I had idea on biospheres.

[Bacardi]

Who say we have to model earth atmosphere? How about setting up

possible environments and see if we can get anything to

adapt to them. IE.. Mars Etc..

[Patrik]

Along those lines, have a look at this article:

Extremophiles Survive Simulated Conditions on Europa
Astrobiologists have reproduced the conditions on the surface of
Europa and found that some extremophiles survive
https://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27215/
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6590

(And yes, that's Europa, the moon of Jupiter - not Europe, the
continent)

Of course, it's a little odd that they simulated conditions on the
*surface* of Europa, since the best chance for life on Europa is in
the ocean underneath the ice, far away from any UV radiation.

[Andrew Barney]

Yeah, It's a great idea. I myself had been planning to buy some of
that martian soil they sell which is supposed to be really close to
the actual soil on mars, but i haven't got around to it yet. It's
called "Regolith Simulant", and they even have simulated lunar soil
available as well.

http://www.orbitec.com/store/simulant.html

I was thinking about plant experiments with it, but the biggest hurdle
with plants on mars is the very low quantities of Nitrogen. If i had
the ability to recreate the atmosphere of mars with the regolith soil
in a contained biosphere, i'd probably try growing some beans. Mostly
because they use bacteria to extract nitrogen from the atmosphere.
But, maybe plants should be tried after bacteria and fungi experiments
have been tried first. Plants are said to do poorly without mycorrhiza
fungi in the soil.

Would it be possible to mix some of this regolith soil with some agar
to see if fungi or bacteria are able to grow on it?

On Oct 7, 2:26 am, Patrik <patr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Along those lines, have a look at this article:
>
> Extremophiles Survive Simulated Conditions on Europa
> Astrobiologists have reproduced the conditions on the surface of

> Europa and found that some extremophiles survivehttps://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27215/http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6590

[Soffus VD]

It could be a good idea trying something different from vegetal life, because it seems too complex (and fragile) to adapt to other environments (different from those you can find on earth, jeje). Maybe you should try with lichens, they have proven to be very resistant organisms, can photosynthesize, and have enhanced absorption capabilities. They could be the first step to terraform a planet (or a controled biosphere).

[Mac Cowell]

Oh man, some little beans growing in a martian environmental simulation chamber, with some kind of microbial support consortia, would be priceless.  Do it.

-- 
Mac Cowell // 775.553.5005 // @100ideas

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[Ravasz]

I say do it!

Just plan the setup carefully before starting out.

I would for instance leave the agar out. If you can take agar to Mars,
then you can simply grow stuff in pure agar, no need to mix it with
soil there. Secondly, agar might be the choice for some bacteria, but
most of them don't really grow on the thing, and you need very special
additives for proper results. And even with our best culturing
strategies, it is said that less than 1% of environmental bacteria can
be cultured in vitro.

But you could try to take a handful of Earth soil as starter, as that
should contain zillions of bacteria. Mix it with regolith and incubate
it for a few weeks under anaerobic conditions. Then try to check what
survived.

I would wait with plants until you can steadily maintain a few species
of soil fungi/bacteria, but I definitely think this a very interesting
idea. Please keep us posted.

Cheers,
Mat

On okt. 7, 11:50, Andrew Barney <keen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, It's a great idea. I myself had been planning to buy some of
> that martian soil they sell which is supposed to be really close to
> the actual soil on mars, but i haven't got around to it yet. It's
> called "Regolith Simulant", and they even have simulated lunar soil
> available as well.
>
> http://www.orbitec.com/store/simulant.html
>
> I was thinking about plant experiments with it, but the biggest hurdle
> with plants on mars is the very low quantities of Nitrogen. If i had
> the ability to recreate the atmosphere of mars with the regolith soil
> in a contained biosphere, i'd probably try growing some beans. Mostly
> because they use bacteria to extract nitrogen from the atmosphere.
> But, maybe plants should be tried after bacteria and fungi experiments
> have been tried first. Plants are said to do poorly without mycorrhiza
> fungi in the soil.
>
> Would it be possible to mix some of this regolith soil with some agar
> to see if fungi or bacteria are able to grow on it?
>
> On Oct 7, 2:26 am, Patrik <patr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Along those lines, have a look at this article:
>
> > Extremophiles Survive Simulated Conditions on Europa
> > Astrobiologists have reproduced the conditions on the surface of

> > Europa and found that some extremophiles survivehttps://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27215/http://arxiv.org/ab...

[CoryG]

I noticed on that site that the Martian-like soil comes from the
volcanic areas of Hawaii, you might try starting with the bacteria and
fungus typically found breaking down volcanic rock. It does sound
like a really cool experiment - it might take a chain of different
organisms but it's probably one of the least costly of methods that
might be able to terraform the planet.

On Oct 7, 11:50 am, Andrew Barney <keen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, It's a great idea. I myself had been planning to buy some of
> that martian soil they sell which is supposed to be really close to
> the actual soil on mars, but i haven't got around to it yet. It's
> called "Regolith Simulant", and they even have simulated lunar soil
> available as well.
>
> http://www.orbitec.com/store/simulant.html
>
> I was thinking about plant experiments with it, but the biggest hurdle
> with plants on mars is the very low quantities of Nitrogen. If i had
> the ability to recreate the atmosphere of mars with the regolith soil
> in a contained biosphere, i'd probably try growing some beans. Mostly
> because they use bacteria to extract nitrogen from the atmosphere.
> But, maybe plants should be tried after bacteria and fungi experiments
> have been tried first. Plants are said to do poorly without mycorrhiza
> fungi in the soil.
>
> Would it be possible to mix some of this regolith soil with some agar
> to see if fungi or bacteria are able to grow on it?
>
> On Oct 7, 2:26 am, Patrik <patr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Along those lines, have a look at this article:
>
> > Extremophiles Survive Simulated Conditions on Europa
> > Astrobiologists have reproduced the conditions on the surface of

> > Europa and found that some extremophiles survivehttps://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27215/http://arxiv.org/ab...

[John Griessen]

On 10/08/2011 03:18 AM, CoryG wrote:
> I noticed on that site that the Martian-like soil comes from the
> volcanic areas of Hawaii, you might try starting with the bacteria and
> fungus typically found breaking down volcanic rock. It does sound
> like a really cool experiment - it might take a chain of different
> organisms but it's probably one of the least costly of methods that
> might be able to terraform the planet.

See the ohia tree that grows in new lava flows:
http://lickmyspoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ohialehuatree_pahoehoe.jpg

JG

[CoryG]

lol, that was a funny link - redirects to "http://www.lickmyspoon.com/
stealingisbad.gif" when you click it - probably a tracking thing -
here's some photos of the tree from Google if anyone wants a quick
link:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ohia+tree&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1918&bih=985

> See the ohia tree that grows in new lava flows:http://lickmyspoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ohialehuatree_pahoe...
>
> JG

[Patrik]

On Oct 7, 1:40 pm, Mac Cowell <m...@diybio.org> wrote:
> Oh man, some little beans growing in a martian environmental simulation chamber, with some kind of microbial support consortia, would be priceless. Do it.

Of course, building a martian environmental simulation chamber would
be no mean feat either! Low atmospheric pressure, average temperatures
of around -55 °C, a mostly CO2 atmosphere, and high UV due to thin
atmosphere...

For practicality, I would ignore the low atmospheric pressure. While
it's true that pressure may affect certain processes (like N and C
fixation), the headaches associate with a low-pressure chamber are
presumably more than an amateur scientist would want to put up with.

Likewise, you could reasonable ignore the low temperature issue, since
peak temperatures in the summer do go up into the twenties (Celsius).

That leaves the CO2 atmosphere (fill a plastic bag with CO2 and do
your experiments in there) and the high UV (add some UV lights). Keep
in mind that the martian atmosphere also contains very little
nitrogen, so nitrogen fixation using legumes (beans) may not work.
It's thought that there may be nitrate deposits on Mars though, which
may help explain its apparent nitrogen deficit.

[Mega]

I've done some ideas of biospheres (again :D )

And I came to think of it that SF6 would be really the way to go to transform Mars into a warmer planet with more pressure. The strongest greenhouse gas known, and very dense (great to improve the atmospheric pressure). And very stable.

But how can one engineer a bacterium that can take Fluorine out of rocks (there's plenty of F in mars rocks) and combine it with sulphur (also quite common on the surface)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Periodic_table.svg&page=1
Maybe a few enzymes that have evolved for Iodine will also work for fluorine (very similar properties- F is in the same row I in the periodic table)?
Is this thinking correct?
 

[Cathal Garvey]

Bonus feature; makes Mars uninhabitable to earth-based life due to epic
fluorine content*? A win for untouched nature, albiet entirely manmade! :)

* For all I know SF6 is entirely harmless, don't eat me biochemists

--
www.indiebiotech.com
twitter.com/onetruecathal
joindiaspora.com/u/cathalgarvey
PGP Public Key: http://bit.ly/CathalGKey

[Simon Quellen Field]

I have a small tank that holds 5 pounds of SF6.

We breathe it to talk like James Earl Jones.

It's a big hit at parties.

It is injected into eyes after vitrectomies, to make a gas bubble that diffuses

into the tissues more slowly than air would.

So, aside from the asphyxiation hazard, it is fairly harmless.

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[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Making SF6 biologically would be a huge challenge. There are precious few known enzymes that work on fluorine compounds. There's actually lots of high-profile research in this area, because fluorinated compounds are huge business, especially for use in pharmaceuticals.

Maybe a simpler hydrofluorocarbon might be more successful to pursue. Here's a starting point:

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2006/June/14060601.asp

[Tristan Eversole]

Fluorinated compounds can be nice and stable, but I believe we had some problems with their free-radical chemistry on Earth... does Mars get much in the way of UVC?

I'm pretty surprised to see people working on biosynthetic production of fluorinated compounds, but I really, really shouldn't be.

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[Ravasz]

I think we should just get used to the idea that if we ever establish a base on Mars, then it will be underground. No need for atmosphere or magnetic field. Dig a hole and problem solved. :)

[Michael Turner]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:13 AM, Ravasz <ravasz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think we should just get used to the idea that if we ever establish a base
> on Mars, then it will be underground. No need for atmosphere or magnetic
> field. Dig a hole and problem solved. :)

No need to dig a hole, even. Some large lava tubes seem to have been
breached by cave-ins or meteor strikes:

http://www.norwebster.com/astrohit/lavatube.html
http://www.space.com/7440-mars-caves-protect-microbes-astronauts.html

Some of the problems of habitability have been seriously investigated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caves_of_Mars_Project

Penelope Boston has done more work in this area than anyone else.

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/e7CiUfYqE-YJ.

[Simon Quellen Field]

Unless you plan to feed yourself.

Agriculture is somewhat less effective underground than in the sunlight.

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[Michael Turner]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 1:28 AM, Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com> wrote:
> Unless you plan to feed yourself.
> Agriculture is somewhat less effective underground than in the sunlight.

Growing plants is most effective when the light is in certain
frequencies that are perfect for photosynthesis -- frequencies that
might be more safely delivered on Mars by LEDs powered by surface PVs.

And safety is a concern, because . . . .

Agriculture is not effective at all if radiation is killing your crops.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576509001921
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~davidc/papers_mine/Cockell_Catling2000.pdf

Nor is agriculture effective if radiative heat losses are freezing
your crops -- and you'd have to thermally blanket your greenhouse
every night to prevent such losses, or else rely on stored energy of
some kind to heat the greenhouse.

http://www.marshome.org/files2/Bucklin2.pdf

The night-heater approach massively increases the PV requirements and
the battery requirements (or else there's reliance on nuclear power.)
The thermal blanket approach is at least an opportunity to dust off
the shell, but you'd better do a good cleaning -- otherwise very
abrasive dust particles will be ground into the shell by applying the
blanket, which will shorten the life of the greenhouse shell. And
speaking of its lifespan .....

The direct solar UV (there's no appreciable ozone layer) will be bad
for most of the materials from which an inflatable greenhouse might be
constructed. Long-term maintenance of surface greenhouses would
require industrial-scale recycling and manufacture:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576501000856

Martian soil would require significant processing to detoxify it:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032063310002722

So you might as well skip the idea of planting in soil entirely, and
go hydroponic -- or better: dramatically minimize the amount of water
needed with hydroponics, by employing aeroponics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics

Mars has lava tubes, and apparently some of these feature naturally
occurring entrances.

http://www.space.com/7440-mars-caves-protect-microbes-astronauts.html

Potential lava tube sizes have perhaps been overestimated, but even
the more sober analyses of available evidence suggest that they can be
about wide as the largest on Earth (perhaps as much 45 meters -- high
enough for trees, which might be desirable as a source of structural
materials, or even fuel, not just food.)

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/marsconcepts2012/pdf/4061.pdf

Given that you'd probably need large PV arrays anyway, underground
horticulture seems to be the optimal way to grow food from the power
they'd produce. Underground, there's no wind to blow dust, no
plant-killing and plastic-degrading UV, no solar storm or GCR
radiation penetration, no 4 degree K cosmic background radiative heat
sink in the sky (because there's no sky). You'd need a blanket of
insulation because it's still pretty cold underground on Mars, but
you'd probably need an insulating blanket anyway if you grew plants on
the surface. At least underground, you wouldn't need to take the
blanket off every morning and put it back on again every evening.

>>> > And I came to think of it that SF6 would be really the way to go to
>>> > transform Mars into a warmer planet with more pressure.

An idea that goes back to 1991 (McKay et al.)

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~davidc/papers_mine/Cockell_Catling2000.pdf

if not Lovelock and Allaby (1985): "The Greening of Mars".

If there's to be any significant DIYbio work on Mars biology,
endogenous or otherwise, I think the most productive focus would be on
caves.

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Wow, nice info Michael - thanks!

What do you think of the chances of growing anything (not plants - think extremophile microbes) under a layer of CO2 ice? Fairly opaque to UV yet may let some visible light through at the right thickness, insulates against night time temperatures, and provides a locally higher CO2 partial pressure. Not exactly a garden of Eden, but a well-chosen CO2 ice cave could be at least somewhat less nightmarish than being out in the open, for the right microbe.

Alternatively, what areas of life in Martian caves do you feel DIYbio could help with? If you were the NASA head of Mars colonization in an alternate universe, what's a million dollar challenge that you might want to propose for the biohackers?

[Michael Turner]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Patrik D'haeseleer <pat...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow, nice info Michael - thanks!
>
> What do you think of the chances of growing anything (not plants - think
> extremophile microbes) under a layer of CO2 ice? Fairly opaque to UV yet may
> let some visible light through at the right thickness, insulates against
> night time temperatures, and provides a locally higher CO2 partial pressure.

Cool idea! (Literally, too). I think there's been some work on the
idea of extremophiles living under Martian permafrost, but IIRC that's
water ice permafrost, not CO2.

Looking at it from the Mars-base point of view:

If there were some external surfacing on a CO2 shell that was both
well-sealed and highly IR-reflective, to help keep the shell cold
enough, sublimation losses might be kept to a bare minimum on the
outer surface, even during a high noon near the equator when Mars can
(briefly) deliver shirtsleeve temperatures. On the inner surface you
have the problem of getting warm enough -- the freezing point of CO2
is too low for plant life, and cold air will tend to flow down onto
the plants. However, if there's also an interior shell that can be
inflated to form a boundary layer, very cold air might be kept
circulating under the dry-ice shell, outside that interior shell, with
warmer air underneath. Frost (both of water-ice and CO2) would
undoubtedly form within that interior shell. This would further cut
the light input needed for photosynthesis. However, direct sunlight
supplies far more light than most plants need. Mars sunlight is less
intense than on Earth in the photosynthesis wavelengths, but not
dramatically so.

I like this idea because it's very "ISRU": the Martian atmosphere
supplies the bulk of the construction material for the pressure
vessel, and the rest is just light sheeting and coatings on it. I also
like it for its potential for self-construction: you might be able to
get it going just by inflating an exterior skin, and cooling the air
underneath it enough to start bulk dry-ice crystallization out of the
atmosphere, making a kind of CO2 igloo through steady accretion. Work
in bioplastics might make the idea more sustainable still -- once you
have enough plant growth, you might grow the feedstocks for making the
plastic used in both the outer sheath and inner shell, as they degrade
(and/or as agriculture expands).

But it would succeed or fail on the calculations, and I don't know if
anyone has done those. It sounds like a new idea. (Those are rare
enough.)

> Not exactly a garden of Eden, but a well-chosen CO2 ice cave could be at
> least somewhat less nightmarish than being out in the open, for the right
> microbe.

I think there are natural dry-ice formations are only at the Martian
poles, which raises another problem: surviving the winters with little
or no sunlight. Which is why I just ran with the idea (above) of
artificial, actively-maintained open-air CO2 structures in the sunnier
regions.

> Alternatively, what areas of life in Martian caves do you feel DIYbio could
> help with?

I'd much prefer that you put that question to Penny Boston. (And she'd
probably be happy to hear it.) She has put decades into cave biology,
and was one of the founding members of The Mars Underground, the
mothership organization of today's Mars Society. I hardly know biology
at all.

> If you were the NASA head of Mars colonization in an alternate
> universe, what's a million dollar challenge that you might want to propose
> for the biohackers?

I don't know enough about what could be done. I will say this,
however: I suspect that radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) will
end up being to be the heat source of choice for any manned Mars base.
Could they also be a sunlight substitute at the bottom of the food
chain? It's not as much of a stretch as you might think.

They found some sort of black fungus inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus.
It lives in the dark, using radiation to drive its own metabolic
processes. What might be able to eat it? Other scientists have found
microbes living very far underground that substitute naturally
occurring radiation from mineral radionuclides for ordinary
photosynthesis. If one could establish larger-scale food-chain links
*into* such processes that somehow keep human diets safe, it might
solve any number of problems in closed ecological life support systems
)CELSS) for long-duration space missions -- perhaps even for the
generation-ship interstellar concepts recently floating around with
DARPA funding. The types of radioactive material that biohackers would
need to experiment with such ideas might be fairly generic and safely
packaged, with established medical supply sources, for example. The
amounts needed might be quite small. Actually, if you collected enough
smoke detectors . . . um, well, let's not go there right now.

> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/A-p0lwUS3k8J.

[Simon Quellen Field]

The original post recommended using SF6 to raise the temperature, pressure, and atmospheric density to comfortable for Earth life. So most of your points are arguing against a straw-man. No one was suggesting growing crops out in the open in the current Martian atmosphere.

Your suggestion of using 20% efficient solar panels to drive 85% efficient LEDs in holes in the ground has many of the same problems of expense and large scale industrial development as non-biological terraforming ideas.

The original post seemed to be suggesting building a life form that could live in the current Mars conditions, and grow exponentially while gradually producing enough SF6 until more Earth-like organisms could take over.

That idea requires only current Mars-probe technology to deliver once the organism itself is created. Then you just wait. No huge mass of equipment would need to be sent to Mars or built there to support an underground agribusiness dependent on above-ground solar panels that have to withstand Martian dust storms.

If you are going to live underground in tunnels, why go all the way to Mars and have two deep gravity wells to contend with? Our own moon is easier to get to, as is Phobos.

The reason for picking Mars is that it has enough gravity to hold an atmosphere once it has been terraformed. If you aren't going to terraform and build an atmosphere, then smaller bodies are much more attractive.

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[Michael Turner]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com> wrote:
> The original post recommended using SF6 to raise the temperature, pressure,
> and atmospheric density to comfortable for Earth life. So most of your
> points are arguing against a straw-man. No one was suggesting growing crops
> out in the open in the current Martian atmosphere.

Someone pointed out that, compared to the highly unlikely task of
terraforming Mars in any way, going underground was the more likely
option. Your response, Simon, was that a lack of direct sunlight would
a serious problem for growing plants. So I assumed that YOU were
assuming the same context as the person you were responding to: an
unterraformed Mars.

I pointed out that photosynthesis underground is at least practicable,
whereas trying to have surface greenhouses with the current Martian
environment runs into all kinds of problems that hardly anybody
considers when they look at those thrilling artist conceptions of
surface-based Mars bases and colonies. Then you claim I'm arguing
against a strawman when you had actually led me to believe that you
were arguing against the idea of underground agriculture on an
*unterraformed* Mars.

I guess I just can't win. Not with the goalposts crawling all over the field.

> Your suggestion of using 20% efficient solar panels to drive 85% efficient
> LEDs in holes in the ground has many of the same problems of expense and
> large scale industrial development as non-biological terraforming ideas.

DID I suggest using only 20% efficient solar panels? I did not. I
supplied no efficiency numbers. As it happens, solar panels are
reaching 33% even for terrestrial applications. For space
applications, 44% has been achieved
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/09/24/40-efficient-uv-nanotech-pv-cells-for-space-receive-1-million-funding/

As for LEDs being "only" 85% efficient, you might have lost track of a
key point I made: if you're using PVs+LEDs to convert from parts of
the solar spectrum that are not usable for photosynthesis (UV down to
blue, and IR) into those that are, you claw back *some* of the
inevitable losses -- from the *plant's* point of view. And this is
entirely apart from the fact that you'd be doing photosynthesis in a
much more hospitable environment for plants: more easily protected
from bad radiation and from radiative heat losses. It's also entirely
apart from a consideration I didn't mention directly: LEDs give you a
way to diffuse light for more efficient photosynthesis (on a
photon-by-photon basis) than you get with direct sunlight, which comes
from only one direction, and is often a lot stronger than needed, even
on Mars.

> The original post seemed to be suggesting building a life form that could
> live in the current Mars conditions, and grow exponentially while gradually
> producing enough SF6 until more Earth-like organisms could take over.
>
> That idea requires only current Mars-probe technology to deliver once the
> organism itself is created.

In other words, once you have something that might be magical, an easy
solution to all your other problems is at hand. This is like the
argument that we could have the Space Elevator within a decade, once
we have absolutely perfect long-strand carbon nanotubes. (A single
imperfection degrades their strength by about 30%, it turns out.)

Arguments from unobtainium, in other words.

> Then you just wait. No huge mass of equipment
> would need to be sent to Mars or built there to support an underground
> agribusiness dependent on above-ground solar panels that have to withstand
> Martian dust storms.

I'm familiar with a range of arguments for terraforming Mars through
nanotechnology and the like. These arguments go back decades. Progress
in the interim? Negligible.

I might see human beings walking on Mars in my lifetime (if I live to
be 90, anyway.) So I tend to think more in terms of what can be done
without magical technological leaps. DIYbio would be well-advised to
do the same, if it wants to contribute to a plausible space future.

> If you are going to live underground in tunnels, why go all the way to Mars
> and have two deep gravity wells to contend with? Our own moon is easier to
> get to, as is Phobos.

The Moon is very carbon-poor, and very volatiles-poor. Phobos
apparently is not carbon-poor (and might have a high H2O component)
but it's still at the end of a very long trip and lacks scenery.
(Don't get me wrong: I like the Phobos-before-Mars manned mission
concepts. Very much. The problem is, the "customer" here -- the
taxpayer -- just yawns during the sales pitch.)

In the end, I have to admit that sending humans to Mars is mainly a
symbolic thing anyway. It's fun to fantasize about it. I just prefer
to fantasize without the unobtainium. It makes the problems more
challenging and realistic. It's also humbling. We're not gods (yet.)
And we're very dependent on a narrow range of conditions here on
Earth. Trying to design practical Mars habitats under realistic
assumptions based on present-day technological possibilities is a very
clarifying exercise on both counts.

[j s]

Hi All,

Has anyone considered Mars radiation?  Mars has a thinner atmosphere compared to Earth and it is mostly of Carbon Dioxide, has higher solar radiation, and compared to Earth, Mars' magnetic field is weak and not uniform enough to deflect radiation that could kill plants and animals. Maybe underground is the way to go if a human is tending the biosphere or alternative. 

There are old technologies that allows us to grow indoors without soil as a medium. What is soil anyway? Its just a media that holds the roots in place to prevent a plant from toppling over or blowing away, in most cultivated desert land minerals and other supplemental nutrients are just added. Organic gardening use buzzwords like microrhizome and fungii which is good but could easily mutate new strains that are more harmful than helpful to the human stewards. Those of you who have played around with fungii know what I mean. Why not aquaponics if fish survived in low g, hydroponics or aeroponics if they can't? That's for food production for breathable air production I think spirolina a micro algae that loves CO2 could be used in vacuum sided glass tubes that could be tuned for the right temperature, that could absorb/filter the light and pump the right amount of CO2 for optimal algae growth. As a bonus spirulina can also be used for food or fuel 'if they have an atmosphere'.  Spirulina is also the most efficient food source in terms of water and energy used for propagation.

To provide lighting why not take advantage of light tubes to provide the light the plants needed to grow if grown underground. The tubes can be closed or covered when solar storms are a threat. That way PV power could be used mostly for essential electronics and would help lessen expensive costs and reliability issues with alternative power. And with light tubes you don't need to have the plants or the structure to face the sunlight. 

Another benefit of living underground is cost, if pioneers actually planned to live there it would be cheaper to cut out the side of an asteroid crater than to haul titanium and thick quartz glass to build a bio dome. Maintaining livable temperature is also important and costly if done above ground. Weight, and limited volume on a craft should be considered in design. Anything that needs power to work would need a lot of space, besides the means to power it.

As for a long term Terra forming option I recall seeing something about breeding a strain of lichen that thrives in low atmosphere, could withstand low moisture, and heavy radiation. While alive they could generate oxygen, when they die add nitrogen to enrich the soil and help retain more moisture.

There are other technologies I'm aware off that make it possible to live on Mars which I haven't listed. We could do it now if people would fund it, and someone crazy enough would volunteer to see it through. Anyway that's my long winded ten cents. Cheers

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[Mega]

I think there are natural dry-ice formations are only at the Martian 
poles, which raises another problem: surviving the winters with little 
or no sunlight.

Why? On special polar regions, you have half the year countinuosly sunlight. 

The other half year it's dark. The bucteria *must* form spores to survive (actually, does a spore "live"?) 

The original post recommended using SF6 to raise the temperature, pressure, and atmospheric density to comfortable for Earth life.

Actually not. It should not be confortable to Earth life, but acceptable / survivable. 

The original post seemed to be suggesting building a life form that could live in the current Mars conditions, 
and grow exponentially while gradually producing enough SF6 until more Earth-like organisms could take over.

Actually, there are a few places where microbes could thrive on Mars right now. Hellas planitia has up to 12 mBars! Water, especially salty water can there be liquid.

When the atmosphere gets more dense over time, the spots where life can thrive get bigger and bigger. (Average pressure increases, so where now are 8 mBars we'll get 10 mbars -> 10 mbars keeps pure water liquid over some degrees range)

Now that more life can grow, even more SF6 is produced, making it a runaway greenhousing plan.

That idea requires only current Mars-probe technology to deliver once the organism itself is created. Then you just wait. No huge mass of equipment would need to be sent to Mars or built there to support an underground agribusiness dependent on above-ground solar panels that have to withstand Martian dust storms.

Exactly, that's the benefit od f microbes, they divide themselfs. When you set up a chemical greenhouse gas factory on Mars, it won't grow exponantially bigger, unless you bring tonnes of steel etc. to Mars. 

 pointed out that photosynthesis underground is at least practicable, 
whereas trying to have surface greenhouses with the current Martian 
environment runs into all kinds of problems 

That's why we shouldn't start with greeenhouses, but bring some bacteria into niches which will do the terraforming basicly for free. 

I'm familiar with a range of arguments for terraforming Mars through 
nanotechnology and the like. 

Nanotechnology hasn't reached this scale. Engineering bacteria to produce greenhouse gasses basically *is* nanotechnology. Kind of. 

DIYbio would be well-advised to 
do the same, if it wants to contribute to a plausible space future. 

Yeah, but it won't be allowed to bring microbes to Mars because of planetary protection. At least considering NASA. 

What e.g. Mars One will do is not controlled by NASA, anyway.

People always scream and have fear of radiation. Even on Earth we have background radiation from the rocks&soil. 

In Brazilia, we have the strongest back-ground radiation. And people are still alive. 

Mars shields people a bit with it's atmosphere. 

And, by the way: A NASA study concluded, that stronger radiation is better to cope with than weak radiation. Because with weak radiation the DNA may get damaged and doesn't recognize it. 

When subjected to stronger radiation, the body activeates repair mechanisms. 

[Michael Turner]

> Mars shields people a bit with it's atmosphere.

But how much?

===
"Apollo 17 did not launch until December. In the August, after the
safe return of Apollo 16, a large sunspot appeared on the solar
surface and let fly a rash of solar flares that pumped deadly
radiation into space. Had Schmitt, or any other astronauts, been in
space at the time, they would have perished from a fatal dose of solar
radiation."
===
http://sciencefocus.com/blog/how-apollo-astronauts-avoided-deadly-solar-flare

Bad science reporting? Not exactly. Here's NASA:

===
"A large sunspot appeared on August 2, 1972, and for the next 10 days
it erupted again and again," recalls Hathaway. The spate of explosions
caused, "a proton storm much worse than the one we've just
experienced," adds Cucinotta. Researchers have been studying it ever
since.

Cucinotta estimates that a moonwalker caught in the August 1972 storm
might have absorbed 400 rem. Deadly? "Not necessarily," he says. A
quick trip back to Earth for medical care could have saved the
hypothetical astronaut's life.
===
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/27jan_solarflares/

And that's just the solar protons. There's also cosmic ray bombardment
(Mars has much less of a magnetic field), and strong ultraviolet (much
less of an ozone layer.)

Mars is *much* more hostile to life in the open than the most
inhospitable desert on Earth. The exceptional circumstances that might
be found here and there, now and then, doesn't change that fact.

And I still haven't seen a credible argument for any mechanism by
which synthesized microbial ecosystems could make SF6 from their
natural environment. I think it falls down on sheer physics, never
mind chemistry or biological. In particular, liberating F from
anything else requires a lot of energy (the flip side of its
reactivity). Liberating F in quantity would also require fairly F-rich
ores. And how do the organisms generate the required energy? From
sunlight? In which case, production would be limited to only where
sunlight falls on the Martian surface, and no further down. (And how
do you get the required intensity within a microbe?) From geothermal
sources? Then it's limited to places where there is such activity on
Mars.

-michael turner

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[Simon Quellen Field]

I can't find any point on which I disagree.

And, of course, there is also the option of directing the light into the

tunnels using mirrors and light pipes.

The cost of going to Phobos might be lower than going to the moon.

Gravity wells cause problems.

You'd still have the long trip, with its need for shielding and life support

consumables.

Of the reasons to put people on Mars, one of the first would be to look for

life, and terraforming would make that difficult. Studying Mars would not

need planet-wide inhabitation, so tunnels would do. If we're looking for a

place to use as a backup in case something happens to Earth, Mars looks

like the most attractive place, and terraforming the best way to make it

habitable, but that may be thousands of years away.

-----

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[Simon Quellen Field]

Fluorine is the thirteenth most abundant element in the crust of the Earth,

(0.065%), followed by sulfur (0.05%).

One would expect similar abundances on Mars.

So presumably any organism that requires sulfur for its metabolism would

find roughly equal parts fluorine in its environment.

This is not to say that creating an organism that can make SF6 is easy,

let alone in Martian conditions.

But swapping calcium for sulfur in a compound is not that energetically

unfavorable. It isn't like you are liberating free fluorine. Swapping sulfur

for the aluminum in cryolite is also an option. The energetics are not

worse than making sugars from carbon dioxide and water, or reducing

molecular nitrogen to ammonia, both of which are commonly done by

life on Earth.

Once you had an atmospheric pressure of one Earth atmosphere on Mars,

due to the SF6, presumably you would also have equivalent shielding from

solar protons. Whether you also had equivalent shielding from UV and

cosmic rays does not seem that likely, but I have no data on which to

base that assumption.

Terraforming Mars still seems an unlikely project for DIYBio.

:-)

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[Michael Turner]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 1:27 AM, Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com> wrote:
> I can't find any point on which I disagree.
>
> And, of course, there is also the option of directing the light into the
> tunnels using mirrors and light pipes.

Which might be more economical than the LEDs, for all I know.
Especially in the longer run, since bioplastic optical fibers look
possible, suggesting some ISRU scalability via the ecosystems hosted:

http://www.today.colostate.edu/story.aspx?id=6671

> The cost of going to Phobos might be lower than going to the moon.
> Gravity wells cause problems.
> You'd still have the long trip, with its need for shielding and life support
> consumables.
>

In energy costs, Phobos is definitely "closer" than the moon -- you
get the Interplanetary Transport Network

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_transport_network

working in your favor starting at Earth-Moon L1, which itself is
reachable in part through chaotic orbital dynamics to reduce fuel
requirements. Then there's aerobraking for free in the Martian
atmosphere to help reach Phobos. But in logistical costs for missions
that require continuous life support? That's a problem, as you point
out. We know humans-to-the-moon can be done with "backpack logistics"
(i.e., take most of your consumables with you). After all, it's
already been done. Several times. But that's an expedition time on the
order of weeks. Earth-Phobos is on the order of years.

I think the best bet for humans-to-Phobos (and eventually to Mars) is
to steadily build up Mars-cycler transportation infrastructure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler

The initially-unmanned cyclers could be built out as teleoperated bases for

(1) long-duration GCR-exposure labs for closed ecological life
support systems, to better understand the lifecycle effects on
megafauna like ourselves and to experiment with how make an ecosystem
that "duck-and-cover", and recover, from solar-proton storms;

(2) rotating-tether assistance for insertion of Mars probes into
useful orbits or landing trajectories.

IIRC, a rotating tether has already been demonstrated for de-orbiting
satellites near Earth. A rotating cycler environment that simulated
Mars gravity at its outer edges would enable long-duration
gravitational biology in parallel with long-duration GCR exposure
studies. So there's potential synergy between the two functions.

Delivering and managing an ecopoiesis "starter yeast" package
(microorganisms, spores, seeds, frozen ova, initial nutrients) to
Phobos then becomes *relatively* easy. You might put it in a robot
that burrows into the regolith for shielding (trailing behind an
extension cord to some PV arrays) and inflates a shell for a
microgravity ecosystem. This could be a relatively easy way to test
concepts for -- and eventually help establish -- a continuously manned
research station on Phobos. But only *relatively*. All this stuff is
going to be very hard.

Still, I think DIYbio might be able to help, especially if there's
enough DIYbio coordination to reduce duplication of effort, in
collaboration with more space-related hackerspace teams. I believe
there are new, cheaper, short-duration microgravity-wet-lab concepts
enabled by this near-space high-altitude ballooning I see a lot of,
recently. It might be done by dropping aerodynamic shells through the
upper atmosphere from such balloons, with internal near-vacuums inside
the aeroshell within which the wet lab could be dropped. For the
longer-duration microgravity studies, commercial outfits like
NanoRacks already deliver packages for ISS biology lab placement.

I think this kind of effort is not merely possible but important:
humans-to-Phobos-then-maybe-Mars will be an easier sell to the
taxpayer if they can see "first living cockroach on Phobos" or
whatever (silly as that might sound), and also see that relatively
modest DIY efforts contributed to it. I think manned space programs
are essentially a form of play at the very high end. Most games evolve
from humble beginnings. If DIYbio gets its space game on, and helps
enable Phobos Cockroach One (or something on a similar scale but a
little less absurd, I hope), other players are likely to follow, and
taxpayers are more likely to be sold.

> Of the reasons to put people on Mars, one of the first would be to look for
> life, and terraforming would make that difficult. Studying Mars would not
> need planet-wide inhabitation, so tunnels would do.

Even teleoperation from Mars orbit, inside Phobos, might do. It might
*have* to do. It helps avoid forward contamination of Mars, for one
thing.

> If we're looking for a
> place to use as a backup in case something happens to Earth, Mars looks
> like the most attractive place, and terraforming the best way to make it
> habitable, but that may be thousands of years away.

The Backup Planet case is a good one, but it hasn't been compelling so
far. Why not? There's quote I like very much in reference to space
programs, and to most long-term (even utopian) visions for space
development:

"A distant end is not an end but a trap. The end we work for must be
closer, the labourer’s wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer
lightning of personal happiness...." - Alexander Herzen, via Tom
Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia.

DIYbio is a movement because it's fun. Now. Because some of the
enabling tech became much cheaper. Same can be said of the more
mechanical/electronic hackerspaces. These activities get you some of
that "pleasure in the work done," and -- often enough -- some of that
"summer lightning".

It's getting to the point where we can have DIY space hacking, too. My
own entry point was in this project, starting late last year:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space

and I hope to put something biological up.

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 9:55:10 AM UTC-7, Simon Field wrote:

This is not to say that creating an organism that can make SF6 is easy,

let alone in Martian conditions.

Yeah, SF6 is probably a nonstarter for biosynthesis. Way too far away from any known enzymatic reactions we can build upon. There may be some other GHG's that could be much easier to synthesize though - maybe some fluorohydrocarbons that are more compatible with biochemistry.

[David Murphy]

radiation alone shouldn't be that bad an issue since organisms can ramp up DNA repair pretty massively.
If stuff can live in the coolant of nuclear reactors then it could survive the radiation on mars.

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[Michael Turner]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 6:37 PM, David Murphy <murphy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> radiation alone shouldn't be that bad an issue since organisms can ramp up
> DNA repair pretty massively.
> If stuff can live in the coolant of nuclear reactors then it could survive
> the radiation on mars.

Most proposals for terraforming the atmosphere of Mars in any
reasonable time-frame, e.g., Margarita Marinova's work on
perfluorocarbons,

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast09feb_1/

involve lots of nuclear reactors to power the synthesis of GHGs (it
would take 100 reactors for 800 years, Marinova estimates). Perhaps a
more productive emphasis what would be on what can be biosynthesized
given that there'd presumably be lots of nuclear reactor coolant
(whisking past lots of radiation) to work with, 24x7. As I mentioned
in earlier e-mail, there's some black fungus growing inside the
Chernobyl sarcophagus.

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20070422222547data_trunc_sys.shtml

Anyway, terraforming isn't going to be anybody's hobby activity any time soon.

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[David Murphy]

I was thinking more of the Pseudomonas at Los Alamos' Omega West where they were able to survive and breed inside a running reactor.  

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

You know, perhaps just focusing on mechanisms of tolerating and even thriving on ionizing radiation could make for an interesting DIYbio project. Forget about the extreme cold, near vacuum, and posionous soil - if we can engineer organisms that will live happily under a UV LED, that would be a significant step towards for space biology!

What would it take, for example, to make E. coli or yeast UV resistant, drawing upon some of the mechanisms found in Deinococcus radiodurans, or some of these melanin producing "radiosynthesizing" fungi in Chernobyl?

Patrik

PS: Here's the original research article in PLoS One about the fungi living off radiation:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000457

On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 2:56:05 AM UTC-7, Michael Turner wrote:

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 6:37 PM, David Murphy <murphy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> radiation alone shouldn't be that bad an issue since organisms can ramp up
> DNA repair pretty massively.
> If stuff can live in the coolant of nuclear reactors then it could survive
> the radiation on mars.

 

Perhaps a

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

By the way, I was trying to track down that story, since I hadn't really heard of it before. In the initial paper, the two Pseudomonas isolates from the reactor were actually shown to be a lot more radiation sensitive than a previously know Clostridium strain, and they may actually have been growing in areas where the radiation was much lower:

"The apparent anomaly of the OWR contaminant surviving a radiation dose of 930,000 rads or higher may have been due to the following factors: (1) a locus of infection in the pool where the water circulation was minimal may have permitted cell destruction to be offset by cell multiplication; (2) the disintegrating mixed-bed deionizer and the felt filters may have been sites for cell growth, thus reseeding the pool through the circulation of water; or (3) the organism may have suffered a loss of radioresistance after isolation."

No real follow up papers referencing this work, so it may wind up having been a dead end...

Patrik

[Michael Turner]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 2:49 AM, Patrik D'haeseleer <pat...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You know, perhaps just focusing on mechanisms of tolerating and even
> thriving on ionizing radiation could make for an interesting DIYbio project.
> Forget about the extreme cold, near vacuum, and posionous soil - if we can
> engineer organisms that will live happily under a UV LED, that would be a
> significant step towards for space biology!

To the extent that UV is used in Mars probe decontamination, the way
that cleaning procedures have backfired somewhat, breeding more
resistance, might hold clues:

http://aem.asm.org/content/78/16/5912.short

"The presence of OTU [operational taxonomic unit(s)] representative of
actinobacteria, deinococci, acidobacteria, firmicutes, and
proteobacteria on spacecraft surfaces suggests that certain bacterial
lineages persist even following rigorous quality control and cleaning
practices. The majority of bacterial OTU observed as being recurrent
belonged to actinobacteria and alphaproteobacteria, supporting the
hypothesis that the measures of cleanliness exerted in spacecraft
assembly cleanrooms (SAC) inadvertently select for the organisms which
are the most fit to survive long journeys in space."

> What would it take, for example, to make E. coli or yeast UV resistant,
> drawing upon some of the mechanisms found in Deinococcus radiodurans, or
> some of these melanin producing "radiosynthesizing" fungi in Chernobyl?

Probably one of the better things one might do for long-duration space
missions is engineer an organism that thrives cheerily on solar-storm
proton bombardment but that's not very competitive otherwise.

People will need to retreat to much more heavily-shielded areas of a
spacecraft (or any Moon/Mars surface base) during solar storms. But
what about their CELSS (Closed Ecological Life Support System)? Do
they take the living things into the shelter with them? That means yet
more dead-weight shielding. (Payload mass = expense, in space.) And
much more of everything else, to make the CELSS portable and packable
on very short notice.

How about just letting the CELSS die? You could harvest and eat
whatever you can out of the ripe stuff, before it goes bad[*], freeze
the rest of the food you harvest then, and compost what's of the
ecosystem for CELSS regeneration. Problem: composting and regeneration
will take time. More time means means more emergency food storage. Any
way you look at it, you'd lose CELSS productivity. (And some human
productivity: you'd have more demoralized human beings. The
psychological benefits of growing stuff during long-duration missions
are considered significant. So is having fresh food all the time.)

But what if you have some organism that actually *likes* proton
bombardment? What if it goes wild *during* the solar storm, using
proton flux for energy and immediately going to work on all the dead
and dying organisms around it for nutrients? It might radically reduce
the composting period, and thus get the CELSS "rebooted" much faster.

A bonus: every proton that one of these organisms intercepts for
energy would be one less proton that human beings would need to be
shielded from. To the extent that an ecosystem's biomass can be used
for solar-storm shielding to begin with,[**] a rapidly proliferating
proton-loving organism only enhances its shielding value.

> What would it take, for example, to make E. coli or yeast UV resistant,
> drawing upon some of the mechanisms found in Deinococcus radiodurans, or
> some of these melanin producing "radiosynthesizing" fungi in Chernobyl?
>

> PS: Here's the original research article in PLoS One about the fungi living
> off radiation:
> http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000457

And I wonder what happens when you hit the melanin in this fungus with
high-energy protons? You might need a cyclotron to find out. But
cyclotrons have been done in DIY style. It's become kind of thing,
actually:

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/august-2010/the-do-it-yourself-cyclotron

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

---
[*] Radiation can sterilize dead things enough to prevent some kinds
of bacterial decomposition. Food storage (except for solar-storm
shelter snack larders) might reasonably be deployed around the outer
walls of a spacecraft, as added shielding.

[**] There are serious proposals to make shielding multi-purpose,
including CELSS functions. Most recently, there's the Water Walls
concept: http://www.spacearchitect.org/pubs/GLEX-2012.10.1.9x12503.pdf
. . . God, I love NIAC Rebooted. It's like there's a real NASA again
or something.

> On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 2:56:05 AM UTC-7, Michael Turner wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 6:37 PM, David Murphy <murphy...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > radiation alone shouldn't be that bad an issue since organisms can ramp
>> > up
>> > DNA repair pretty massively.
>> > If stuff can live in the coolant of nuclear reactors then it could
>> > survive
>> > the radiation on mars.
>
>
>>
>> Perhaps a
>> more productive emphasis what would be on what can be biosynthesized
>> given that there'd presumably be lots of nuclear reactor coolant
>> (whisking past lots of radiation) to work with, 24x7. As I mentioned
>> in earlier e-mail, there's some black fungus growing inside the
>> Chernobyl sarcophagus.
>>
>> http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20070422222547data_trunc_sys.shtml
>>
>> Anyway, terraforming isn't going to be anybody's hobby activity any time
>> soon.
>

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> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/6EvEuEX4Ly4J.

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

A 10-100MeV proton accelerator is going to be somewhat outside the typical DIYbio amateur's capabilities though. Let's just start with UV, because that will likely be hard enough to begin with. And anything that can survive a proton storm will likely need to be resistant to UV as well.

Patrik

[Mega]

Water will shield you well against radiation. So essentially, the algae living in the centre of the 'aquarium' will survive, if it's thicker than say 2 meters.

[Michael Turner]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 4:50 PM, Mega <masters...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Water will shield you well against radiation. So essentially, the algae living in the centre of the 'aquarium' will survive, if it's thicker than say 2 meters.

Can you put that aquarium wall all the way around a Mars craft's
living space? Maybe. But it'll cost ya. Acquaint yourself with the
Rocket Equation, if you haven't already.

Let's do some math, shall we?

The pressurized interior volume of ISS is around 900 cubic meters.
With a full crew of 6, that's 150 cubic meters per crew member. Let's
say that only 20% of ISS interior volume is for human use and life
support, and the rest is for science. Further assume that a manned
Mars ship doesn't need to do science, or to take scientific equipment
along. The mass of ISS is 450,000 kg. So your Mars ship might offer
only about 30 cubic meters per crewmember, and about 15,000
kg/crewmember. WITHOUT shielding beyond what ISS offers (which is far
from adequate for getting through solar storm activity outside the
Earth's magnetic shield, and which does not stop GCR particles out
there either; metal shielding makes GCR events worse for living
things, actually.)

180 cubic meters of interior volume -- that would be a cube of about
5.5 meters on a side. If each side is a 2-meter wall of water, that's
about 450 cubic meters of water. Mass of that water? It works out to
about the same as ISS's mass already, to shield an interior volume of
only 1/5th as much. This includes no life support equipment beyond the
surrounding "aquarium", no pressure vessel materials, no other
amenities, no nothing -- just the water. Note that I've been pretty
systematically underestimating each factor all along, to be generous.

If there's any way you can get by with much less shield mass during
transit to and from Mars, perhaps by restricting the water to
shielding a cramped temporary shelter, you'd do it. You might even
consider having crew immerse themselves in the water during a solar
storm, clustered together near the center of a water tank with shared
breathing apparatus. Six people huddled together at the center of such
a tank, with a buffer of 2 meters of water in every direction, might
be about 100 cubic meters of water (think ellipsoid shape) -- less
than 1/4th as much water mass as required to surround the entire
living quarters + CELSS unit with water. This might reduce the overall
unfueled spacecraft mass by almost 75% over the exterior-water-wall
configuration.

Then consider fuel. When you work out the problems of accelerating the
craft to a Mars trajectory, and figure that fuel costs tend to grow
exponentially with increasing payload mass, for any given target
velocity, you start to see the problem I'm talking about.

Engineering an energetic-proton-o-philic organism that can help a Mars
mission crew more quickly "reboot" an ecological life-support system
that's been killed by energetic protons could help radically reduce
shielding requirements, and even more radically reduce overall mission
cost. Maybe not by much -- "reboot" times and emergency food storage
requirements might be acceptable anyway. But it could help reduce
both.

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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[Mega]

Why do you assume the spacecraft is surrounded by water?

Solar storms usually come from the sun. If you shield that direction (where the solar arrays point at), you'll be fine.

Also, the water can be gotten from Mars frozen soil. During the transit time (spacecraft's essentially free falling), no storms should happen. (You spend years on Mars, which makes solar flares more likely to be in your lifetime)






On Friday, October 7, 2011 4:31:16 AM UTC+2, jake jr wrote:

Who say we have to model earth atmosphere? How about setting up

possible environments and see if we can get anything to

adapt to them. IE.. Mars Etc..

[Michael Turner]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Mega <masters...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why do you assume the spacecraft is surrounded by water?

I don't. I assume that would require too much mass.

I DO assume, for purposes of solar storm shelter design, that the
shelter has shielding in every direction. Everyone else who looks at
this problem does that too. Because they need to -- see below.

> Solar storms usually come from the sun. If you shield that direction (where
> the solar arrays point at), you'll be fine.

You assert, flatly. I'd watch that, if I were you.

Aren't you assuming that the proton flow is more or less coherent?
It's not. It's basically a hydrogen plasma -- 100,000 to 150,000 deg K
at 1 AU from the sun. The component of a given proton's velocity that
owes only to ejection from the sun really isn't that high. A solar
storm immerses an interplanetary spacecraft in something like gas
that's very thin but extremely hot -- some of these particles can
reach relativistic velocities, even in backscatter *toward* the sun.

So, unsurprisingly, every mention I find for the geometry of crew
solar storm shelters events speaks of lining the walls. For example,

"For the Boeing-proposed NEA mission, a Radiation Storm Shelter would
consist of a “[s]torm shelter in hard inner core of the inflatable
habitat.” This shelter would consist of “stored water and polyethylene
… to line the walls of the shelter” for radiation protection for the
crew."

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/03/boeing-outlines-new-modulestechnologies-for-nea-missions/

> Also, the water can be gotten from Mars frozen soil.

You're assuming there's significant infrastructure for water
extraction already there. Kind of cart-before-horse, isn't it? Mars is
very dry -- just extracting enough water to grow things would be a
major mining and refining effort. I'm looking at the economics of how
you'd *get* to Mars safely and comfortably, and how to keep going to
and from Mars.

If you needed to resupply a return craft with water for shielding and
CELSS, extracting water from Phobos (rather than lifting it from the
Martian surface) probably makes much more sense than extracting it
from Mars and lifting it through Mars' much steeper gravity well.
Phobos seems to be made very much of carbonaceous chondrites. Those
can have high H2O content (3%-22%), much "wetter" than the Martian
surface. If Phobos is what they think it is, any initial Mars surface
base that's staged from an initial Phobos base (the mission profile I
prefer) will probably get most of its starter water from Phobos.

> During the transit time
> (spacecraft's essentially free falling), no storms should happen.

Why not? Do you have some kind of clout with the relevant gods?

The "spacecraft's essentially free falling" to and from Mars only
after acceleration. The amount of fuel needed to achieve those
accelerations goes up more or less exponentially with payload mass
(even with Mars cycler orbits -- see below). And water is heavy.

> (You spend
> years on Mars, which makes solar flares more likely to be in your lifetime)

Human lifetimes on Mars pretty much imply Mars cyclers for
transportation, for resupply logistics and to bring in new people.
(Even Robert Zubrin admits that settlements would remain dependent on
Earth for centuries.) Mars cycler orbits, though designed for
minimum-delta-V continuous round-trip capacity, require *some* delta V
to maintain, and would probably need CELSS to keep feeding the people
being transported. Delta V gets ever more expensive with added
spacecraft mass. And even the shortest proposed cycler orbit
(Aldrin's) is over two years. That's a lot of time to be exposed to
solar particle events. That's also a lot of time to be cooped up --
people will want decent amounts of living space just to maintain their
sanity, with living things for their ornamental value as well, not
just for food. "Rebooting" CELSS if it gets radiation-poisoned is a
problem that would need to be solved. Shielding it all is probably a
non-starter.

I notice you're using a lot of hand-waving arguments, Mega. Let me
suggest: look stuff up first. Numbers, especially. It's not that hard.
Some of my numbers above actually came from web materials geared
toward teachers of high school science courses.

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

> On Friday, October 7, 2011 4:31:16 AM UTC+2, jake jr wrote:
>>
>> Who say we have to model earth atmosphere? How about setting up
>> possible environments and see if we can get anything to
>> adapt to them. IE.. Mars Etc..
>

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[Mega]

Mars cyclers won't be realized by NASA very probably. They rather use the traditional approach.

Well, you say Mars is dry? Orbiter data say 6% of weight at curiosities place. Phoenix has found water. At the poles there is water. Of course, you would send a robot first. That harvests the water.

[Michael Turner]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 8:10 PM, Mega <masters...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mars cyclers won't be realized by NASA very probably. They rather use the traditional approach.

Nobody can know for sure what NASA is going to do in 20 years. Check
out Mason Peck, NASA's current Chief Technologist. Nobody would accuse
him of lacking imagination or long-term commitment.

> Well, you say Mars is dry? Orbiter data say 6% of weight at curiosities place.

Citation please?

Your "6%" doesn't stand up very well, from recent instrumentation
readings taken BY Curiosity itself:

"The prediction based on previous measurements using the Mars Odyssey
orbiter was that the soil in Gale Crater would be around 6% water. But
the preliminary results from Curiosity show only a fraction of this,"
said Maxim Mokrousov (Russian Space Research Institute), the lead
designer of the instrument."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120928085214.htm

What they had from orbit was mostly evidence of hydrogen. Well, guess
what: there's similar evidence of hydrogen on the moon, which is a
very dry place despite that. There's a reasonable theory that protons
in the solar wind can combine with oxygen dissociated from surface
oxides by radiation to produce hydroxyls and H2O. Nice, but it's never
going to amount to very much water -- mining it would be a little like
mining platinum. Solar protons probably reach the ground on Mars in
significant quantity. There's little atmosphere, and no magnetic
shield.

Most of the theories proposing a significant amount of *existing*
subsurface ice on Mars do not, as far as I know, subtract out possible
contributions from solar-proton interactions, but rather attribute all
the detected hydrogen to the possible presence of water deeper down.

Radar data is tantalizing, but unfortunately ambiguous, with very
indirect inferences and a heavy reliance on analogies to terrestrial
subsurface permafrost conditions, analogies that might not hold up:

"Radar detection of subsurface ice on Mars has been widely debated in
part because the
dielectric signature of ice, as deduced from the dielectric constant,
can be confused with dry-
silicate-rich materials."

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010JE003768.shtml

> Phoenix has found water.

I always had a big problem with that. Phoenix found evidence of water
ice by spectrographic measurements in soil in its immediate vicinity,
after the water had supposedly sublimated from some bulk samples (the
"dice cubes"), and after a landing that disturbed the site, allowing
for reactions and diffusion of reaction byproducts into soils.

Specifically: Phoenix did a powered landing with hydrazine thrusters.
Hydrazine reactions are very exothermic, potentially hot enough to
liberate oxygen from oxides in soil. Hydrazine reactions release a lot
of hydrogen. So there's a possible explanation for that relatively
pure frost layer they exposed (the "Snow White 1 + 2" evidence): a
thin layer of rapidly frozen steam captured underneath detritus thrown
up by the landing itself.

Then there are the "dice cubes" that seemed to sublimate away faster
than CO2 ice would explain. But, at least in the photos I've seen,
they seem to have been in continuous shadow, where it might have been
a lot colder than the surface temperature average that Phoenix could
register. The sampler didn't get to them until after the sublimation
-- of whatever it was that made them cuboid for a while. (Did they do
very focused IR readings around those "dice cubes" to make *sure* they
weren't CO2 ice? Did they measure the surface conductivity of what
those "dice" were sitting on, which might have provided a significant
heat-sink to help keep the CO2 frozen?)

NASA was, of course, very triumphalist about all this. They do good
science, I know. But sometimes it's all in how you say it. And saying,
"Um, sorry, but it's still ambiguous" as often as cold objectivity
might warrant in this case would make it harder to keep the Mars-probe
megabucks flowing.

> At the poles there is water.

No doubt. But the poles are not exactly a good place to set up a base
that relies on solar for heating and growing food.

> Of course, you would send a robot first. That harvests the water.

Which might or might not be there in sufficient quantity and
*availability* (which includes *meltability*) to make it worth lifting
into Mars orbit for return-trip CELSS and shielding. Or even for any
immediate life-support purpose.

Yes, there's a lot of water ice at the poles. But the poles are *very*
cold, which means that its ice is very cold; water ice has huge heat
capacity, which means your heat source had better be pretty strong.
Your robot will have a significant nuclear reactor. Curiosity's
plutonium-fueld MMRTG produces 2.8 W/kg (electrical output, not
radioisotope heat output -- conversion efficiency is under 10%). Since
it's a spacecraft component, it's super-optimized for low weight. An
exercise for you: with 2.8 W/kg from one those MMRTGs, starting with
Martian polar ice, at a mean temperature of about -160 deg C (and
buried under CO2 in winter) how long would it take to melt out a liter
of water? (I think the answer will kinda make you want to melt Martian
polar ice using the plutonium itself, straight, no chaser.)

When I say Mars is very dry, I don't mean just that it has a lot less
water than the Earth, per unit of surface area. I also mean that ice,
when cold enough, and with heating sources in short supply, might as
well be rock.

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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[Mega]

Since [the radioisotope battery]

it's a spacecraft component, it's super-optimized for low weight.

Think so?

It's shielded with tons (figuratively) of graphite, in case the rocket would have failed, the plutonium wouldn't have been set free.  It would have fallen into the ocean as one block.

And, they surely haven't used 100% radioactive isotopes. I haven't looked it up, but it may be 30% radioactive plutonium isotopes out of total plutonium.

If you take near 100%, of course, it means less weight per Watt. (Just make sure not to reach the critical mass to create a chain reaction)

[Michael Turner]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Mega <masters...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Since [the radioisotope battery]
>>
>> it's a spacecraft component, it's super-optimized for low weight.
>
>
> Think so?

Yes.

> It's shielded with tons (figuratively) of graphite

"Figuratively?" Why speak figuratively when there are ... actual figures?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MMRTG_schematic_-_english_labels.png

Hard to see the "tons" of graphite in this one.

> in case the rocket would
> have failed, the plutonium wouldn't have been set free. It would have
> fallen into the ocean as one block.

Yes, and they used graphite because it's light. Which is part of
optimizing it to be as light as possible. For space applications. As I
said.

What would you have preferred? That these things be launched with no
protection for human populations at all?

> And, they surely haven't used 100% radioactive isotopes. I haven't looked it
> up,

Of course not. Looking stuff up requires work or something.

> but it may be 30% radioactive plutonium isotopes out of total plutonium.

83.5% Pu-238 in an oxide, according to this source:

http://www.mdcampbell.com/Bennett0606.pdf

Since plutonium has a very heavy nucleus, and oxygen does not, PuO2's
weight is about 2/3rds of its Pu part. There is little or no shielding
required (millimeters of lead will do; in some applications they forgo
it.) The Iridium cladding is also millimeters. The graphite jacket
will be quite lightweight, of course, because ... well, it's graphite.

Much of the remaining weight appears to go into the problem of making
the thing useful at all as an electric power source. Not into "tons of
graphite."

> If you take near 100%, of course, it means less weight per Watt. (Just make
> sure not to reach the critical mass to create a chain reaction)

Not reached with pure Pu-238 until you have about 9kg in a sphere.
(Not sure it's reached at all in its oxide form.) That's about 4500 W
of heat output. Now, starting with ice at around -160 deg K, .... or
am I the only one who's going to look up numbers and do arithmetic?

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


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[Mega]

Now, starting with ice at around -160 deg K, .... or
am I the only one who's going to look up numbers and do arithmetic?

Have I ever said we should melt -160°C cold water? That's wastement of energy. On the poles it's too cold, too.
Show me the source that says there's no water ice at the equator. http://www.space.com/10704-mars-water-ice-equator.html
By the way, I assume there are underground caves (from volcanic origin) like on Earth (Mars is a terrestrial planet). There is much pressure and heat from Mars' interior. Water would be liquid there. Of course, one would have to drill several hunders of meters which still is utopical.


Get it from the Equator, where in summer you have moderate temperatures.

Don't get all the water you need on Mars, but recycle at 90-95% efficiency.  So you just to get 5-10% of the needed water.



As I have read, the shileding of the plutonium was quite exaggeraeted. And you have a reliable rocket.
In any case

[Michael Turner]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 8:35 PM, Mega <masters...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Now, starting with ice at around -160 deg K, .... or
>> am I the only one who's going to look up numbers and do arithmetic?
>>
>
> Have I ever said we should melt -160°C cold water?

You said the poles have lots of water. Why bother saying that, in this
context, unless to imply extraction was practical?

> That's wastement of energy. On the poles it's too cold, too.

So you agree with what I said, over and over, in my last message, but
without acknowledging that I said it over and over?

> Show me the source that says there's no water ice at the equator.

Show me the sources that assert, as unequivocally as YOU do, that
there IS equatorial water ice in concentrations worth mining. The only
reports that come close to your level of certainty are the ones I
already talked about in my last message -- reports I regard with some
skepticism. Don't just repeat yourself. Address that skepticism. Tell
me why I'm wrong to be concerned.

> http://www.space.com/10704-mars-water-ice-equator.html

Which says, among other things:

".... researchers could not rule out the possibility their findings
might reflect fluffy, dusty or loosely packed material that holds only
a small amount of ice."

Which would be consistent with the White Mars theory

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/sci/fifthconf99/6001.pdf

which proposes that much of what seems to be water-flow evidence is
actually CO2 flow of various kinds.

The article you link also says that the evidence is not conclusive and ....

"We must rely on additional satellite data and modeling studies"

-- because the evidence has other explanations, and because current
modeling suggests there shouldn't be such significant ice deposits
anyway.

You said there was 6% ice previously measured from orbit in
Curiosity's vicinity -- even though that was only indirect evidence
for which there are other explanations. Now that Curiosity's actually
IN that area, it's not finding water ice remotely approaching 6%. This
lends weight to the alternative explanations, not just in that area,
but in all other areas on Mars where similarly derived evidence has
been used to argue for significant water ice concentrations.

> By the way, I assume there are underground caves (from volcanic origin) like
> on Earth (Mars is a terrestrial planet). There is much pressure and heat
> from Mars' interior. Water would be liquid there. Of course, one would have
> to drill several hunders of meters which still is utopical.

OR there are easily accessed lava tubes where significant frost
precipitation of outgassed magmatic H2O might reasonably still be
intact. There's no evidence yet for that, however. If such evidence
emerges, it strengthens the case for using lava tubes instead of
surface habitats: maybe people and robots won't have to stripmine
their water on the surface, with all the problems of radiation and
dust mitigation that go with being on the surface. Maybe they'll be
able to just scrape it off cave walls.

> Get it from the Equator, where in summer you have moderate temperatures.

IF it's there in significant quantities. I happen to think the jury's
still out. Recent Curiosity results aren't encouraging.

> Don't get all the water you need on Mars, but recycle at 90-95% efficiency.

CELSS units already designed retain water at far higher efficiencies.
If you do a little math, you'll see that such efficiencies will be
important just to get to and from Mars. If you lose 5%-10% of a crew's
water requirements daily, the amount of water you need to take along,
just to make sure you have enough at the end, is radically increased.
More mass = more expense.

Robert Zubrin seems to accept water-recycling efficiencies in the low
90% range, for a surface base, in exchange for higher reliability

http://www.marsjournal.org/contents/2006/0005/files/rapp_mars_2006_0005.pdf

but Zubrin's risk perceptions are notoriously different from those of
most Mars mission planners. He bases survival and return-trips on ISRU
scenarios that, in the case of water, might not be realistic. If
you've got a base that can only keep 90% of its water on each cycle,
and can't mine ice fast enough because the ores turn out to be much
thinner than first thought, it's going to die of thirst.

> So you just to get 5-10% of the needed water.

Or hell, you just wave your hands, and water appears.

> As I have read, the shileding of the plutonium was quite exaggeraeted.

Don't you mean "conservatively engineered"?

> And you have a reliable rocket In any case

Rocket launch failures rates have never fallen much below 3% even for
Soyuz-U, which might be the current world-beater. It sounds like
you're willing to take a 3% chance of launch failure, on every launch
attempt for every RTG-powered mission, with perhaps up to 20,000 extra
cancer cases globally if the plutonium ends up scattered in the
atmosphere. No thanks. I'll take the extra RTG shielding. So will
everybody else on Earth. Paying that price buys the added range RTGs
get you in space. RTGs are essential for outer-planet missions.
Cassini is an example of a jaw-droppingly great mission that just had
to use them. Significant Mars missions -- Curiosity-scale and above --
are probably impossible without them.

> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/4FsEWSNRpXcJ.

[Mega]

Yeah, then I agree with you, that the -160C won't be feasible. The energy needed  for heating is c*m*dT, so obviously, for -160°C you'll need 10 times more energy than melting -16°C ice.

It sounds like
you're willing to take a 3% chance of launch failure, on every launch
attempt for every RTG-powered mission

"On every launch ... for every RTG .... " That sounds like there were much. There haven't been, and there won't be. Unfortunately, Obama has made the energy-departement stop the production of RTG by not providing the money needed.


And yeah, for high-value missions you have to take som risk. You said you're familiar with the rocket equation.

The shielding adds mass, which has to be taken into orbit, and the accelerated to escape velocity, and then further to travel speed (if electrical propulsion, which we don't have for human missions any time soon, then some km/sec more). And if you want to return it, you'll get still much more fuel-need.

If the RTG hits, it will more than 70% likely hit water.


For RTG-powered missions each 5 years you can risk low shielding, if you in return take the most reliable rocket. But that's just my opinion.




It seems to me kind of like a belief - thing. You can say, you believe Mars is very very low in water at the equator, I say it's *relatively* much there. (In the sense of a bit is there. )
Yeah, Curiosity could have just landed in a dryer region. We just don't know, as long as it hasn't visited many places to investigate the ammount of water.

[Mega]

Oh, said something wrong:

Obama stopped the production of Plutonium, not of RTG. Which is the consequence of no plutonium, obviously.

[Michael Turner]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 3:03 AM, Mega <masters...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Michael Turner]

> It sounds like
> you're willing to take a 3% chance of launch failure, on every launch
> attempt for every RTG-powered mission

[Mega]

> "On every launch ... for every RTG .... " That sounds like there were much.
> There haven't been, and there won't be.

26 missions by the U.S. alone is "not much"? 45 RTGs sent to space so
far (by the U.S. alone) is "not much"?

"Radioisotope power has been used on 8 Earth orbiting missions, 8
missions travelling to each of the outer planets as well as each of
Apollo missions following 11 to Earth's moon. Some of the outer Solar
System missions are the Pioneer, Voyager, Ulyssess, Galileo, Cassini
and Pluto New Horizons missions. The RTGs on Voyager 1 and 2 have been
operating since 1977. Similar RHUs which provide heat to critical
electronics have been used on Apollo 11 as well as the first 2
generations of Mars rovers.[7] In total, over the last four decades,
26 missions and 45 RTGs have been launched in the United States."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Mission_Radioisotope_Thermoelectric_Generator

The total undoubtedly goes up quite a bit more when you include the
contributions of other nations, especially since Russia was a leader
in RTGs.

> Unfortunately, Obama has made the
> energy-departement stop the production of RTG by not providing the money
> needed.

You are, as usual, mistaken. In this case, you're unusually mistaken.
Congress failed to appropriate funds for re-initiating domestic
production of the main RTG fuel, Pu-238. Congress, if you'll recall,
is dominated by the GOP in the House, and can filibuster anything in
the Senate.

http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/2012/01/09/pu-238-production-risk/

NASA, if you'll recall, is run by Charles Bolden -- an Obama
appointee. NASA has actually urged the resumption of Pu-238
production.

http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/2011/09/27/nasa-urges-resuming-plutonium-238-production/

This most recent "fact" of yours is only 180 degrees off from the truth.

> And yeah, for high-value missions you have to take som risk. You said you're
> familiar with the rocket equation.
>
> The shielding adds mass, which has to be taken into orbit,

[snip]

I really don't need things like this explained to me.

> If the RTG hits, it will more than 70% likely hit water.

What you hand-wave aside: that the problematic event won't involve
disintegration of the payload within the atmosphere. Rockets do fail
explosively at times. Analyses of RTG disintegration risk base their
estimates of health almost entirely on such events:

http://www.fas.org/nuke/space/pu-ulysses.pdf

In their view, hitting land doesn't pose much risk:

"Only if an RTG hits something as hard as granite on its plunge back
to Earth, or if it is hit by a shard from an explosion of a solid
rocket booster, does it have any chance of fracturing."

The percentage of the Earth's surface that's exposed granite is
minuscule -- much smaller than the percentage of rocket boosters that
blow up in the atmosphere.

> For RTG-powered missions each 5 years you can risk low shielding, if you in
> return take the most reliable rocket. But that's just my opinion.

We've had a lot of your opinions here. They are very seldom backed up
by citations, and never backed by calculations.

> It seems to me kind of like a belief - thing. You can say, you believe Mars
> is very very low in water at the equator, I say it's *relatively* much
> there. (In the sense of a bit is there. )

You now say "a bit is there". I said "Mars is very dry." Given that
there are some H2O molecules in almost everything that we don't
hesitate to call "very dry", there's no direct contradiction here --
except with numerous assertions YOU have flatly made on this thread.

> Yeah, Curiosity could have just landed in a dryer region.

That's the current hope. And it's fine to hope.

Not so cool: stating unproven hypotheses as fact. Especially when the
truth (as in the case of your claims of an end to space-mission RTG
production on orders from the Obama administration) is actually the
OPPOSITE of what you're saying.

Curiosity is in Gale Crater, which was chosen because of the higher
likelihood of past and present water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale_(crater)

Current sampling in a relatively high-probability region is now coming
up empty-handed. It's far drier than one optimistic hypothesis plus
some ambiguous orbital readings would suggest (that 6%). It's about as
dry as the state of the art in Mars modeling suggests. This is not
exactly grounds for greater hope in anything except those models. How
science proceeds: by comparing model predictions with evidence.

> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/K0Lg7JFhmL4J.

[Mega]

We've gone far away from biology, haven't we?


Well, when you said one would need radiation shielding, I thought of a spacecraft that resembles the "500 Bio Dollar approach". Because "Mars direct" *needs* lower shielding. I think the study/report was done by the (father of G.W.B) Bush administration. Meaning the craft has roughly the mass of the ISS.
And if the life supporting systems are done by algae in aquarium as someone above said, you would need big aquariums. If the aquarium has 2meters*2 meters *1 meter, you would have 4 tons of water. For a spacecraft that has 400 tonnes, that'd be ok, if it also provides oxygen and cleans the air from CO2.
For a Mars Direct approach, 4 tons is much more, meaning the plan to fail perhaps.





I'm not american, so I've got no big overview on who ceases plutonium production, but obviously it was under the Obama administration.  I like biology far more than those politics, which determine the kind of transport used. Technology is not the limiting factor, by far not. Money is.
Also, the original issue then was Biospheres on Mars, not how to get them there. I'm no expert in that, just know and apply the rocket equation and some hohmann transfer orbit theory.

And more in detail, I was inerested in bacteria producing biospheres by making greenhouse gasses. You just would have to take 1 Gramm of bacteria to Mars, and they would multiply and do the job. No big deal, hwo you get them there, each rover could carry that payload.

[Jay Woods]

On Sunday, October 28, 2012 06:17:04 AM Mega wrote:
...

>I'm not american, so I've got no big overview on who ceases plutonium >production, but obviously it was under the Obama administration. 

 

Remember that the production of plutonium hasn't ceased. It is still being created in nuclear fuel rods and stored in pools at the reactors. But the plutonium is not weapons grade nor is it being refined from the rods. Other countries are refining their rods and storing the plutonium in wastes or recycling it into new rods as MOX.

[Jay Woods]

There are eliptical orbits (but much slower) that shuttle between Earth and Mars using a minimum of fuel. This allows for a much larger vessel to be accumulated which can start out on an unmanned basis to transfer stuff to Mars and back. After enough shielding and later a food production facility is accumulated, manned operation can be started.

 

On Sunday, October 28, 2012 06:17:04 AM Mega wrote:

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[Michael Turner]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 10:17 PM, Mega <masters...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We've gone far away from biology, haven't we?

Not exactly, because water is important for life as we know it, and so
is radiation shielding.

> Well, when you said one would need radiation shielding, I thought of a
> spacecraft that resembles the "500 Bio Dollar approach".

"Bio dollar"? Is this like Bitcoin?

> .... Because "Mars

> direct" *needs* lower shielding. I think the study/report was done by the
> (father of G.W.B) Bush administration. Meaning the craft has roughly the
> mass of the ISS.

Mars Direct is Robert Zubrin/Mars Society, which isn't specific to any
administration. In fact, Mars Direct was in part a negative *response*
to the studies funded by the Bush Sr. administration.

Zubrin is notorious for waving away the radiation threat. The fact is,
the *kind* of radiation (GCR) most often cited as a long-term
shielding problem still isn't well-characterized, I believe in part
because it's not that easy to produce continuously.

> I'm not american, so I've got no big overview on who ceases plutonium
> production, but obviously it was under the Obama administration.

"Obviously"? Obviously, you (once again) have no idea what you're talking about.

"The United States stopped producing plutonium-238 in 1988; and since
1993, all of the plutonium-238 used in American spacecraft has been
purchased from Russia."

In other words, production ceased during the Reagan/Bush years.

Obama? His administration has tried to revive it.

"In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) requested funding to
restart American domestic production.[5][6] It is estimated that to
restart production will cost between $75 million and $90 million over
five years.[7] Since the DOE would be responsible for producing the
plutonium-238 for NASA, the two agencies want to split the cost of
restarting production.[7] Congress has given NASA some of the money
requested, $10 million in 2011 and the same in 2012.[7] The U.S.
Congress have denied the DOE's funding request for three years in a
row."

> I like
> biology far more than those politics, which determine the kind of transport
> used.

In this case, you have the political orientation of an enabling
technology completely backwards. And you could have looked up these
facts in 10 seconds.

> Technology is not the limiting factor, by far not. Money is.

No. There's plenty of money. Political will is the problem.

> Also, the original issue then was Biospheres on Mars, not how to get them
> there.

Since biospheres will need to be shielded ON THE WAY THERE, and will
need similar shielding if they are hosted in surface habitats, how to
get them there is very relevant.

> I'm no expert in that, just know and apply the rocket equation and
> some hohmann transfer orbit theory.

If you think you know as much about those things as you've claimed to
know about other subjects on this thread, you probably don't know very
much.

> And more in detail, I was inerested in bacteria producing biospheres by
> making greenhouse gasses. You just would have to take 1 Gramm of bacteria to
> Mars, and they would multiply and do the job.

He states, flatly, as if it were a fact already.

> No big deal ....

Nothing ever is, with you. (Except looking things up.)

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[Michael Turner]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 10:47 PM, Jay Woods <wood...@cox.net> wrote:
> There are eliptical orbits (but much slower) that shuttle between Earth and
> Mars using a minimum of fuel. This allows for a much larger vessel to be
> accumulated which can start out on an unmanned basis to transfer stuff to
> Mars and back. After enough shielding and later a food production facility
> is accumulated, manned operation can be started.

Yes, these are the Mars cycler trajectories I've been talking about on
this thread -- where I've argued that you might as well start out with
an unmanned closed ecological life support system just to help
calibrate that ecosystem and its shielding (and other variables) for
an eventual crew environment.

If a cycler is also a rotating system that can simulate Mars gravity,
so much the better -- long-duration studies of possible ecosystem
performance under Mars gravity are enabled, without concern for
forward contamination.

As I've mentioned previously, the cycler's rotation might also be used
as a way to help sling Mars probes into Mars orbit or into Mars
atmospheric entry trajectories (and to help land probes on Phobos);
the initial cyclers could thereby serve two purposes related to
figuring out what kind of manned Mars mission to actually execute. 20
years of experience with them might give us almost 10 round-trips even
with a single cycler. This would provide a lot of testing and learning
possibilities. It's a lot more Mars-visit frequency than we're getting
now; it could be a boon to the search for life (past or present.) It's
also a lot more cosmic ray and solar storm exposure than we have to
work with now. There are still a lot of radiation biology unknowns
with that kind of exposure.

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[Mega]

> And more in detail, I was inerested in bacteria producing biospheres by 
> making greenhouse gasses. You just would have to take 1 Gramm of bacteria to 
> Mars, and they would multiply and do the job. 
 

He states, flatly, as if it were a fact already. 

 

It IS a fact that bacteria multiply very quickly if the conditions are right (or better: if they are genetically fitted to the environment). 

You wanna deny that? 

> I'm no expert in that, just know and apply the rocket equation and 
> some hohmann transfer orbit theory.  

If you think you know as much about those things as you've claimed to 

know about other subjects on this thread, you probably don't know very 
much. 

1. I've never claimed to be a rocket expert or rocket scientist. I just have learnt a few physics equations in high school, and for interrest have a detailed book about rocket science (which I haven't read all of, just did some maths what I was interested in) 

2. It's getting offensive. I'm out. 

[Michael Turner]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 1:34 AM, Mega <masters...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > And more in detail, I was inerested in bacteria producing biospheres by
>> > making greenhouse gasses. You just would have to take 1 Gramm of
>> > bacteria to
>> > Mars, and they would multiply and do the job.
>>
>>
>> He states, flatly, as if it were a fact already.
>
> It IS a fact that bacteria multiply very quickly if the conditions are right
> (or better: if they are genetically fitted to the environment).
> You wanna deny that?

Until you have a bacterium that could do THAT particular job? Yes.
Without even a *theory* of how it would work, you're just talking
science fiction. As if it were fact.

> 2. It's getting offensive. I'm out.

Don't forget to take all that stuff you just made up. It's pretty offensive too.

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
tur...@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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[Cathal Garvey]

> "Bio dollar"? Is this like Bitcoin?

In a society living in space with limited resources and space, I imagine
economies would shift to a system based on the scarce resources; carbon,
calories and water. Sounds like a "bio dollar" to me. :)

[Cathal Garvey]

Huh! The more you know. :)

On 20/10/12 23:06, Simon Quellen Field wrote:
> I have a small tank that holds 5 pounds of SF6.
> We breathe it to talk like James Earl Jones.
> It's a big hit at parties.
>
> It is injected into eyes after vitrectomies, to make a gas bubble that
> diffuses
> into the tissues more slowly than air would.
>
> So, aside from the asphyxiation hazard, it is fairly harmless.
>
> -----
> Get a free science project every week! "http://scitoys.com/newsletter.html"
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Cathal Garvey <cathal...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Bonus feature; makes Mars uninhabitable to earth-based life due to epic
>> fluorine content*? A win for untouched nature, albiet entirely manmade! :)
>>
>> * For all I know SF6 is entirely harmless, don't eat me biochemists
>>
>> On 20/10/12 17:20, Mega wrote:
>>> I've done some ideas of biospheres (again :D )
>>>
>>> And I came to think of it that SF6 would be really the way to go to
>>> transform Mars into a warmer planet with more pressure. The strongest
>>> greenhouse gas known, and very dense (great to improve the atmospheric
>>> pressure). And very stable.
>>>
>>> But how can one engineer a bacterium that can take Fluorine out of rocks
>>> (there's plenty of F in mars rocks) and combine it with sulphur (also
>> quite
>>> common on the surface)?
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Periodic_table.svg&page=1
>>> Maybe a few enzymes that have evolved for Iodine will also work for
>>> fluorine (very similar properties- F is in the same row I in the periodic
>>> table)?
>>> Is this thinking correct?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> www.indiebiotech.com
>> twitter.com/onetruecathal
>> joindiaspora.com/u/cathalgarvey
>> PGP Public Key: http://bit.ly/CathalGKey

>>
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