January 12, 2004

The Mars Underground

Posted by tomo at 02:40 AM in science . | 2 Comments

In the sleepy late 70s after we had failed to find evidence of life on Mars a grassroots effort lead by graduate students at the University of Colorado in Boulder set about on a mission of Mars exploration and possible terraformation. Out of drunken grad student discussions came a formal seminar that attracted students from many disciplines as well as local engineers and others. Their report on the habitability of Mars made its way to NASA headquarters, generating excitement about a group of students intelligently investigating Mars exploration. Members of the group drove around the country to various space science conferences and met others who were tuned into what they were doing. In 1981, the group hosted the first Case for Mars conference in Boulder and the hundred or so in attendance were to become known as the Mars Underground.

From the title of the conference was to come the book "The Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin, in which a plan for successive manned missions to Mars is detailed costing as low as $20 billion (compared to NASA's proposed $450 billion plan and a fraction of the $87 billion of Dubya's Iraq War). Under Dr. Zubrin's direction the Underground would become the Mars Society, which today has chapters all over the world and is conducting real world experiments in the desert as well as the arctic to explore solutions to problems that would arise on Mars. They have several other initiatives including the Pressurized Mars Analog Rover Project which has a team working on it at the University of Michigan!

The destruction of this planet being as imminent as Polamex has shown us, will Bush make a real commitment to putting man on Mars within a decade?

 

Comments

I read some article (that I can't find anymore), and it just said that landing a human on Mars is more akin to showbiz than science. Robotic exploration is so much cheaper and safer. If we miss the planet (which has been common) and they float in space forever, no big deal. Plus we don't have to send a bunch of food and water with them. PLUS we don't have to bring them back. Yeah. Let's build some Von Neumann probes! I'll start and just put some flower seeds in a model rocket and see what happens.

Posted by: polamex at January 12, 2004 10:17 PM

I believe it. People are much more needy than electronic devices. I don't think any man-on-Mars advocates would ever deny that landing men is way more expensive, but the problem with robots is that they aren't very smart or versatile. They can do some limited exploration and tests but can't notice something odd and decide to try something new. High latency, low bandwidth exploration. We do have to bring the people back but that gives us an oppurtunity to bring a chunk of Mars back too. Despite the fact that humans are more useful there, we should still work on better automated exploration technology. I think DARPA's Grand Challenge will eventually be useful for this.

Safety is perhaps the biggest concern. We've had too many Martian failures, which has affected morale. It's acceptable to have a higher failure rate when all you're losing is machinery... and that's what happened. When human lives are at stake, mission success will be given much higher priority and that's probably where a lot of the money will go. We already have (most of) the technology to get there. We just can't guarantee safe arrival, yet.

Posted by: agent1073 at January 12, 2004 11:28 PM