolev crater has 2,200 cubic kilometers of water.
For terraforming, depending on water soaked deep into the Martian crust seems like a bad plan since it could reasonably soak back into the crust. To create enough water to fill Mars' north polar water basin (a nice ocean to sustain a water cycle) and saturate the crust, you'd want about a Ceres-sized volume of water, which is a bit beyond the "smash a couple of comets into Mars and nuke the poles" of Muskian thinking. And you need a rich source of carbon and nitrogen for the atmosphere and ecosphere, something on the scale of strip-mining continental masses of ice crust and the atmosphere from Titan. Which sort of points to the dead-end nature of terraforming: it's a luxury project for post-scarcity interplanetary civilizations. Start with settling the belt and leave terraforming for latter day kajillionaires.
> The north pole has plenty of water ice
It sure has. Unfortunately, the north pole is about the furthest point away from any point where a settlement (which presumably wants to use solar power) would be established. And what with the astounding lack of overnight delivery services on the red planet, there is pretty much zero chance in hell to transport that water down south for processing.
Oh, sure, one could, in theory, establish a base in the north pole. Only, now all those solar panels (which are transported there how exactly btw. considering we will need housands of metric tons in panels alone, not to mention scaffolding, cabling, inverters, storage batteries, ...) which were running at half-capacity to begin with (inverse square law and all that), are even more useless than before, because now we don't even get sunlight at a good angle.
"For terraforming, depending on water soaked deep into the Martian crust seems like a bad plan since it could reasonably soak back into the crust. "
I believe that some day people will visit Mars, but not a colony in a giant stainless tube with CH4/O2 chemical propulsion. Elon's fantasies are soap bubble thin when examined. Why would he want CH4 as a fuel when H2 would lead to an easier process (not easy) for making fuel on Mars?
A trip to Mars would be pure scientific investigation and zero ROI other than technology development, maybe. A big problem I see right now is any serious talk about people on Mars diverts efforts being put into seeing what can be done on the moon where there could be applications for doing extremely high tech manufacturing in fractional G and biological research that shouldn't be done on Earth such as work with filoviruses and other hot pathogens.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
