NASA’s Curiosity rover finds water [using the term very loosely] below the surface of Mars

Can HaARP affect our fields?

Is geoengineering and chemtrails a ticking time bomb?

The solar wind would make antarctica look like a desert resort..

And sure please the zero pop growth folks!

Two birds one stone

The problem with the analyzers, is it vaporizes the specimen it analyzes. The laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy vaporizes a small sample with about 50 to 75 5-nanosecond pulses from a 1067 nm infrared laser and then observing the spectrum of the light emitted by the vaporized rock. That might be great if you want to do an inventory of Mars’ minerals and chemical composition. It should have included screening for possible biological activity past and present.

I suspect that NASA’s motives for Mars exploration do not include the search for life. Instead, it looks like a quest for rare earth minerals in the mode of high tech prospecting. Shhhhhhh! We don’t want a gold rush going on the planet Mars.

Solar flux is half that of Earth's, meaning that twice the mass of solar arrays have to be soft-landed on a planet with twice the gravity of the Moon, so evaluate that multiplicative factor of four by the rocket equation. It's ugly.

Or, soft-land something that will make solar cells using silicon from the Martian surface. We don't have such a thing now, but we will.

Or, soft-land something that will make solar cells using silicon from the Martian surface. We don't have such a thing now, but we will.

That sounds like right out of the Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy. Earth is quite a bit behind the books' timeline date-wise but we're getting there in the computing power. All we need is finding more ice/water and perhaps some rare mineral(s) to provide some financial inducement and who knows?

But I'd bet that the group known in the books as the 'Reds' ( which would be our terrestrial eviro-wackos) would soon be in firm control about not spoiling the pristine beauty of the red planet.

I believe this is a misattribution ( to Curiosity ) of an announcement based on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery. I saw an article with the correctly attributed orbital image ( Curiosity is on the ground, of course, ) which contained all the same verbiage about “brine” etc.

Or, soft-land something that will make solar cells using silicon from the Martian surface. We don't have such a thing now, but we will.

That's not nearly as easy as your comment implies. You can't just melt the soil into glass -- you have to create glass, dope it with the appropriate elements to make the individual solar cell, then mount it on a substrate and wire all those individual cells together. Then you have to install framing and cable the cell panels into arrays. With low efficiency amorphous cells of the type you'll be making, you might get arrays of a few percent efficiency, so you'll need tens of acres of these panels to be deployed. You will need to have some way to clean the solar arrays, as windblown dust will accumulate on them rapidly and reduce your power output to near zero. Finally, solar cells degrade with time, so you would have to make these arrays continuously.

By the way, you'll need considerable power to do all these things above, so you still have a mass problem.

Oh, and you have to do this all with teleoperated robots, so that you have the power system set up and running when people arrive. And you have to operate those machines with a round-trip time delay that lasts up to 40 minutes. Hope that nothing breaks down beyond repair -- it will take you another 22 months for a launch window before you can ship a replacement up to Mars.

Good luck and Godspeed.

That's not nearly as easy as your comment implies.

Using 2015 technology, you are correct. Using 2050 technology or 2100 technology, who knows?

Then again, by the time we have the technology to create autonomous robot solar cell factories, maybe we'll have finally gotten compact fusion power.

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