What kind of natural resources could one reasonably expect to find on Mars? What about on the the Moon?

What kind of natural resources could one reasonably expect to find on Mars? What about on the the Moon?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=dNXO06fmAUk&t=2m10s
ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120016419.pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=dumolLDfWw4
cat.com/en_ID/products/new/equipment/excavators/mini-excavators.html
ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050198938.pdf
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_entrapment
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Sand.

dust

Dusty sand.

Sandy dust

aliens

mars gems

Spice, you idiot.

Musk has plans to capture Methane on Mars to fuel his planned raptor engines. But I'm not sure, I thought the methane presence on Mars was temperamental? Like it's there sometimes and gone the next? Some were even saying that pattern indicates life.

>I thought
don't comment on things you don't know shit about

oxidized iron

Johj

Mexicans, they are everywhere.

>Mars
Silicates
Iron oxides
Buried ice
CO2
N2
Ar

>Moon
Silicates
Aluminium oxides
Iron oxides
That's about it.

be interesting to find oil there, would'nit?
youtube.com/watch?v=dNXO06fmAUk&t=2m10s

Harsh

Mexican from mars here, can confirm

...

>Aluminum oxides
>Moon

Are you fucking retarded?

even if methane was a plenty. Wouldn't an earth based source be a gazilion times cheaper?

The moon does have pure iron grains in it and trace amounts of water/hydrogen.

Iron grains are like less than 1%, but readily extractable.

This link gives more details on what is extractable, although it is a bit old.

Are you fucking retarded , the moon is a big ball of oxides it would weird if it didn't have aluminum in it

I am not even going to dignify the tripfag with a response. You don't capture methane on Mars you make it via the Sabatier reaction.

the reason you do this is not to send methane back to earth, but to make rocket fuel from resources on Mars so you don't have to haul that all the way from earth.

>You don't capture methane on Mars you make it via the Sabatier reaction.
>the reason you do this is not to send methane back to earth, but to make rocket fuel from resources on Mars so you don't have to haul that all the way from earth
So building pic related on Mars? Not that easy IMO.
Also methane isn't typically used as rocket fuel or am I wrong about that?

>So building pic related on Mars? Not that easy IMO.
That, but scaled down a thousand-fold. Even a very small reactor will produce useful amounts of liquid methane over the long durations of a Mars mission.

>Also methane isn't typically used as rocket fuel or am I wrong about that?
It's not normally used as a rocket fuel, but there aren't really any good reasons why. It works very well, we just don't have much experience with it compared to other fuels.
There are actually several liquid oxygen + liquid methane engines in development, including the BE-4 and Raptor.

In the Mooon you can obtain Helium-3 wich could be requiered for nuclear fusion and for its position and minerals is the perfect place to built and take off an space habitat.

No the point is to fuel rockets for the return journey to save on the fuel you have to bring.
This guy has been following me around the board attacking my posts like a big baby because he doesn't agree with me in another thread but he is right, it isn't captured sorry it's made in the Sabatier reaction.
That's why Musk is developing a new rocket that can use it.

>all this discussion about places that don't even exist

Mars would contain mostly the same elements as Earth but the concentrations of denser elements would be much poorer towards the surface since areology died every early in Mars's history.

Mars would have distinctive minerals samples that wouldn't be found on Earth but nothing valuable outside of scientific curiosities.

Metallic asteroids would be a better bet if you want to find noble metals. The next best bet would Io or Venus.

>what is argent energy?

Getting to Mars isn't easy. Now the hard part isn't making something like a refinery, it's mining water. A device for cooling down atmosphere, seperating out CO2, splitting water, and carrying out the sabatier reaction we can easily verify on earth. We can verify it in simulation. We have built some of these things:
ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120016419.pdf

The problem is getting water for the reaction and this involves dealing with granular materials which we don't understand so well. Boeing can model an entire jet liner in sim and have it just work, but no one do the same for a concrete plant.

And the thing about concrete plants and other facilities is that they don't work well. They almost always jam up because we don't understand granular materials. Concrete plants solve this by having lots of people on hand to fix this. For Mars we can't necessarily do this.

Dorito dust on mars and cheesecon the moon

Helium! Three

>Mars
Cinnamon

>Moon
Cheese

nice try martian, we're coming for you. Prepare to be liberated

I don't think Musk is planning to capture Methane on Mars, he's just going to produce it there. Mar's Atmosphere, thin though it is, has decent amounts of CO2. If you bring some H2 with you from Earth (Or if we're being optimistic extract some from Martian Ice), you can use the Sabatier process to make methane.

microbes

CO2 and water are both best extracted from the Martian soil, and if you're getting one that way, you'll get the other with almost no additional trouble. Getting CO2 out of the air on Mars is like getting water at the South Pole by condensing it from the atmosphere: the only reason you'd consider doing it is that you only want to set up something so minimal it can't scoop up solid material.

Extracting gas from a near-vacuum is a bitch. Scooping up Martian soil has so many advantages that it's hard to imagine any serious Mars ISRU program wouldn't do it.

moving soil around is more of a bitch than extracting gas from a near vacuum. Once we understand granular materials, get more people on Mars, or invent robots that can deal with the problems arising from granular materials yes.

The Phoenix lander had a heck of a time just getting a soil sample into an oven so it could be processed. It is less efficient to do, but it's more reliable.

Not to mention solid CO2 is probably not present in significant amounts in non-polar regions.

>That's about it.

heuheuheu

>Also methane isn't typically used as rocket fuel or am I wrong about that?

youtube.com/watch?v=dumolLDfWw4

>or invent robots that can deal with the problems arising from granular materials yes.

these already exist

problem: they also tend to be very heavy

And what robots would these be?

Futurists think that 'robot' is a cure-all for any problem, and that once something is launched into space there is no such thing as maintenance costs. There is no point trying to reason with him.

>moving soil around is more of a bitch than extracting gas from a near vacuum.
For sampling, sure. Not for even light industry.

Anyway, you need water. Bringing it from Earth is not feasible (and no, neither is bringing hydrogen).

>The Phoenix lander had a heck of a time just getting a soil sample into an oven so it could be processed.
Probes are wimpy. Phoenix had to fit on a Delta II. They cut weight until stuff barely works. Sometimes they fuck up and it doesn't.

None of the past probes resembles the kind of equipment you'd need to produce tons of propellant for a return journey.

>Not to mention solid CO2 is probably not present in significant amounts in non-polar regions.
It's believed to be in the ground all over Mars. Mars has such a thin atmosphere because it's frozen. That's why people talk about thickening the Mars atmosphere so you just need something like scuba gear rather than a space suit, just by warming it up with greenhouse gasses.

Bulldozers (for roads), excavators (for excavating raw material), dump trucks (for moving material) and an actual processing plant and storage/loading facility. However, pic related (a Caterpillar 345C L) alone weighs 50 tons. For comparison the Falcon Heavy's maximum payload is 59 tons.

Robots are the "cure" but they are also extremely expensive. I'm not a futurist either, from a practical angle remotely controlled mining drones is how initial off-earth mining will be done.

However, this is also immensely expensive due to the sheer weight of the required equipment. A mile of prefab steel train track (important to mining operations) weighs over 115 tons. And it requires both a bulldozer to build the roadbed and a machine to actually lay the track.

>It's believed to be in the ground all over Mars
I'll try and find a proper source, but I'm sure most of Mars's non-polar regions are far too warm for solid CO2. Even the poles have a very large seasonal sublimation and deposition - The north pole is almost CO2-ice free in summer.

Temperate surface temperatures on Mars are usually something like -80C to +10C. At 1KPa, CO2-ice sublimates at about -125C.

Besides, compressing the atmosphere is easy; you just need a dust-filter and a pump. Sure it requires a fair bit of power, but it's a load that can be switched on and off to follow electrical production.

Electric sand

forget perclorates

Lots and lots of perclorates, everywhere

I'd kinda just assumed you'd throw those away. They're a health hazard, and I can't think of anything at all astronauts would want them for on Mars.

>pic related (a Caterpillar 345C L) alone weighs 50 tons.
>A mile of prefab steel train track (important to mining operations)
Jesus. Only a complete idiot would even think about sending that kind of stuff, let alone try and claim it's necessary.

Mini-excavators start from under a ton, and that's without paying much attention in their design to keeping the weight down:
cat.com/en_ID/products/new/equipment/excavators/mini-excavators.html

Nobody ever needs a 50-ton excavator or steel track. These things enhance efficiency. They let you do the job faster, or save you labor or energy. You might as well have talked about how big Bagger 288 and the largest container ships are.

>Robots are the "cure" but they are also extremely expensive.
Not relative to launch costs to Mars, even if SpaceX gets costs down as far as they hope.

Setting up an industrial base on Mars would be about reaching a "critical mass" of equipment, so you're eventually only dependent on Earth for electronic components and scarce materials. You can work equipment a lot harder with a garage capable of repairs and at least two vehicles which can serve as tow trucks. In the garage, you want at least two repair bots which can replace each other's parts with spares.

Nobody makes this stuff on Earth because there's no way it would save money over using human repairmen. Someone would still have to remotely control the bots to diagnose and repair problems, and by having the human worker at a remote location, unable to use their own hands or natural senses, they'd work much more slowly and more clumsily. However, having a dozen men on Earth and ten millions of dollars of hardware doing the work of one man and a thousand dollars worth of tools on Mars is a bargain by space exploration standards.

Not really that much.

Rocket propellant for one thing. Solid rockets are often fuelled with ammonium perchlorate (you can recombine ionic compounds in various ways). You can decompose perchlorates to get oxygen out. Many other interesting reactions are also possible.

There are many useful salts to rinse out of Martian soil.

>you can use this unconcievably expensive space resource to get oxygen
fuck off with the popsci shit

Really this stupid, or really making a troll this lame?

>I was only pretending to be retarded!

mini excavators can't do the scale of work normal sized equipment can do. At the most, they'd be used to setup something like a steel foundry or an assembly plant where steel and parts can be made locally.

>Nobody ever needs a 50-ton excavator or steel track. These things enhance efficiency. They let you do the job faster, or save you labor or energy. You might as well have talked about how big Bagger 288 and the largest container ships are.

Those aren't needed, what is needed is pic related. A railroad, which can move raw materials locally very cheaply. It might sound silly to even suggest it at all, but if the goal is to do mining then it's clearly what "step 2" would be. Which includes setting up launching and mining facilities in places that can be more easily accessed by rail.

How come he would think of Aluminium Oxides not being present on the moon? I can't think of any reason for thing not having deposits in some form on that rock

>A railroad
>if the goal is to do mining then it's clearly what "step 2" would be.
I've seen some dumb shit on Veeky Forums, but... well, actually I see shit this dumb all the time on Veeky Forums, but I don't really see any dumber shit that this.

A railroad is more like step 20,000 than step 2. It's the kind of thing you think about doing after you have thousands of people living on Mars. We're talking about bootstrapping industry on Mars, and you're talking about stuff that helps if you want to move thousands of tons of material hundreds of miles every day.

A guy with a pickaxe and a basket can mine. Mining isn't something that only happens on a grand scale.

Paprika

>In the garage, you want at least two repair bots which can replace each other's parts with spares.
I don't see "repair bot" as remotely plausible. Repairing shit requires a high degree of dexterity and coordination, and robots are still a long way away from that. Any kind of fixing other than straight-up redundancy is going to need humans holding tools.

First of all, extracting the perchlorates involves handling large amounts of sand, and won't be a fun process

>Rocket propellant for one thing. Solid rockets are often fuelled with ammonium perchlorate
Yeah, but you're not going to want to deal with that shit on Mars. To start with, the chemistry involved something that a Mars base could really live without (explosions). Liquid methane + liquid oxygen is easier to make, safer to store, and requires materials that are far more easily obtainable. And why would you WANT to make solid rockets on Mars anyway?

>You can decompose perchlorates to get oxygen out.
You can do that with carbon dioxide or water ice, both of with are far more available and less likely to kill someone. The only thing you get for working with perchlorates is lower power requirements, and power is the one resource we've already solved on Mars.

>Many other interesting reactions are also possible.
The only thing perchlorates offer that ice and air doesn't is a source of chlorine. I can't think of any reason why you'd want that, but I guess it's there.

>Railroad on Mars
WHY!?
A railroad requires a substantial industrial base to build, and excels at moving enormous masses over large distances.
Even a moderately large Mars base will have a microscopic industrial capacity (outside of functions directly related to life-support), will generally only need to handle small masses, and has literally nothing far away to transport things to.

If you're mining stuff on Mars, you're going to be digging a small hole with the resource processing happening directly next to it.

>not building the rest of the facilities next of the mine either

I doubt there is much logistic need for a rail road either given the lunar landscape limiting factor would simply be viable terrain to build the facilities on

>>You can decompose perchlorates to get oxygen out.
>You can do that with carbon dioxide or water ice
No, carbon dioxide and water ice don't give off oxygen just because you heat them up moderately.

Sodium perchlorate is NaClO4. At 480 degrees celcius, it will give off oxygen, eventually separating entirely to NaCl + 2 O2.

Nitrates likewise give off nitrogen oxides, which can easily be decomposed further to nitrogen and oxygen for breathable gas, or oxidized to make NTO (dinitrogen tetroxide -- a storable rocket oxidizer).

Sodium nitrate (NaNO2) can be thermally decomposed to sodium oxide (Na2O), oxygen, and nitrogen oxides. The sodium oxide can easily (by exposing to oxygen at modestly raised temperature) be oxidized to sodium peroxide, which will release oxygen on heating, or mixed with water (and a catalyst that breaks down hydrogen peroxide) to give off oxygen, leaving a sodium hydroxide solution which will absorb (scrub) carbon dioxide.

These are simple processes with moderate reaction conditions and low energy costs. If you can separate useful amounts of perchlorates and nitrates from the soil, Martian explorers and colonists would have many uses for them.

And that is the exact issue here systems that process granular materials require too much maintenance because we don't understand granular materials all that well.

ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050198938.pdf

Excavators aren't the only problem here. Another issue is with the "processing plant and storage/loading facility." Just getting dirt from point A to B in a processing plant is difficult

According to the above link, systems that handle granular materials on Earth only operate at 63% of their design capability. Said devices are heavily overbuilt and often require adhoc fixes. Changes in temperature, humidity, and surface conditions, cause such devices to fail.

The other big issue, is that there are no scaling laws for granular materials. This means when we want to build a new granular processing plant, the only way we can test it is at full scale in the exact conditions. We can do this on Earth, but it will be very expensive to do on Mars.

One big problem is jamming, for some reason or the other, granular materials jam. On Earth fixing jammed systems is slow, expensive, and dangerous.

One example of this is grain silos. Grain silos can jam, one way we solve this is by having people go into the silo and walk on top of the grain. This is very dangerous as when the grain unjams people can get sucked under if they are not careful:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_entrapment

>I don't see "repair bot" as remotely plausible. Repairing shit requires a high degree of dexterity and coordination, and robots are still a long way away from that. Any kind of fixing other than straight-up redundancy is going to need humans holding tools.
It's different if you design things to be repaired by robots. Which, as I said, nobody does because it serves no purpose on Earth. And nobody's done it in space because it's too expensive to launch the additional mass.

>A railroad requires a substantial industrial base to build
No it doesnt. A railway is perfect for mars because roads with IC engine cars will not work because IC engines won't work without oxygen. Even electric cars aren't a good idea because batteries are shit. Train with electrified rail or overhead cable is the only way.

Yes it does.
>> repairing shit requires a high degree of dexterity and coordination
And unfortunately an astronaut on EVA has severly reduced dexterity.
And if IC engines don't work and electric cars are shit, how are you gonna run your bulldozers and excavators to make a railway?

What are you moving with your railway in the first place?

>No, carbon dioxide and water ice don't give off oxygen just because you heat them up moderately.
Sure, but power requirements are much less of a concern than handling requirements on Mars. Dealing with Martian dust is going to require a lot of work, and the perchlorates are going to corrode the shit out of anything uprotected. Dealing with CO2 requires a pump, some pipes and a tank. Also, 480C doesn't really qualify as "moderate heating".

>Nitrates
I'm not aware of the presence of nitrates on Mars. Do you have a source for that?

>It's different if you design things to be repaired by robots.
That helps, but it would increase the mass. Also, no matter how well you design something, once it's damaged you won't be able to count on your robot-friendly components remaining robot-friendly. What if a motor fails, and the handles it was supposed to be removed by are broken off?
It's an interesting idea, but you're still a long way short of humans in a garage.

>A railway is perfect for mars because roads with IC engine cars will not work because IC engines won't work without oxygen.
Fuels are a long way from being the largest concern for transporting cargo over the Martian surface. Anyway, you can just use a fuel cell with a stored oxidiser if you really need long ranges.

>Even electric cars aren't a good idea because batteries are shit.
They're good enough for most things. What exactly are these vehicles needed for?

>Train with electrified rail or overhead cable is the only way.
How many kilometres of railway are you going to build? And to where?

>And unfortunately an astronaut on EVA has severly reduced dexterity.
Still a lot more than any robot. Look at EVA work on the ISS; it's slower than work on the ground, but they're still doing fairly complex tasks.

An EVA suit used on mars will give much better dexterity and freedom than one they use on the ISS, because it doesn't have to be as thick or insulated. Plus you dont have to worry about micrometeoroid armor.

>And to where?
Between Martian towns

Lel nope. Pic relates is what we are taking to Mars

Virtually every non-biogenic mineral found on Earth, obviously.

uranium is big demand

>autists will cry

Enough to justify going to space? Nope