Recent content by tenchi

Lighter than air vehicle????

I would like to interject here that martian rocks, or more clearly meteorites heat up to thousands of degrees entering the earth's atmosphere. Any contaminants or organisms contained in them would very likely die. The return of Martian material from the rovers poses a low risk but must not be...

Some people get carried away with fantasies, like the men's cologne man and his followers. All I can say is "har har har....Pfffttt."

Where's Elon's Musk?

I just checked the reference cited by the authors. It is a paper from 2004 by Napier, W. M. 2004, MNRAS, 348, 46 . Here is an excerpt: Boulders more than 20 cm across, ejected from the topmost layers of an impact site, are probably never heated to more than 100◦C in their interiors during the...

The last time I checked, asteroids entering even the fringes of the atmosphere reach over 2k degrees F. It is hard to imagine any life surviving that.