Part one of a review of nine technologies that are already in development and testing today and that will bring us to Mars and allow us to save Mark Watney
The planet Mars has had a central place in imagination and culture for thousands of years. The ancients admired its red color and its brightness that rises and falls in cycles over the years.
First observations from telescopes led to the hypothesis that the planet is covered in canals used by its inhabitants for transport and trade. In "The War of the Worlds" places H.G. Wells the Martian civilization plotting to conquer Earth. In 1938 Orson Welles put the listeners in a panic who thought they were listening to a news broadcaster and not a radio drama according to the book by H.G. Wells.
The real story of humans and Mars is a bit more prosaic and no less fascinating. The first telescopes pointed at the red dot in the sky saw a hazy and mottled disc as a result of the telescope technology of the time and this led to the same hallucinations about canals. Only 50 years ago, the first photograph was taken from a spacecraft that passed by Mars. Now after decades of research on the planet itself, the emerging picture is of a world that once contained open reservoirs of water, an essential ingredient for life.
The magic of Mars has not dimmed, even in the age of the Internet. A retired programmer named Andy Weir (Weir) who liked to write posts on his blog, published a series about NASA astronauts being abandoned on Mars. The popularity led him to turn the series into a successful book "The Martian" which was also adapted into a movie that was released in October 2015. In the Hebrew version of the movie, for some reason they chose a name that doesn't mean anything: "Saving Mark Watney".
"Saving Mark Watney" merges the fiction and the facts about Mars, and is based on the research of NASA and others on Mars, and it continues the line to the thirties of the current century, a time when astronauts regularly fly to Mars, live on the surface and explore the planet you went Although the plot takes place twenty years in the future, NASA is already developing many of the technologies featured in the film.
Residential complex
On the surface of Mars, Watney spends a significant amount of time inside the habitation module - the Hab -, the home away from home. Future astronauts who land on Mars will need homes of this type so that they don't have to spend months and years lying on the dusty ground in spacesuits.
At NASA's Johnson Space Center, crews train for long, extended space missions in a sort of facility that simulates these conditions, known as the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA).
HERA contains an isolated environment that simulates the conditions of deep space flight. The two-story facility contains living quarters, work areas, a hygienic toilet module and a simulation of an airlock. Inside this facility, the participants in the experiment perform operational tasks, fill in what is necessary to operate the facilities they "brought with them" and live together for 14 days (soon the intention is to increase the duration of the stay to sixty days). They simulate future missions in an isolated environment. Astronauts recently used the facility to simulate the space station on the eve of their flight there. This research facility provides important data about the human factor, behavioral health and means of maintaining it in order to help NASA understand how to carry out missions in deep space.
Plant farm
Today, the astronauts on the space station have an abundance of food that reaches them in the cargo spacecraft, in Russian, European, Japanese Progress spacecraft and of course the first private spacecraft Dragon of SPACEX and Cygnus of Orbital. On Mars, the astronauts will not be able to rely on supply missions from Earth. Even express shipments will take at least nine months to arrive. In order for humans to survive on Mars, they will have to provide a continuous source of food - in other words, they will have to grow it themselves.
Left: In a scene from the movie "Saving Mark Whitney", a collection of potatoes he grew inside the residential facility. Photo: Fox. On the right - the (real) astronaut Kiel Lindgren picks lettuce grown in the VEGGIE experiment on the International Space Station.
In the film, Watney turns the HAB into a farm that supplies his food needs and turns the potato into the first edible edible plant. Today, in low Earth orbit, lettuce is the most common crop in space. On board the space station is installed the VEGGIE experiment designed to test a system for supplying fresh food.
Red, blue and green lights help the plants to grow in cushions - small bags with active surfaces that contain growing medium and fertilizers. The plants were meant to be harvested by the astronauts. In 2014, astronauts used the system to grow red romaine lettuce and just recently they harvested and tasted the first plant grown in space. This is a big step toward agriculture in space, and NASA is seeking to expand the amount and types of plants that will help meet the nutritional needs of future astronauts on Mars.
For the full article on the NASA website
The next chapters will be published in the coming days
More of the topic in Hayadan:
The future of the future - colonies on Mars not science fiction
"The flight to Mars will leave the moon"
15 תגובות
the guide of the universe
An interesting and amusing response because the storms on Mars are indeed not of the intensity described, and are not strong enough to cause such damage. This is what is called a plot device.
What really annoyed me in the movie "Saving Mark Watney" is the fact that they didn't bother to bury the buildings of the residence below the surface. If indeed the storms on the surface of Mars are of the intensity described (I understand that the filmmakers intended to be accurate and as close to reality as possible), hiding the structures below the surface of the ground can save damage and maybe even energy.
Burying the buildings is of course more difficult to do than just placing them on the ground, but in my opinion it is absolutely possible.
They chose the name Saving Mark Watney because it is unsurprisingly very similar to Saving Private Ryan. And in both the star is Matt Damon.
Snupkin
I agree with you that currently the human race has a problem living sustainably on Earth and the problem probably won't be solved by changing address.
What will solve the problem is a deep cultural change of enough people.
In order for this change to happen, we need two things that settling on other sects will give us.
1. Cultural diversity 2. Time.
A settlement on Mars gives us more borrowed time to correct our ways and a new human society from which the behavioral change that enables a long-term existence may come.
To Yossi - what is the connection between the difficulty of responding and "preserving the pearl". that people will react however they want. Don't worry, anyone who comments or even enters this site and bothers to comment is a person far above average, so you won't see comments like "God bless my brother Chame, what a scientific article".
If anything, then the other way around - if you want to preserve this site (and develop it!) then you need to introduce a greater traffic of surfers to it. All over the world they understood that traffic of people = money and it is desirable that this wonderful site does not disappear due to lack of money, therefore I would expect the owners of the site to make this site friendly and take it from the thinking of the first decade of the Internet (as it looks now unfortunately for everyone) to the present, that is, a convenient option Comment, like, interact with social networks (where is the SHARE button?!) etc. good week.
Yossi, you are missing the point a bit.
It won't do you any good to colonize other stars until you've learned to live sustainably.
In addition, if they invested the effort in saving the human race on Earth, you could get a few more million years to reach the technology you want, instead of another 200 years or so at best that we will have left if we continue in the current situation.
Even in Antarctica you can't and don't want to live, so you think you'll have fun on Mars?
Without air, in freezing temperatures, lack of water and toxic dust everywhere?
Technology and fantasies are nice and I also like MDB, but in the meantime and until then we have reality to deal with and we have to take into account that billions of people will stay on Earth, or die on Earth, while other people fantasize about destroying our home and sending eggs into space.
I am definitely in favor of research and science but it is better to focus on research right now than to spend most of the money on flights to Mars.
The modeling of a tesseract in the movie Interstellar is a beautiful modeling of an idea from general relativity by a computer so that it is understandable to many people. This is another thing that is not sustainable science and may not even be true - but it is worth understanding. The movie my father writes about interests me and following the article I will go see it. Alon Musk, the entrepreneur, definitely believes in permanent settlement on Mars despite the enormous difficulty of realizing it. It's good to have a musk oak.
In the movie Interstellar, a tesseract made by a more advanced culture is shown. A cube in four dimensions, where time is the fourth physical dimension and every point is a point in time. Perhaps time is not the fourth dimension that general relativity indicates it is, and perhaps the expansion is spherical and not cubic, and perhaps the arrow of time always moves forward and not backward, at least for us. What is important is the understanding of the fourth dimension that the film gives us. It's obviously not sustainable science and I don't mix science with futuristic ideas, but I didn't have an illustration of what a tesseract looks like before the movie and now I have a partial idea better than before in my opinion.
The idea is to spread the legacy and it is not clear if there will be an ability to save the entire human race.
Maybe in 1000 years there will be technology that will allow interstellar travel like today a trip to the USA.
maybe not.
In the movie Interstellar with Matthew McConaughey, significant parts of the Earth are supposedly transferred to another planet by discovering new laws and driving gravity. The professor who initiates the project to save the planet is skeptical about the chances of transferring an entire population and therefore launches spaceships using existing technology with frozen fertilized eggs for an expedition that goes to three stars in a new galaxy of course through a wormhole - something that does not exist today. What is important in the film is the openness to ideas that today are not viable science. The screenwriter of the film is Professor Kip Thorne and he is a first-class physicist who expressed the belief that wormholes exist and that they bridge distant galaxies. Books are meant to promote ideas that are not yet viable. When Columbus crossed the ocean he did so without knowing what awaited him and failed to understand that this was not Asia and in primitive ships. It was only three hundred years after 1492 that he and not Amerigo Vespucci was recognized as responsible for the discovery of America.
Throughout history, glorious cultures have passed on their legacy to the cultures that succeeded them. Greece and Judea to Western culture, the new world to the old world that twice saved it from itself.
If the earth could one day suffer some kind of disaster, dividing the eggs into one basket increases the probability of survival of the legacy of the human race, which is in my opinion at the beginning of its journey. Culture and knowledge today are not the pinnacle of evolution in my opinion. In addition, colonization in space may, in my personal opinion only, encourage intellectual pluralism, old cultures that we have become accustomed to and it is not possible to carry out a cultural transformation in them compared to a new world in which it is possible. Makes sense in my opinion, although it is not proven that there are cultures that managed to spread in space. When Maxwell developed the equations for an electromagnetic field everyone asked why it was necessary. After all, these are invisible and unproven waves. Today all our lives consist of electromagnetism. Today they say about string theory - why is it good if it cannot be proven. And the XNUMXth Higgs boson was probably proven to exist at the LHC.
Interstellar travel that starts small will help develop propulsion infrastructures more sophisticated than conventional fuel rocket propulsion.
Infrastructures that repair themselves in motion. First with the use of plasma and nuclear engines and then perhaps with gravity propulsion. Each planet gives its culture a window of time in which it needs to advance culturally and technologically enough to survive an acute crisis. For example, an asteroid impact, or a collision by the local sun. Most attempts self-destruct or are destroyed. But somewhere in space there might be a culture that manages to make it to the next level.
Agree with "I". And what does the "website" have to do with it? Someone explain
my site? The address of the page where I respond? What is?
And now regarding Mars - it is not the most idiotic thing to invest huge resources in making Mars habitable
And more tremendous resources in making the earth "uninhabitable"?
After all, even if they succeed, they will be able to move a few thousand people there at the most and everyone else will die...
"I am". The effort is worthwhile. This is one of the smartest sites in Israel, so in my opinion (maybe I'm wrong) the amount of talkbacks on it is lower compared to an online newspaper or Facebook. In my opinion, after one time, no more details should be added to the article.
In my opinion it is our duty to preserve this gem site, and the talkbacks are a modest way to do this.
The movie Interstellar with Matthew McConaughey is not entirely scientific, but it is based on a half script/direction by Professor Kip Thorne. Perfect scientific accuracy cannot be found there, not even close to it.
The ideas demonstrated in it are beautiful: they are a black hole, except for spaghetti, and a tesseract - a cube in four dimensions with the time dimension spread out as if it were a space dimension, and in each wing of it, the same room in another time. Those who are looking for complete scientific accuracy will not find it, because for example the core of the black hole cannot be reached intact, or that advanced generations of humanity bypassed the destruction of the earth and managed to save the present from the future.
But the idea that advanced generations of humanity have control over gravity and the time dimension, and searching for stars in a distant galaxy by warping space and creating a wormhole are ideas that are not yet Kip Thorne's science and can be read in the universe as Hawking's nutshell.
The article is good. One-time data entry. Next time you don't have to enter.
The topic is interesting.
It's terribly annoying to have to enter so many details before each response (why do I have to enter an email and a website?! What does that have to do with anything...). I'm getting tired of commenting here. I already forgot what I wanted to write about the article.