Mars (Planet)

Mars is smaller than Earth. So much so that Mars' gravity is less than 40% of Earth's. While that is beneficial for launching things into orbit and moving mass around, i never see discussions talking place on how this would affect humans physiologically.

In my view, the weaker gravity kills any hope of a Martian settlement project. Even if we could build a sustainable settlement, how long could humans live there before experiencing changes to their bodies. Sure they could stay a year or two and probably be fine. But after 10? The bone density changes would make a return to Earth extremely difficult. God forbid a child was to be born there. Would they grow twice as tall? Would they ever be able to live on Earth?

I have no doubts that humanity could build a research station on Mars. But that's all it can ever be. A research station where scientists stay for a limited time. A permenent population would rapidly develop into a new species. Even if Mars had a breathable atmosphere the effects of gravity would remain.

Science fiction is not reality. I see a lot of powerful, influential people selling fiction as reality. You are not immune to propaganda.

i just did some rough engineering/math to figure out how to build domes to live in. Assumption of course is inside pressure p = 0.2 bar.

• Assuming that you want to source as much construction material as possible on-site (In-Situ Resource Utilization), simple materials like Polyethylene might be advantageous to more complex materials like carbon nanofiber etc
• Polyethylene can be processed at temperatures around 200°C, while steel would have to be heated to 1500°C. Especially in the early days, plastics are clearly cheaper than steel. Let's see whether we can get away with it:

A room-sized dome (i.e. sphere, but only the upper half, with sphere-radius r = 10 m, so maximum diameter d = 20 m if you cut at half height) with inside pressure p = 0.2 bar would require a thickness d = 6.66 cm roughly, if it's made of PE. That does not sound undoable! In fact, that sounds entirely reasonable and doable.

There's a third, less well-done page:

This is an RFC (Request For Comments). Leave your comments down below!

Sending people to Mars, keeping them alive there, and bringing them back (optional) is hard.

Sending robots to Mars is easier. It's been done in 1997 and artificial intelligence and robotics have made major strides since.

A semi-autonomous* settlement with life support should be built before we send people there. This will save a lot of time and make the mission far more likely to succeed than if we treat it like a camping trip and make astronauts set their own "tents" up.

* with high-level operations being managed remotely, but real-time operations requiring automation due to the unavoidably high ping between Earth and Mars

the point is that you can actually live inside the rockets when they first land, you don't need to build extra housing immediately. this significantly simplifies the mission requirements, at least for the first few years.

tank volume is about 1000 m³, which stores about 5000 kg of oxygen assuming 5 bar of pressure, which lasts a crew of 10 for about half a (martian) year, or about as long as the winter sand storms threaten to reduce solar panel production, so you have enough oxygen to breathe through this time.

it is a myth and misleading to assume that energy supply has to be constant. it is good enough if you can intermittently replenish your live support resources.

you remember the last post i made in this community about farming on mars in small greenhouses?

yeah, that rings a bell. i just wanted to know how to construct these plastic tubes sothat they would hold 1 bar of pressure inside. so i did some calculations. they are a real mess, don't look at them:

(r/d is the ratio of the tube radius to the wall thickness btw. r/d = 300 is the point where it tears, so having a thicker wall than that should be fine)

i mostly wrote this down as a reminder for myself sothat i can roughly understand what i did later.

anyways, the results are: basically you can make such a tube with 10cm diameter easily out of polyethylene or any other type of polymer with only a wall strength of 1mm. it will hold, it won't burst. i used some insights from ultimate tensile strength, linear elasticity (Young's modulus) etc.

basically what i did is to assume that the force that the wall material exerts to push to the inside is equal to the gradient in spring-energy that would be stored inside the wall material depending on radius. So dW(r)/dr = F is the force with which the wall material pushes inward, where W(r) is the mechanical stress energy stored in a slice of the tube of 1mm thickness.

ask if you want to know something. i'm tired rn and can't tell what i might have missed.

you know about these mattresses that they sell for swimming?

they are entirely made of plastic and could be produced on-site. the advantage is that as the structure size is smaller, you need less material to build the greenhouse, and also since it has a steeper curvature, it can be pressurized more easily (the less curvature, the thicker the materials have to be to hold the pressure within).

to harvest the algae, you'd open the lid on one side and let the whole goo out, including the water, which you then put through a filter to extract the algae out, then you can recycle the water.

i just made this diagram by comparing history of the US with possible future history of mars (timescale included). notable technological turning points include:

• solar panel production on-site, because it would mean that the settlement has very large amount of energy available, and just like the steam engine and all the heavily-motorized machines kicked off the industrial revolution, having much energy available would do a lot.
• polar ice extraction because water is just extremely valuable, and therefore it's worth it at some point to build that 3000 km railway system to the korolev crater. this would flood the economy with water which would give another important growth spurt.

more thoughts on habitat construction. i want to make animations about this too but people voted against AI image generation (which would be the easy route) so i would have to draw it all by hand which is a chore and i can't motivate myself to do it yet.

so anyways, if you want to build a house that can hold a minimum of 200 mbar of oxygen inside, that's quite a lot of pressure. it's like you're trying to build an in-door swimming pool on earth, but not on ground level. so you have 2 m of water in a big bucket that has to be held up entirely by steel. the pressure is the same. 2 m of water on earth has 2000 kg /m² · 10 N/kg = 20 kPa. meanwhile 200 mbar oxygen gas = 20 kPa.

Have a spring? Have a field?

You have water and space. Put some people on it you have a town in the making.

text

ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Parachute Baked Sterile at ESTEC Ahead of 2028 Mars Mission by Robert Schreiber Berlin, Germany (SPX) May 04, 2026 A 35-metre diameter parachute destined to slow the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover during its descent through the Martian atmosphere has undergone heat sterilisation at the European Space Agency's technical centre in the Netherlands, completing a critical planetary protection milestone ahead of the mission's 2028 launch.

The parachute, weighing 74 kilograms and constructed primarily from nylon and Kevlar fabrics, will be the largest ever flown on Mars - or anywhere else in the Solar System outside of Earth. During entry, it must endure a six-minute dive through the thin Martian atmosphere before delivering the rover safely to the surface.

Sterilisation was carried out in a specialised dry heater oven at ESA's Life Support and Physical Sciences Laboratory at ESTEC in Noordwijk. The process required the parachute to reach 125 degrees Celsius and hold that temperature for 36 hours, preceded by a 50-hour preheating phase to ensure the heat penetrated the innermost folds of the tightly packed canopy. The parameters were established through multiple rounds of testing on exact replica parachutes, as no established procedure existed for the task.

The sterilisation standard imposed on the parachute is exceptionally stringent. Under international planetary protection requirements, the hardware must be at least 10,000 times cleaner than a typical smartphone. The concern is twofold: terrestrial microbes hardy enough to survive interplanetary transit could interfere with the rover's search for signs of life by causing false-positive detections, and planetary protection obligations require that Mars itself be shielded from biological contamination originating on Earth.

The oven used for baking is housed inside an ISO Class 1 cleanroom at ESTEC - among the most contamination-controlled environments in Europe. All air in the facility is continuously processed through a two-stage filter system, and personnel entering the room must follow gowning procedures more rigorous than surgical standards and pass through an air shower to remove particulates.

After cooling for several hours inside the cleanroom, the parachute was packaged by suited technicians and sealed inside a protective wrapping. It was then transported to Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy, where it will await integration with the spacecraft.

The flight parachute passed a key deployment test the previous year, when a precise copy was released from a high-altitude balloon and successfully decelerated an ExoMars mock-up landing platform to a safe touchdown on Earth.

The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin mission is scheduled for launch in 2028. The rover will spend more than 25 months in transit before arriving at Mars, where its primary objective is to drill beneath the Martian surface in search of chemical or biological indicators of past or present life.

so this article is about temperature regulation for a spacesuit on mars. we assume you want to walk around on the outside, doing light work like checking the terrain and maybe also heavy work like constructing houses and such.

there's 4 major ways to lose heat:

• radiation
• convection (through the wind)
• evaporation (water loss)
• conduction (through the ground)

the share of each way to heat loss on mars is as follows: assuming -60°C external temperature, almost all of the heat loss is through radiation; there's a very thin atmosphere (therefore almost no convection losses), we assume no evaporation losses (the suit is airtight), very small conduction losses (small feet area).

so sorry for posting chatgpt output here, i checked the text however and it's true, but it's neatly summed up and i'm too lazy to rephrase.

sources for the details:

• Stefan-Boltzmann-law
• Emissivity

emissivity of materials can vary from 0.03 to 0.99 so you can basically choose your emissivity. depending on the emissivity, the heat losses will be different. there's an almost linear connection there.

so for a typical white spacesuit, the losses will be around 600 W of heat on average; which can be reduced by an order of magnitude if you use tin foil as the surface material instead.

meanwhile the average human metabolic output is around 250 W throughout the day (assuming light activity like walking around), and it can peak at around 500 W during heavy work activity.

so you could choose a proper material to have around 400 W of heat loss on average, so you wouldn't overheat if you work hard but also not lose too much heat if you just walk around; in the latter case, you'd have to supplement the heat with a technical heat source, such as resistive heating. so the spacesuit would also have a battery attached to it as the power source; if you want the battery to last an hour before you have to change it for a new battery, it would have to have a capacity of around 100 Wh. if it's a Li-ion battery, it would have to weight around 400 g to provide that energy.

a person requires approximately 1 kg of oxygen a day.

how to calculate this: a person requires roughly 8 MJ of chemical energy a day, which is about 0.5 kg of bread. to oxidize this in a 2:1 ratio of oxygen:carbon (CO2), you need 1 kg of oxygen.

so if you use some kind of face mask to supply you oxygen, you might inhale 200 mbar of pure oxygen. however, the body cannot take that all in all at once, so the air you exhale has like 160 mbar of oxygen still (that the body could not absorb) and 40 mbar of exhaled CO2. at least that's how it works on Earth. (i should link a source here, but i'm too lazy to look one up, i write this down from memory)

so inhalation absorbs about 20% of the available oxygen. so if you require to take in 1 kg of oxygen in a day, that means that 5 kg have to be provided in total. so how big would the flasks have to be?

if a flask is 1 liter in size, it would contain 1 g of oxygen at 1 bar, but if we increase the pressure, it can hold more. obviously, we can't increase the pressure to 5000 bar to make it hold 5 kg of oxygen at once, because the highest pressures that can be safely used in industrial settings are 200 bar, and that's already incredibly high. so if we only put 50 bar of pressure into the flasks, one flask would hold 50 g of oxygen, which is about enough for 15 minutes, before you have to change it again. (we need 5000 g of oxygen supply in a day of 86400 seconds, so roughly 50 g supply oxygen for 864 seconds which is almost 15 minutes).

Mars captured by NASA's Psyche spacecraft on May 16th, 2026 after its gravity assist.

We see the south permanent cap, Hellas Bassin (bright disk in the middle) and Terra Sabaea (bright plains on the left) with Schiaparelli crater.

RGB composite made with pictures through IR1 (723 nm), Green (550 nm) and Blue (495 nm) filters.

© NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Thomas Appéré

This is huge!

Spirulina, a type of algae, is considered one of the best sources of food on Mars, because it can grow in small containers and doesn't need big greenhouses. It is also very nutrient-rich, containing both lots of energy and protein.

However, vitamin B12 so far has been assumed to only exist in animal food products, such as beef and dairies.

This research project investigates genetically modified spirulina algae that contain levels of B12 comparable to beef!

This is not only a big breakthrough for food security on Mars but it also opens up the door another step to the broader approach of genetically engineering food sources on Mars. What might be next?

In engineering and many branches of economy, it is custom to provide a minimum viable product:

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development.

This maximizes development speed as basic features can be tried out and tested while new features are being developed, thus minimizing feedback time and maximizing deployment speed.

What is the minimum viable product for a mars mission? I think it is reasonable to guess that it is a life support system, as it is already being deployed on the ISS, just on another planet. This minimizes new development work before a usable variant can be deployed and allows re-use of established technologies.

This would mean that the type of life support system that's already being used on the ISS today is simply re-packaged into a new ship and used on-ship and on-destination as it is being used on the ISS today.

Apart from the minimal feature set, there is some valid criticism with this approach, such as:

• in case of emergency, no quick rescue mission is possible because of the long distance.
• the mission duration would probably have to be longer until enough fuel can be produced for a journey back, which increases exposure to radiation and unknown variables

Essentially, it would be a leap of faith that the type of mission that has already been happening on the ISS for the last 25 years, can also still function well enough if it's deployed at a much more remote location, and for significantly longer durations.

Due to overwhelming user votes, no AI generated pictures will be allowed on this community. Post them to !mars_ai_pics@discuss.tchncs.de instead.

To explain my reasoning:

• Every post must make sense. We don't accept slop without purpose. Every post must be backed up by human intelligence, provide meaningful arguments or link to relevant (trustworthy, non-clickbait) articles.
• What's not accepted is long walls-of-text of AI-generated nonsense.
• The fair use doctrine applies: "Fair use" of copyrighted material is usage that has educational or transformative properties: If you use AI to visualize your own ideas, that's "transformative use" because you're using the visualization skills of somebody else in new ways. Furthermore, all AI-generated media must not be used for commercial purposes.
• This means that you should always put your own spirit into every post, instead of using a dumb machine to generate content for you. Using the machine to express your own spirit, however, is fair use.

Edit: Due to popular vote, no AI pictures will be allowed on this community after all. See this post.

This is a sub-section of the "geometrically improved, color enhanced" version of the 360-degree panorama heretofore known as the "Gallery Pan," the first contiguous, uniform panorama taken by the Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) over the course of Sols 8, 9, and 10. Different regions were imaged at different times over the three Martian days to acquire consistent lighting and shadow conditions for all areas of the panorama.

The IMP is a stereo imaging system that, in its fully deployed configuration, stands 1.8 meters above the Martian surface, and has a resolution of two millimeters at a range of two meters. In this geometrically improved version of the panorama, distortion due to a 2.5 degree tilt in the IMP camera mast has been removed, effectively flattening the horizon.

The IMP has color capability provided by 24 selectable filters -- twelve filters per "eye." Its red, green, and blue filters were used to take this image. The color was digitally balanced according to the color transmittance capability of a high-resolution TV at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and is dependent on that device. In this color enhanced version of the panorama, detail in surface features are brought out via changes to saturation and intensity, holding the original hue constant. A threshold was applied to avoid changes to the sky.

On the horizon the double "Twin Peaks" are visible, about 1- 2 kilometers away. The rock "Couch" is the dark, curved rock at right of Twin Peaks. A Lander petal is visible on the left, showing the fully deployed rear ramp, which rover Sojourner used to descend to the surface of Mars on July 5. Immediately to the left of the rear ramp is the rock "Barnacle Bill," which scientists found to be andesitic, possibly indicating that it is a volcanic rock (a true andesite) or a physical mixture of particles. Just beyond Barnacle Bill, rover tracks lead to Sojourner, shown using its Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument to study the large rock "Yogi." Yogi, low in quartz content, appears to be more primitive than Barnacle Bill, and appears more like the common basalts found on Earth.

The tracks and circular pattern in the soil leading up to Yogi were part of Sojourner's soil mechanics experiments, in which varying amounts of pressure were applied to the wheels in order to determine physical properties of the soil. During its traverse to Yogi the rover stirred the soil and exposed material from several centimeters in depth. During one of the turns to deploy Sojourner's Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer, the wheels dug particularly deeply and exposed white material. Spectra of this white material show it is virtually identical to the rock "Scooby Doo," and such white material may underlie much of the site. Deflated airbags are visible at the perimeter of the Lander petals.

Mars Pathfinder is the second in NASA's Discovery program of low-cost spacecraft with highly focused science goals. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, developed and manages the Mars Pathfinder mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The IMP was developed by the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory under contract to JPL. Peter Smith is the Principal Investigator.

Photojournal note: Sojourner spent 83 days of a planned seven-day mission exploring the Martian terrain, acquiring images, and taking chemical, atmospheric and other measurements. The final data transmission received from Pathfinder was at 10:23 UTC on September 27, 1997. Although mission managers tried to restore full communications during the following five months, the successful mission was terminated on March 10, 1998.

This is part 2 in a longer series on the economics on mars. I haven't written part 1 yet, but i'll publish it as soon as i do.

Lemmy might be the worst place to discuss this subject because lots of people here identify as politically left so anything that touches private company ownership and banks might be a bit of a sensitive issue here. But i'll write it anyways because my target audience is not lemmy as a whole, but whoever thinks the same way i do.

Mars will not be communist, nor will it be socialist (no "luxury gay space communism"). It will be ultra-capitalistic, probably more so than the US already is today. Why? Because i believe that expanding a settlement requires lots of hard work to be put into it; And if the experiences on earth are anything to go by, people avoid doing hard work except if it's 1. their hobby or 2. they get a reward for it. Experience has shown that 1. is a feasible way of doing things as long as you don't expect maximum performance to be done. Like, schools are still being operated even without a profit incentive because some people like teaching but you'd have to accept that the teachers will be less willing to put up with daily bullshit if they don't get paid. Also houses would be less big, streets would be less wide, cars would be less fast if people didn't get paid enough to actually crunch the numbers and do the hard work.

Mars is going to be a high-growth environment. This means that putting in hard work will be preferable to doing everything as a hobby, which is why the concept of being paid according to your work output will still be upheld, which is the core concept of ableism, at-will employment, and private ownership.

This time i want to discuss the role of banks and how they might form. Banks, in essence, provide an abstraction layer by replacing natural resources (like water) with abstract resources, in other words: money. So a bank might offer to store water for you in a big tank and hand it out to you later, in exchange for a fee. The transaction mechanism might involve giving out certificates that you gave your water to them, in other words: money. You give 1 kg of water to the bank, the bank gives 1 $ (issued by the bank) to you, and later you can give 1 $ back to the bank and they give you back almost 1 kg of water (minus a "transaction fee"). The advantage of such a transaction to the end user might be that storing large amounts of water is both 1. important, because you might need the water later and 2. expensive, if you want to store lots of it, since it requires space and might get stolen.

Water is an especially interesting product since it has lots of uses (you can generate oxygen through electrolysis and use it in green-houses for agriculture) and at the same time is kinda expensive, because it has to be extracted out of the ground, which is an expensive operation to do. So it has both high cost to produce and high usefulness which creates high demand, which are both rather stable, which makes it an ideal exchange commodity with almost stable value over time. Abstract money might reflect that commodity by mapping a certain amount of currency to a certain amount of water.

There's only two sources of power on other planets/outer space, and that is nuclear and solar.

Wind and water and biomass and geothermal and fossil fuels are out of the question, because of lack of said things or lack of oxygen to burn anything.

That being said, "nuclear" only works if it's steady-state and does not use water/air input. That excludes steam engines and such, and basically only leaves RTGs (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator).

These are solid-state devices (meaning they have no moving parts) and convert the heat directly into electricity using TEGs (Thermoelectric Generator). They don't need water or air input.

RTGs have an overall fuel efficiency of around 3-5%, meaning they translate around 3-5% of the radioactive decay heat of the nuclear material into electric power output.

Edit: For the sake of documenting stuff, i'd like to point out that my comment that "nuclear only works if it’s steady-state and does not use water/air input" is probably wrong, as some engines such as stirling engines can deal with normal-pressure air, no water needed. NASA is indeed building closed-loop stirling generators to be used on the moon with efficiencies around 20% IIRC instead of 5% which RTGs would have, so they're more efficient.