from
https://aeon.co/essays/what-dangers-must-we-overcome-before-we-can-live-on-mars

(Best to go to the above citation to see the pictures and videos.)

Thriving on Mars
Dust storms, long distances and freezing temperatures make living on
Mars magnificently challenging. How will we do it?

Wish you were here? A composite picture taken by the Curiosity rover’s
Navcams in both morning and afternoon light, 16 November 2021. Photo by NASA

Simon Mordenhas degrees in geology and planetary geophysics, and is the
author of 14 science fiction and fantasy novels. He was awarded the
Philip K Dick award in 2011 for the Petrovitch trilogy. His first
nonfiction book is The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars (2022). He
lives in England.

Edited byNigel Warburton
3,000 words

Can humans live on Mars? The answer is startlingly simple. Can humans
live in Antarctica, where the temperatures regularly fall below -50ºC
(-60ºF) and it’s dark for six months of the year? Can humans live below
the ocean, where pressure rapidly increases with depth to crushing
levels? Can humans live in space, where there’s no air at all?

As the limits of our ingenuity, our materials science and our chemistry
have grown, we’ve gone from being able to tolerate only a narrow band of
conditions to expanding our presence to almost every part of the globe,
and now beyond it. Even the most hostile environment we’ve ever faced –
the vacuum of space – has had a continuous human population for more
than two decades.

So why not Mars? If we can live in Antarctica, if we can live in space,
then surely it’s simply a question of logistics. If we can put enough
materiel on the surface of the Red Planet, then perhaps we can survive –
and even thrive – there.

But that ‘if’ is doing an awful lot of work. When we went to the Moon,
the astronauts had to carry everything for their visit in their tiny,
fragile landers. The Apollo missions spent between just one and three
days on the surface – and it took only three days to get to the Moon
itself. When a Mars-bound astronaut will spend months in space just
getting to the landing spot, spending just a couple of days on the
planet isn’t going to satisfy. Any mission, even the initial one, will
necessarily be planned to be months-long, and that increases the
complexity of the logistics enormously.

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Mars is a particularly difficult planet to land on. It’s too far away
from Earth to control any descent remotely – on average, a radio signal
takes 12 minutes to cover the distance – so everything has to be
preprogrammed in. A single error in either the computer or in its inputs
will result in a new and expensive crater, of which there’ve been many.
And once the command for landing has been given, there’s nothing that
anyone back in Mission Control can do to intervene – the length of time
it takes between that order, and a safe landing, is known as the ‘seven
minutes of terror’.

The tenuous Martian atmosphere also complicates landing. It’s thick
enough that any deorbiting spacecraft requires a heatshield to prevent
it from burning up, but even the latest generation of vast,
supersonic-rated parachutes struggles to provide significant purchase on
the tenuous air on the way down. What remains of the orbit velocity has
to be accounted for, or our landers will break against the frozen
Martian surface.

A vast silver rocket with everything the astronauts need for their
months-long stay simply isn’t practical

Various methods have been used, but the most consistently successful has
been the ‘sky crane’, a disposable frame fitted with retro-rockets that
burn until it’s hovering a few yards above the surface. It then winches
the lander down gently, disengages its connecting cables, and then flies
a safe distance away before its propellent runs out.

The skycrane portion of the Mars 2020 lander flying away from the
Perseverance rover after the rover touched down. Image taken by the
rover from the surface of Mars. Photo by NASA
As expected, these calculations are very finely judged. Every pound of
lander – the batteries, the solar panels, the scientific experiments –
needs several kilogrammes of fuel in the sky crane. And every kilogramme
of fuel in the sky crane requires several more kilogrammes of fuel on
the rocket that takes it to Mars orbit. We’d send bigger, better landers
to Mars if we could – but rocketry is at the very limits of our
capabilities, getting a rover the size of a subcompact down to the
ground. This has huge implications for conducting a successful crewed
mission to Mars.

While we might dream of a vast silver rocket slowly descending to the
dusty red surface, containing everything that the astronauts need for
their months-long stay, we have to realise that it simply isn’t
practical. That rocket, and the even-larger spaceship required to get it
there, is beyond our projected launch capabilities for decades, if not
centuries, to come. Planning for a successful Mars mission – for a
permanent presence on Mars – requires us to work smarter, and use every
advantage that we can. That includes those we can find on Mars itself.

An artist’s rendering of the Mars Ice Home concept. Photo by NASA/Clouds
AO/SEArch
Mars is a planet full of useful resources, and specific dangers. On the
plus side, if we pick our landing site sensibly, we don’t need to take
water. Water is heavy, and there’s nothing we can do to make it lighter.
It takes up space, and there’s nothing we can do to make it smaller.
And, even with the very best recycling facilities, the astronauts will
still require a certain amount of spare water. Yet on Mars, there are
many places where water, in the form of ice, is just part of the soil.
Stick a shovel in the ground, and half of what gets picked up is water
ice. And we can use that water for all sorts of things, not just
drinking. We can use it for chemistry.

We can split it using electrolysis into its component gases. We can
breathe the oxygen – which saves us from having to take tanked air. And
if we recombine it with the hydrogen, we have an explosive mixture we
might use as a rudimentary rocket fuel. If we go one stage further, we
can scavenge the carbon from Mars’s carbon dioxide atmosphere and
synthesise hydrocarbons for a better burn.

That carbon dioxide is also vital for plant growth. Add water, and a
growing medium, and suddenly supplementing our freeze-dried packets of
food becomes not just a possibility, but a mission goal. Humans consume
a lot of calories, but we also eat with our eyes. A side salad isn’t
just nutrition, but a morale booster.

Then there’s the stuff of Mars itself. We can use that as a construction
material: make bricks from it, or simply heap it up and over our
existing structures. And we really need to do that because life on the
Martian surface isn’t straightforward.

The red dust has become a nanoparticle and is a major hazard, both to us
and to our machines

Most immediately, there’s the temperature. Mars is an average of 80
million kilometres (50 million miles) further from the Sun, and its
atmosphere is too thin to buffer the extremes of daily variations.
Daytime temperatures in high summer can reach a balmy 21ºC (70ºF), but
that same day, just before dawn, will have recorded -90ºC (-130ºF).
Temperatures can fall as far as to freeze carbon dioxide out of the
atmosphere. The extra insulation provided by several feet of Martian
soil is going to be a welcome bonus.

Moreover, it’ll help with a long-term threat: radiation. The Sun spits
out charged particles all the time, as well as high-energy light in the
form of gamma and X-rays. On Earth, and to a lesser extent, on the Moon,
we’re protected by Earth’s large magnetic field, which extends out into
space and deflects the solar wind around us. Mars has no such magnetic
field, and while conditions at the surface aren’t acutely
life-threatening, every day that astronauts spend on the surface of
Mars, they are accumulating radiation damage 10 to 20 times faster than
they would on Earth – not counting the occasional solar flare that
squeezes a decade’s worth of exposure into a single event.

Burying the astronauts’ base beneath the ground is one relatively easy
solution to this radiation problem. So is building it inside a cave –
volcanic areas of Mars are the sites of lava tubes that now form huge
tunnels, with access through partial roof collapses.

The soil itself is toxic, rich with perchlorates. While these are a
potential source of oxygen, perchlorates are water-soluble: contaminated
soil cannot be used as a growing medium.

Then there is the dust. The red dust has been formed by hundreds of
millions of years of continuous grinding of volcanic ash, becoming so
fine that even the weak Martian winds can carry and keep it aloft for
weeks at a time. The dust has become a nanoparticle – averaging 3μm (one
10,000th of an inch) – and is a major hazard, both to us and to our
machines. It would be all but impossible to exclude the dust from living
spaces: astronauts would carry it in from trips outside, even with
assiduous measures – washing, hoovering, anti-static screens and air
filtration – it would become part of the air they breathed and the food
they ate. As well as the perchlorates previously mentioned, there’s
other cancer-causing compounds, and the damage that fine-grained rock
powder can cause specifically to lungs and eyes.

On 08/12/2022 18:58, a425couple wrote:
> from
> https://aeon.co/essays/what-dangers-must-we-overcome-before-we-can-live-on-mars
>
> (Best to go to the above citation to see the pictures and videos.)
>
> Thriving on Mars
> Dust storms, long distances and freezing temperatures make living on
> Mars magnificently challenging. How will we do it?

>

You would be better off moving to the Antarctic - at least there is air
and water there. In all seriousness if you want access to the asteroid
belt for raw materials then stick to Ceres where its easier to have a
base. I has water ice and you are not at the bottom of a gravity well.
All Mars has is a little water and lots of rust.

>"a425couple" wrote in message news:XsqkL.8964$Tcw8.4063@fx10.iad...

The biggest hurdle may be convincing enough voters that they should pay to
send humans instead of AI robots that can survive the conditions there.

On 12/9/22 10:11, Jim Wilkins wrote:
>> "a425couple"  wrote in message news:XsqkL.8964$Tcw8.4063@fx10.iad...
>
> The biggest hurdle may be convincing enough voters that they should pay
> to send humans instead of AI robots that can survive the conditions there.
>

Yeah !
That is a lot of truth there!

That is part of why I really like Elon Musk and
Jeff Bezos being interested in spending money
on humans into space.

I went to the library today. From the 'Friends of
the Library' sale shelves, I pick up and bought:
The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of
Permanent Fiscal Crisis Paperback – February 20, 2006
by David Osborne (Author), Peter Hutchinson (Author)

https://www.amazon.com/Price-Government-Getting-Results-Permanent/dp/0465053645