Solar Panels?

does mars has no atmosphere because it has no water?

mars is bigger than earth or as big so why

it should attract oxygen by gravity like earth and everything else

this doesnt make sense

nuclear energy is hazardous so the smart thing to do is avoid it

>mars is bigger than earth or as big so why
its way fucking smaller
why say stupid shit that you could google

Nice bait

Mars has wind. The problem is that the air density is so low. That you can't push a wind turbine that is worth a damn.

>Scientists say, "Bumble bees are not designed to fly!"

We all know how that turned out. lol

Is this the King Bait thread?

>there's dust devils

But they are hueg

OP here, back now

You're telling me that the power consumption of a rover is comparable to that of a million-person colony? GTFO.

>Uranium or thorium fission power plants are massive
For their size, nuclear power plants will generate much more power than an equivalent array of solar panels

>need someplace to dump heat
How convenient that we're looking to melt ice then

>Does launching a rocket require a lot of electrical energy anyway?
No, but processing the fuel will as pointed out in . For life support systems solar panels in space are the better option because most of the problems I outlined in the OP are avoided.

>We know that dust storms aren't an issue from the solar powered rovers that have been sent.
GTFO, see pic related and nasa.gov/feature/goddard/the-fact-and-fiction-of-martian-dust-storms

>the ITS could lift the mass of the ISS in one flight.
Yes but that doesn't mean an ITS launch is free, and if you can get away with producing the same energy while having to take less mass it'll be vastly cheaper, and while Musk seems to want to spend billions in this it's still a finite amount of money, and saving on one end means that the funds can be spent on another.

I agree that it makes sense for Musk to send panels as he hass experience with that technology, but I don't think that experience will outweigh the benefits of nuclear over solar. I'd also agree with regulation being the biggest hurdle, I don't really have any point that can refute that.

>having to take less mass it'll be vastly cheaper,
The cost of fuel is vastly the cheapest thing per flight. The convenience the solar array provides once it is set up (literally plug it in and away it goes) well makes up for the weight. Mars not having much of an atmosphere makes up for the weaker solar intensity. Plus, even making more panels on mars would be easy as fuck given that we bring over a few chemicals. You talk about factories like theyre a bad thing but fail to realize that these people are going to need jobs.

>You're telling me that the power consumption of a rover is comparable to that of a million-person colony? GTFO.

Are you seriously that brain damaged to not understand that user is talking about wind blowing dust off?

>colony

That requires multiple generations. Otherwise it is just a "base". That will never happen on Mars with its low gravity. It seems like you are just another cry baby Enjoy your Jello babies, kid.

Solar energy is free and thus not profitable so it will never exist.

Nothing will be profitable on Mars. It will be a massive economic sinkhole. Just like the ISS.

The fact that fuel is the cheap bit it still has a cost that could be saved by taking less mass. If Musk does manage to bring the price per ton down to what he's suggesting though it may be feasible. I agree convenience will be a big plus, especially compared to nuclear, however technical difficulty doesn't seem to have been a limiting factor in Musk's plans and nuclear power is well understood, so while it may require more effort to set up in the long term that shouldn't be a big factor.

It wouldn't make sense to transport raw materials to Mars and then assemble the panels there, you might as well make them on Earth if you're going to do that. I'm not talking about factories being a bad thing in the long term, however they require power and in the short term that is very limited if you rely on solar. Until you can get a reliable power source, running production on Mars would be unfeasible. Furthermore, if you did the reasonable thing and gathered the resources needed there instead of taking them from Earth that'd further increase the energy requirements.

If you depend on wind blow dust off your power source it doesn't make it very reliable. If the power levels drop on a rover, it limits its functionality and in the worst case forces it to enter a dormant mode or to shut down completely. If there is a dust storm and a colony or base is left with low power, you still need to sustain the people there, so you're forced to halt useful activities. In a worst case scenario, you're unable to power life support systems and people die. If you have any regard for human life, you need something more reliable than solar panels to make the idea work.

Quite likely

i can see it being used as a bank and an insurance policy by the billionaires

thats profitable

they should build orbital solar concentration stations
giant mirrors (maybe boPET sprayed with aluminum) in orbit, focusing their rays on certain points on the surface. You would get energy out of it and warm mars up, which would melt the polar caps, which would warm mars up and increase atmospheric pressure

>They're heavy af
Uh... solar panels are the most mass-efficient way to get energy in the inner solar system, short of some exotic, still theoretical kinds of nuclear power (such as fission fragment reactors).

Your objections don't get any better after that, so I'm abandoning thread.

Because hippies and other retards protest against nuclear.

Turns out bumblebees fly in a completely different way than we thought they should. They were right about them not being able to fly by flapping their wings up and down

is thorium as abundant on mars as it is on earth?
If so, thorium reactors are the obvious solution

Rovers using solar panels have consistently outlasted nasal estimates for longevity so I dunno dude.

He could also go full madman and have the solar panels be in space and beam the power to the surface.

They still eventually died after a couple of years, which wouldn't really be helpful if you wanted to have a sustainable long-term settlement.

>a million-person colony
He expects it to take at least 50 years at best to get one million people on Mars.

This. I don't see Mars bringing any profit, even in a hundred years.
I think the market for "Authentic Martian wine $20K a bottle" is quite small.

Jesus fucking christ

What part of do you consider bait?

the only thing that will ever be profitable about space, for those on earth, is platinum group metals, He3, and micro gravity fabrication.

For the Spacenoids, it is about setting up new economies in space.

Do a work rotation on the moon. Mining and building O'niel cylinder parts.

Go to Mars and build spacecraft to go deeper into the solar system.

meanwhile moon rocks are quite valuable

You can basically assume there will be a bustling market in gems & rocks & sand from mars. So the idea that mars can't be "profitable" is nonsense, especially if most of the colonists are essentially volunteers, not paid employees.

Why not hydrogen fuel cells?

I think the problem is about mass. complexity and resource avaliabilty.

A nuclear reactor that produces a reasonable ammount of energy will weigh on the order of kilotons and that means that you cannot bring along a lot more material(since delta-V is affected by mass logaritmically) that is not energy related but esential to any colony that can only hope for months before getting a replacement.

On the other hand a nuclear reactor is not just something you just put on the surface and make it run, it requires having people around who know what they're doing in case the comunications cut off or lag or just need fine manipulation.

And we can't just discard de posibility of something in the nuclear reactor going off and finding out that you don't have the spare parts around because they weighted too much and the mission planers didn't thought about that specific part breaking, a reactor meltdown(like total worst case stupid scenario) of lets say a simple modular 20 MW might not seem like much and can be solved by putting some distance but it would still mean that you would end up with reserve power or simply out of power and since you are not in a friendly enviroment this situation is kinda bad.

On the other hand, Solar panels are cheap, simple, redundant and light.

But in the end the question is how really big the colony is suposed to be and how many trips are they going to do(the 1000 trips of 100 people is... a very optimistic figure to say the least).

>So the idea that mars can't be "profitable" is nonsense
No, it is. People with a rock collection aren't a million dollar industry. It's the same as my 20K Martian wine argument.
Sure you'll find some people who wanna buy some exotic shit for high prices, but they're a fringe.

And It's still cheaper to mine stuff here on Earth than it is in space and will be for the foreseeable future for the majority of materials.

Space mining will only be useful if you wanna build stuff directly in space. Like o'Neill cylinders.

One user on /g/ suggested turning mars into a tax haven. Let people register a company on Mars on the condition that they have at least a few employees there.
It's possibly the best way to fund this shit.

>the solar panels be in space and beam the power to the surface.
Musk has explicitly said this idea is dumb.
Shitelonsays.com

But that was for Earth.

"Mars won't be profitable for Earth" --- No shit fucking Sherlocks.

Mars will however we profitable for the Martian economy after certain thresholds have been met. Almost NO goods trading will be had from Mars to Earth.

There will however be people on Mars that want to build and prosper.

Every ship travelling to mars can carry some payload back for "free"(only the fuel needed to give it the 8 km/s return)
If they are able to be producing a few hundred millions a year in exotic goods, thats easy money to be invested directly into more mars stuff.

>One user on /g/ suggested turning mars into a tax haven. Let people register a company on Mars on the condition that they have at least a few employees there.
>It's possibly the best way to fund this shit.

lol That won't happen. Even if it was tried, it'd be stopped right away.

Look, that shit will only be a penny compared to the actual cost of this whole project.

The only reason geosynchronous panels in space are better than panels on earth is because of the atmosphere absorbing and diffusing some of the light. Guess what Mars basically doesn't have?

>And It's still cheaper to mine stuff here on Earth

For over how long? Prices have started to rise, we know about the oil crisis but we also know about other crises that will not be as easily avoided like the phosphates runing out for the excesive agriculture, and even if we find other sources they will not be easily accesed or as pure as the one we have already exploited.

Meanwhile mining on Mars is as "simple" as it was in the old days, or mining an asteroid that is almost pure profit from start to finish.

There is a point in resource extraction where choping down tress takes more time beceause you already took the closer ones, this is a know economic law(which name I don't remember right now) and hence requires more effort/money before it starts requiring a truck for loading, or specialiced machinery, and even that has a limit.

He only said it was dumb because there is simply no need to build them in space. Earths surface will suffice.

But we're already in space. We could just drop it off in orbit before landing.
The only downside is that it requires extra infrastructure, which we wouldn't have at that time.

>Guess what Mars basically doesn't have?
It does have sand, lots of it.
It also has occasional global dust storms. Don't expect to generate much electricity at that time.

Luxury & exotic goods markets are only going to increase
if even a small amount of the hundreds of billions spent a year goes to martian sourced goods, that'll pay for the colonization program.

So premature to claim shit about what industries might exist on mars before we've even gone there...

No he said its dumb because you are turning solar into electricity, into beamed power, back into electricity

>We could just drop it off in orbit before landing.
Thats not how physics works

>How are solar panels a good idea on Mars?
No coal, oil, geothermal, other shit on mars.

All we have is solar or nuclear.

With multi-junction solar panels you can get very good power outputs even with the weakened sun.

>Drilling deep enough seems hard as fuck though, even on earth.
It's only hard because the drills begin to melt once you get a couple of miles.

The bigger problem is making the long tubing needed to drill that deep and hoping the mantel is warm enough to make any use of it.

I don't think sand is nearly as big an issue as you think it would be. Worst comes to worst send someone out with a good broom to sweep the panels off.

You're right about the dust storms though. They'd cut your power generation down to the point where you would have serious problems. Using a battery for backup could only work for so long. You basically need another form of power and Nuclear is really the only other option. (Wind maybe, but I'm doubtful that the atmosphere is thick enough for that to practical)

Yeah but for how are we gonna keep relying on oil? We're relying more and more on electricity and renewable energy sources.

>excesive agriculture
Actually I'm sure that Mars greenhouse and farming technology can help improve agriculture efficiency on Earth.
But those are ideas, we can beam them back using radiowaves.

The majority resources that are easily mined is space are the ones that are still abundant here on Earth.

>Mars is as "simple" as it was in the old days
I'm sure it is. But it will still be expensive to bring large amounts back.

>Yeah but for how are we gonna keep relying on oil?

We can't, we need to achieve space faring state to exploit thermoelectric power without the limits of a planet, or discover something like fusion(fision energy is another form of oil, if we depended totally on it we would run out of usefull fisionables after only 60 years) or something as magical as superstrong membranes to exploit the sea.

>Actually I'm sure that Mars greenhouse and farming technology can help improve agriculture efficiency on Earth.

The problem is more fundamental than that, phosphorous is a fertilicer because its part of the CHOPS(the main macronutrients) that a plant uses, and the current demand for phosphorous is huge for the high population, so this means that the "Roman Empire of our time" will not come out of a faulty system dependent on slaves but rather as victims of our own ability to use the enviroment, this is why is so imperative the need to become a space faring civilization, because if we fail now, future generations will lack the resources to rebuild a world like ours and will be fundamentally stuck.

And the best we can do about it is trying to optimice plants to do more with less by modifying them, but we still need to find more resources to sustaint a constantly growing population.

>But it will still be expensive to bring large amounts back.

Yes, but it depends on the mass/volume/price relationship than anything else, and the price relationship in the end is nothing more than a relationship between the pure power of engines and logistical capacity to sustain such power.

For example: Mobile phones in the past were massive, not only for the lack of miniaturization capacity but because there were very few antenas and you needed a more powerfull battery and antena to reach it, now there is so much comunication infraestructure that you can reduce the size of the batery and the antena and use it for other things.

>if we fail now, future generations will lack the resources to rebuild a world like ours and will be fundamentally stuck
>more resources to sustaint a constantly growing population
I think I found the stuck, being apes we are obviously incapable of regulating our own population be it politics, religion or selfishness. Wet dreams of a space faring civilization are stuck on this want of ever growing population. We didn't evolve in space and don't belong there. There are two options, we regulate our population or have mother nature do it for us and if I was a betting man I would put the farm on the later.

Don't want to pee in your cornflakes and I'm all for ejecting volunteers into space towards distant planets but viewing that as anything but a suicide trip is ignorance, digestion of too much sci-fi mental masturbation. Come back to earth son.

Get some water and build a methane steam generator

Fuck solar

The problem with this is that you need power to make the methane. And power to split water to get oxygen to burn the methane. I don't think you'd be able to create enough methane for a steam plant and be able to break even.

Although you might be able to use solar power to get the methane and oxygen. Have the steam plant as an emergency backup in case you lose solar power. I doubt you could get such a setup to be practical though.

organic photovoltaics are pretty light

Nuclear power on Mars has same problem as in space. Cooling.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle
No oceans or rivers to cool working body. Not even atmosphere so no ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower too.
Mars is really shity planet.

Only radiators left. But this is very inefficient method and these radiators could easily rival solar batteries in size and weight.

Though for melting ice during water mining nuclear reactor could be very handy.

mars DOES have an atmosphere, and you can dump heat into ground too

People have good reason to worry about launching nuclear stuff...
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954

"The effort to recover radioactive material from the satellite was dubbed Operation Morning Light. Covering a total area of 124,000 square kilometres (48,000 sq mi), the joint Canadian-American team swept the area by foot and air in Phase I from January 24, 1978 to April 20, 1978 and Phase II from April 21, 1978 to October 15, 1978.[1][2] They were ultimately able to recover 12 large pieces of the satellite. All but two of the fragments recovered were radioactive.[1] These pieces displayed radioactivity of up to 1.1 sieverts per hour, yet they only comprised an estimated 1% of the fuel. One fragment had a radiation level of 500 R/h, which "is sufficient to kill a person ... remaining in contact with the piece for a few hours."[12]"

t. A huge proponent of nuclear power

We just need a suede relaible and safe launcher for the nuclear material first. 99%+

the problem with nuclear is that its heavy & shitty

There has been very little work done on improving nuclear power plants, whereas tons of work done on improving solar.

So for the foreseable future, solar will be the way to go in the inner solar system.

It doesnt really matter how much has been done, it matters how much more can be done.

Society is retarded about anything NUCULAR, so it'll take a lot of public outreach and education before that's a viable option.

Essentially, feels are getting in the way of progress, as per the norm.

>depend on wind

It just means you don't have to wipe it down all the time. How fucking dense are you, kid? Fucking shitposting hippy.

Actually there's been a decent amount of work done with regards to improving reactors. NASA even has designs that are barely a hundred kilograms and pump out a few dozen MW. Most of them are designed for use in engines so you aren't getting all of that as electrical power. On the other side you also have designs on the scale of NERVA but with added equipment so that they can generate electrical power when you aren't executing a main engine burn.

We have most of the details worked out. It would mostly be a matter of building them.

hey dipshit the reactor itself might be
>barely a hundred kilograms

the heavy shit is the shells of shielding that go around your hundred kilogram reactor. having power is all fine and good, but getting cancer and radiation poisoning isn't an option on mars

the heavy shit for a space reactor is a heat sink and radiators
shielding is not much of an issue because they could put the reactor on a 500 meter long pole

>jello babies

They'll be fine.

It is not sort of atmosphere that can be sued fro cooling.

>and you can dump heat into ground too
In the found your linted to conduction heat transfer only (on Mars, because no water). So no it is not feasible too.

Don't live near reactor? Mobile nuclear reactor solution developed for Earth used soil berms for shielding. Soil would become mildly radioactive because of Induced radioactivity but nobody asks you to live on top of reactor berms. Mars surface exposed to x100 more radiation than Earth anyway.

Fission is only massive if you need a concrete environment shield, something you don't need on Mars.

Heat can be dumped with a radiator. It's not perfect but it would be lighter than solar panels.

Want to know why Mars has no magnetic field and no atmosphere? Because the planet is cold you dumbfuck.

On a spaceship that can see the sun 24/7. On Mars you're at the mercy of the rotation on the planet. So on top of your solar panels you need batteries.

>A nuclear reactor that produces a reasonable ammount of energy will weigh on the order of kilotons

Wrong. The 1100MWe AP1000 reactor vessels weigh in at about 400t. The reactor vessel after radiation shielding are easily the heaviest component of a reactor. Given you don't need an environment shield on Mars and you don't need 1100MWe for the first colony the mass isn't really that bad. I think 400t all up for a 100MWe reactor is a reasonable figure.

For comparison solar panels are about 10kg m^2 with fittings. Mars has a solar radiance of about 600 W/m^2. Lets be generous and assume 50% efficiency and assume a very generous 30% capacity factor:

100,000,000/(600*0.5*0.3) = 1,111,111 m^2 of panels.

10*1,111,111/1000 = ~11,000 t of solar panels.

And on top of this you need batteries.

>it requires having people around who know what they're doing
People like this aren't hard to find. This is also likely to be a colony of over-achieving scientists and engineers.

>some rubbish about your reactor breaking

It's call redundancy you stupid twat.

>On the other hand, Solar panels are cheap, simple, redundant and light.

Even before you factor in batteries they're neither point one or point four.

universetoday.com/21293/despite-dust-storms-solar-power-is-best-for-mars-colonies/

Looks like solar is still the best way to go.

You are quite dismissive of the heat issue with fission plants.
>we'll just melt ice
That's a lot of work, you could dump heat into the regolith with some kind of HUGE heat exchanger though.

Thanks for putting some numbers behind this

It may be a lot of work, but one of the things we required energy for in the first place is melting this ice. If you use it as a heat dump, you can kill two birds with one stone. Sure it may be a lot of work, but it makes more sense than dumping the heat and then running electric heaters to melt it.

I didn't think of a fission reactor as a process for mining water itself. Actually that's pretty efficient. Thanks user

The mass of the reaction vessel is a tiny fraction of the mass of a steam-driven power plant, though.

>using steam on mars

It's called supercritical CO2

>It's called supercritical CO2
That requires very high pressures (especially if you want temperatures high enough to make any power), which in turns necessitates even heavier pressure vessels and thicker pipes. And you're not saving any weight on the plant end either - you still need turbines and all that crap.
Why would you want to take something like that to Mars?

Developed Russian space reactor uses He+Xe gas mix at 40 bar
geektimes.ru/post/253368/
Total eight of of system with ion engines is 20000 kg. Total electric power is 1 MWt, thermal power is 3.8MWt (26% efficiency). As you can see largest part of the system is radiators. For planetary use it would be even heavier as radiators need to withstand gravity.

>on top of your solar panels you need batteries.
A small amount of batteries would be useful, but most of your power will be going to electrolysis, to produce hydrogen (and oxygen) for methane synthesis. That process can just run when the sun's shining.

It effectivly cuts productivity of you chemical plants in half though, so you need them twice as much (and heavier). So this weight it should be accounted to when choice is made between nuclear and solar.

Of course it would be solar anyway. Dealing with nuclear shit is too regulated and has huge costs overheads due to regulation reasons.

Setting aside supercriticality, as your diagram shows, you only need 10bar for CO2 to have a liquid phase to work with in a "steam engine".

On Mars, the NO2/N2O4 system would provide an efficiency boost, and the outside environment is toxic anyway.

NO2 is relatively easy to produce on Mars thanks to the nitrate (and chlorate/perchlorate) content of the soil. Heat it up, and NO and O2 will be among the gasses released, and they can easily be reacted to produce NO2/N2O4.

It's way easier to use concentrated solar to melt ice. Mylar sheets or fresnel lenses, either way, you're just talking about thin sheets of plastic. You can even use non-concentrating "greenhouses". Heat's the easiest thing to get with solar power.

>supercritical CO2

Veeky Forums is full of this

There are these flexible solar panels that weigh less than ordinary solar panels, due to having no glass (dense material) and no frame. I don't know how long they last though.

Wouldn't you need a seperate assembly to generate electricity as well though? With fission you are using the waste heat to do the job.

I guess glass could be manufactured there without *that* huge a power requirement, so that's definitely a good counter against the mass argument. The other issues with solar panels would still be there though.

That's the beauty of using heat-based power stations on mars, not necessarily nuclear. Most waste heat goes to doing something useful and any loses warm up the atmosphere which is helpful in the long run anyway.

That sounds all very elegant and efficient, but how is it supposed to be practical?

What if you want to do the work in different places and at different times?

Add more piping, build out to the next area of frozen water and switch a valve over to the heat exchanger in the new patch. You face the same issue with solar though. Neither one would be "easy" but I guess its easier to reposition some lenses to melt ice. Or to load the panels up in a truck and haul them to a new base. But I don't know why you would do that instead of just building a new assembly at the second base, once you have proper mining and industrial process at the first base.

>You face the same issue with solar though.
No, with solar you're not messing with the coolant system of a nuclear reactor or screwing around with plumbing.

Pipes are trouble. And they're heavy.

Solar cells themselves are super light. What makes solar panels heavy is the glass they're mounted on. There's got to be something much lighter that can be used instead.

A mars colony designed to be energy efficient is also going to need a lot less power than the same number of people living on Earth.

Another question about solar. Mars has a thin atmosphere bad for heat transfer. If you end up with a large abount of solar panels for doing industrial level work, wouldn't you need sone cooling there as well? Not as much as a nuke plant, but some kind of radiator?

Well it's gonna be 10 years before mass cargo is being shipped over, so Solar will have improved even more.

And Musk already has a solar company that'll likely just be donating the panels to SpaceX

Obviously you can build lighter solar panels since they don't need to handle weather or kids throwing rocks at them.

eh, its industries that consume 80%+ of all the power on Earth, and mars is going to need as much industries as possible. Producing fuel for launches every 2 years will take tons of 24/7 power supply.

A solar panel can only get as hot as the Sun can heat it up, and under heavy load, a large percentage of the incoming light is turned into electricity instead of heat.