Recent content by danR

Gee, so many of Peter's innovations look so familiar...

Can any of the current probes on Mars be configured to do a ferrihydrite test? "Mars Curiosity Astrobiology Rover ChemCam Instrument Has Fired 1 Million Times" —Astrobiology, Sept. 2024

What I have to question is that after all the Martian landers and rovers, none of them did any simple, almost trivial, tests for the (then-presumed) hematite. And yet, almost half a century ago, two (Viking) landers undertook rather sophisticated soil tests for life itself. By the way, the lab...

Curious how much of this is informed guesswork given the loss of telemetry, and that both methane and lox leaked simultaneously from fractures stoichiometrically enough to be flammable, and that there was an ignition source in the attic, isolated as it is from the engine bay proper, and that...

The decay emits the electron, not the quark. Conservation laws require the mass/energy, charge, and whatnot be preserved in Nature's bookkeeping. Nuclear reactions aren't like chemical reactions where, say, hydrogen evolves from zinc and hydrochloric acid. The electron was never there in the...

Watching live. Currently big fat watermark in the middle, no ambient on-ground audio (only comms chatter), dumb background musak. Some really p-off comments in live chat from everyone. Botched production. _____ Edit: OK, they've fixed it. Production unbotched.

If they have no mass, they have no momentum.

" The plume of ions jetting out from the spacecraft therefore acts to provide thrust." Not quite. Once they are expelled, as with a chemical engine, they play no further role in providing thrust. It is the electric field, Hall effect, engine, (and vehicle) pushing against the ions while still...

"NASA would likely not be able to return Perseverance's samples to Earth until 2040, a full 20 years after the rover first launched to Mars." Time to escape a sunk cost fallacy here. There's no need to bring any samples home. Drop the entire project and contract with SpaceX for a fresh...

2018, a Falcon Heavy yeeted an automobile+final-stage mass towards Mars' orbit. Since an unmanned Starship that does not need to demonstrate LEO refueling and does not need to waste propellant returning either stage, the only real constraint for <2030 landing of an automated/remote-guided lab is...

Sounds like you do not disagree with a <2040 date, then, which satisfies the constraints indicated in the article. As for ~2029, SpaceX has already demonstrated the ability to launch a Tesla to a cis-Martian flypast. It would be a delta-V energy stretch from that event to getting a...

Not only can SpaceX do it for less, the whole project is being rendered moot by the company's own boots-on-the-ground timeline. They could have a complete robotic lab on Mars <2030 that will simply obviate any need for a 'sample return'. Before landing people on Mars, Musk's project necessarily...

"Squash" "Quash", with its sense of "suppress", might be better employed here; and is closer to the paper's frequent use of the word "quench".

The article is interesting but seems rather repetitious. I feel it would be more lucidly presented in four or five paragraphs.

Because they just plain won't listen to you. I thought a certain Mars Rover in a naming contest should be called Dusty McDustface. But did they listen? Of course not. The World is bereft of common sense.