Note to self: Water found on Mars-now what?

NUKE ROCKY44 · Senior Member

Note to self: Water found on Mars-now what?

John · Senior Member

I just received my "stimulus" check this week. If all of that money had gone into some combination of space exploration and energy projects we'd be a lot better off. They never have the money except when they want to send it!

NUKE ROCKY44 · Senior Member

Yes, John I agree:

They never have the money except when they want to send it!
So NASA's future might be limited to sending technicians to ISS on foreign lift systems? cry

"Space, like Earth below, is globalizing. And as it does, America's long-held superiority in exploring, exploiting and commercializing "the final frontier" is slipping away, many experts believe." [link]

GoogleNaut · Guru

Water on mars--it's nice to have proof that it exists, however I have yet to see any data which indicates how much is likely to be there. The northern polar region is thought to have kilometer thick ice sheets, but what we need to know now is what the distribution of subsurface ices are in more equatorial regions. To exploit those potential resources, we will also need to approximately how much ice is in a particular area, how deep below the surface it is, and possibly most importantly, how much soil, rock, etc is mixed in with the ice. Also, we need to know its approximate composition--there are some indications that water on Mars may have a lot of dissolved salts: sulfates, probably of magnesium and calcium; sodium chlorides may also be dominant halide salt as it is on earth. All of this data will be important to ahev on hand when the first insitu rocket propellant plant is placed on mars.

I'm not a real fan of sending hydrogen all the way to mars for the purpose of creating a methane propellant there--not if you position a base close to a large subsurface ice concentration. The trouble is, if Mars permafrost is anything like Earth permafrost, it will be a real bugger to drill, or cut through it. Most likely a hot probe will have to be used to slowly melt, and force its way into the medium--and then melt the water insitu fro pumping to the surce. But this is much more difficult to do, and it will be very energy intensive...

NUKE ROCKY44 · Senior Member

I think the MSL nuke class of rovers is suppose to do the in depth analysis of water/ice deposits.

I think there are two way approaches off the top of my head Zubrin comes up with mobile methods of extracting water from martian soil:
( I think it requires humans)

-soil eater/processor on wheels
-portable greenhouse dome w/ condenser
-skirted grader w/ microwave system

Personally, I would opt for a nuke powered 'hot jacketed' tipped drill to melt subsurface layered 'pockets of brine' without creating a huge sinkhole. let the silt settle to the bottom of the pockets and extract the salty water into filtration system tanks at surface for processing potable water.

I think this avoids any risk of sublimation (waste)

I think the nuke method drill has literature already.

So yea... interesting topic article to post. Any assistance would be appreciated biggrin

GoogleNaut · Guru

I would design the system with notion that the briny water will be corrosive: I would assume that since there are a lot of sulfate salts in the brine, then there will likely be H2SO4 as well--so I would automatically think distillation. Distilling the brine to purify the water for further processing will go a long way to reduce the loads on difficult to replace items like: ion exchange resin columns; activated carbon filters; water softeners...remove 60-80% of the water from the brine; pump the remainder of the brine and salt crystals to the surface and dump it into a pond: put a greenhouse bubble over it to condense a little bit more evaporate. When the 'pond' is full of salt crystals, mine it for its mineral content.