Here is a copy of a digest that i received from the Australian Mars Society:

sounds good!!!

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Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

Time is really our biggest enemy....

that it is, iw ill be 57 years old when the final stage is worked on! - and I am already having trouble adjusting to being 27!

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Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

Space travel for man is a myth.

On a trip to Mars, every cell of a persons body would be hit by a very high energy cosmic particle by the time they got to Mars. Without the magnetic field of Earth there is absolutely no protection against these rays. Also, any Solar flare would kill anyone in space.

Even when on Mars there would be no protection unless the people can dig down hundreds of feet into Martian soil.

Space flight beyond the Earth's magnetic field is suicide. The Moon missions worked because the Astronauts were only out of the magntic field's protection for a few days. During the moon landings a watch was kept on the Sun so that if a Solar flare occured, the astronauts would immediately come back to Earth to avoid the radiation. To say out of the Earth's protection for weeks or years is fatal. There is no known technolgy that can protect us from these particles. This will delay a manned mission beyond the Moon for decades if not centuries.

I am open to and wecome any comments to the contrary. I was a big advocate of manned space flight, but have entirely altered my position because of this problem.

Joe Crash

I readed elsewhere that water can protect us against flare. can maybe do water in the buffer between outer and innerwall?
dig under the marsground for manned marsmission is no need, Earth can send alert to astronauts that sun flare is coming then they can hide in their compound.
only the problem is that sometime can take more than a month.

so, let them send an animal first, to see if it can survive the journey.

Not because I see animals as beneath me and worth sacrificing, but just that, if I said 'yes, please send me', then they would say 'no, too risky for humans at this time, maybe 2040'.

Plus, there would be 1000 people ahead of me, prepared to risk themselves.

maybe animals have no chance anyway because of needed 'designed excercise' etc which would keep a living-thing alive and stop bone depreciation.

JPL scientists said we have at least 10-15 years robotic exploration before manned missions are needed.

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The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower...drives my green age!
It is only with the heart that things can be seen clearly; what is essential is invisible to the eye!

Usually most of those guy are from Air Force.....

or send robot for research of human fits in mars or not and find a minerals that is useful for manned mission. robot must have life of 1 year on mars.
viking and rovers is for search for life and water so is a lot different.
animals is no need, robots can do their work with electronic organs.

I think we need to discover the problems we are having with our descents into the Martian Atmosphere first.

Well, president Bush is supposed to be announcing a new program of manned flights to the Moon and Mars next week. It's an election year in the US and words are cheap when the deficit is ballooning like it is there but at least it's a step in the right direction after decades of stuffing about and no commitment.

The radiation issue is much exaggerated - see this from Robert Zubrin in response to that nonsense in the NYT about it a while back. It's an issue but not a showstopper. Another good reason to use missions to (and bases on) the Moon to test things like life support, radiation shielding, propulsion systems, etc. out first.

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David S.

"Why are the pretty ones always insane?"
-- Chief Clancy Wiggum, The Simpsons.

Water will not protect us. In the early days of life on this planet, water protected life until the ozone layer formed screening out the UV. The magnetic field of the Earth has always protected life from the high energy cosmic particles. Water is not enough. You need thousands of miles of magnetic field to stop these particles.

The moon cause tidal movement in the core of the Earth causing the magnetic field which is added to by the Van Allen belt. Mars has no large moon and therefore does not have a strong enough magnetic field to protect life.

Protection of the Astronauts to Mars would require many Hundreds of tons of lead or magnetic field generating equipment, which is impossible with the energy sources we have today.

A base on the Moon would have a similar problem. This will come out as we return to the moon. I hope we do not find out the hard way.

Joe Crash.

perhaps lead glass may be used in the domes or in aspects of contruction.

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Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

"Water will not protect us. "


JoeCrash [/b][/quote]
Actually Joe,

There is an article on Space.com that just spoke about the problem of radiation in space (http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...rs_040120.html). It is definitely a serious threat and something that has to be dealt with. There are several ways to reduce the amount of exposure and water is mentioned as one of the best. Here is the quote from the article mentioned above, "(Interestingly, the best way to protect spacefarers aboard a Mars transport ship might be to surround them with the water they'd need for their journey. The hydrogen in water, scientists have learned, is one of the best absorbers of particle radiation.)"
The problem of radiation is much worse on a spacecraft than on the surface of the moon or another planet like Mars. Radiation comes from all directions in space, but only from above while on the surface of a planet or a moon. However, technology will be developed to completely shield astronauts from this threat someday. It is true that the astronauts that went to the moon during the Apollo missions were lucky to have survived. A major solar flare would have killed them. However, like it was mentioned earlier, their short stay reduced the odds of this occuring.

James

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-James

NASA is working on the "water" idea. The idea is to put as much Hydrogen into plastic so a high energy particle will hit the Hydrogen and the H will hit the Astronauts. Instead of one particle an atomic weight in the hundreds, he would be hit with hundreds of particles with an atomic weight of one. This could work but is untested. It has to be tested in deep space on animals which has not been done. Are the hundreds of Htydrogen particles safe? No one knows the long term effects and the effects on the Astronaut's kids. My own opinion is that it will not work. The total damage to cells eventually will be the same. The magnetic field is the answer but would require enormous weights of material to get it strong enough. Some sort of pulsed Superconductor would be ideal. You do not need the field to be "on" all the time.

A solar flare will kill anyone outside the Earth's magnetic field. There is no protection that we can put out there. The only defense is to reduce the time of travel to Mars to reduce the probability of death. A very unnerving thought. On Mars, the Astronauts would have to dig in and have a cave ready as soon as possible. I do not think that life of any sort will be found on Mars. It has been sterilized by flares and high energy cosmic rays for its entire existance. It makes life on Earth seem like a spectacular miracle.

I think we can put a pernament base on the Moon and should. An astronomical observatory on the opposite side of the Moon would be perfect. Radio Telescopes on Earth will soon be obsolete because of all the man made radio noise that increases each year. Arrays of optical telescopes would function with no atmospheric aberation. Solar Flares could be avoided in under-moon caves.

The second biggest problem is finance. The space station/shuttle failed because it was based on the idea that there would be hundreds of companies making money out there. The design was for a mammoth space effort which never happened. We were to have 50 shuttle flights a year and a station with hundred or thousands of people.

Any one care to speculate on what a Martian Space Station might produce commercially? I think it would reduce to, put the guy there to make the step for Mankind, And never return.

One question I have for the "water" idea for protection from radiation is ... what happens to the water? Are the astronauts supposed to drink it? Wouldn't it be contaminated somehow?


On another note, enormous solar panels on the moon would be able to supply all the power we need on the earth someday. The problem is how to beam the energy to earth by microwaves ...

As for Mars, I truly think that it will be where another human civilization starts in the future. Maybe not soon, but definitely in a couple hundred years.

Never say never ... technology will be there in the future.

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-James

Where can you find information on this technology? It sounds like the ideal solution to the radition problem.

Joe, any manned exploration, even here on Earth, faces problems, often life threatening. The most untenable position in discussing future exploration is saying that something is impossible. Several years before the Wright brothers flight a famous physicist proclaimed that human flight in machines heavier than air was impossible and would never take place; at the end of the 19th century serious physicists asserted that flying to other planets was impossible because in the vacuum of outer space there is nothing to support the flying machine, but at the end of the century the Russian scientist Tsiolkovsky elaborated his theory of rocket propulsion; examples like that are innumerable. Protecting astronauts from radiation is one of the serious but at the same time easiest to resolve problems - protective covers have already been researched long ago, invented, and tested.
Finally - be optimistic, that's the attitude that moves any exploration.

I agree with you galaxy dweller
that is what I call Technology evulotion. what we imagine what is impossible now, next (many) years it's possible.

I ran across some interesting information regarding radiation exposure and how water along with other possible materials can possibly be used to protect humans in space. The link is here:

http://www.nuclearspace.com/A_nukrocsafeastro2.htm

The article talks about the earth's atmosphere and how is protects humans. It compares the earth's atmosphere to a wall of water 10 meters thick! Here is that part of the article:

"Space Exposure Limits

The Earth’s protective atmosphere is a massive 1 kg/cm2 or equivalent mass of ten meters of water. There is little wonder that the cosmic ray levels are low on the surface and still modest at aircraft altitudes where only 25 percent of the atmosphere remains to protect subsonic aircraft and only 5 percent remains to shield the HSCT. Even so, 5 percent is equivalent to 50 cm of water. Even if one is above the atmosphere, there is still the geomagnetic field which provides protection from extraterrestrial radiations near the equator (low inclination orbits) but also poses a new hazard from those particles trapped in the geomagnetic field itself (see figure 2). In addition to the greater intensities of the space radiation environment, the astronaut is committed to 24 hours of exposure time for each work day unlike any other occupational exposure. For these reasons, astronaut exposure limits have always been considered outside the realm of other radiation related occupations.9"

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-James

My oppinion is that it's too early to send man on Mars. Bush made some annoucements that I don't think that they will be realised until 2020. We need to study long travel effects, to develope new way of propulsion systems that can take us there in far less time.
My general oppinion is that we will not be able to reach Mars until 2020.

Steve from Romania